Mixing it up in a Nation of Cowards

The new Attorney General, Eric Holder, spoke provokatively on the subject of race this past February 18, 2009:

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

“Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.”

OK, I’ll show a little courage and enter in this discussion. Let’s say that Americans become 100% race blind, and intermarry across races in random proportion to percentage of population. The following chart shows the resulting changing racial demographics over 5 generations.

Race	Now	G1	G2	G3	G4	G5
White	75.1%	56.4%	31.8%	10.1%	1.0%	0.0%
African-American	12.3%	1.5%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Asian	3.6%	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Native American	1.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Other	5.5%	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Mixed	2.5%	41.6%	68.2%	89.9%	99.0%	100.0%

As you can see, the African-American race disappears after 2 generations and the white race disappears after 5 generations, after which all of us are mixed race.

Now you are going to say that’s not realistic. This chart implies that in generation 1 75% of African-Americans would marry and have children with whites and 12.3% of whites would marry and have children with African-Americans. (Actually, it’s sufficient to have the children without getting married.)

And true, due to the voluntary living patterns that Holder describes, many African-Americans in this country live in majority African-American communities. So the African-American race is not likely to disappear so quickly, nor should that be a condition for a color-blind society.

But we are moving in this direction already. In my own Midwestern family that most outsiders would describe as white, we already have Native American, Hispanic, and Asian mixed race relatives. In fact, this is true of most all of the other “white” families I know. It’s true that you don’t see as many white families with African-American intermarriages. But I can think of several such mixed race couples that I am friends with or close with. It’s just not that exceptional anymore.

So, if that’s where we are going, what are we going to call this new mixed race of people? Same as we always have: Americans.