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Dean Baquet vs. MLK and My Grandkids
My 10 (so far) grandchildren will grow up in an age when it will be harder and harder to decide what race and ethnicity boxes to check on census forms and other applications because the rate of intermarriage in the US is so high. The astonishingly bright and good-looking kids in this picture are all partly Irish and Scottish (me and my wife) but include African, Filipino, Central American, English, German and certainly some miscellaneous other ethnicities.
In my generation, there was not much white-black intermarriage and Asian guys I knew complained that white girls were not interested. But within the parish and parochial school communities, the various Catholic ethnicities (Irish, German, Italian, Polish, Mexican) merged rather rapidly. A mathematician of my acquaintance from St. Louis said it was only a matter of two generations before there would not be any purely Irish or German Catholic families in St. Louis. It was as if that form of intermarriage was a requirement. He exaggerated but it did seem the norm. And now marriage-wise, America is one big St. Louis Catholic parish in which mixing of all kinds is the norm rather than the exception.
As America continues to rapidly integrate and erase boundaries between ethnicities, religions, and races, our elite class is increasingly obsessed with basing ideology, identity, policy, and social structure on sharp racial distinctions and hostilities that no longer exist.
It is almost as if Martin Luther King never existed, as if it were never the shared ideal of the vast majority of Americans that race would no longer matter. Weirdly, in an age when de jure discrimination no longer exists, and racial segregation in economic and social institutions is vanishingly rare, where Americans are far more likely to know an interracial couple than an actual “white supremacist,” the political rhetoric of racial division seems louder than ever.
I am old enough to have listened in-person to an angry speech by George Wallace. My father spent many months on the road in Mississippi and Tennessee as a USDOJ attorney in the Civil Rights Division. I used to drink with a colorful old fellow who had been planted in the KKK in Maryland and North Carolina by the FBI (“Hell, by the time I finished with that stuff, I think most of the Klan was made up of informants and FBI guys.”). In other words, like every other American my age, I know what real racism looks like and it was not a collection of microaggressions, infelicitous adjective choices and historical revisionism.
Cultural appropriation, privilege, racism… an entire vocabulary created to describe conditions that do not actually exist. And now the idiotic New York Times “1619 project” will try to describe the United States as nothing but an outgrowth of slavery rather than the miraculous political project that ultimately not only ended slavery but made democracy a global norm and human rights a universally shared ideal.
My grandkids were supposed to grow up in the “I have a dream” America, not in the malignant fiction that Mr. Baquet and the entire Democratic Party want to impose on them.
Published in General
What a wonderful thought–that there will be such significant intermarriage among the races and cultures that diversity will no longer have any meaning . . . ! Well, I can dream for that outcome, for your grandkids . . .
It’s not that simple. It’s a pretty thought, but not reality.
And btw, this is La Raza as described to me by a supporter – everyone mixed that The One True Race will resemble hispania.
The reality is that skin color is a hit and miss. Some are blended, some are white, and some are black. Most will be blended… so how would a blended populace react to the rare unicorns that would appear fully white or fully black? Will they be treated with suspicion? Ostracized?
Albinos exist in Africa. They have not been treated well.
Counting on a blended society to erase race is not a hope found in reality.
It depends on whether you try to put a timeline on it, Stina; this won’t happen tomorrow. And if the Left wants to live in a world of racism that eventually may disappear, that is their choice; it is a sad way to live. Also, comparing the mixture of races to albinos is not realistic. I could care less about La Raza and what they think. My sister is so olive-complected that she looks Hispanic. Who cares.
With the increasing rate of intermarriage, in large part due to our becoming a less racist society, I choose to be optimistic. And the fact is, you have no way of predicting that I’m wrong.
I’ve spent most of my life in southern Appalachia, and I have not yet encountered a white supremacist. According to the media, they’re everywhere now, but not in The South, apparently. But we have lots of inter-racial marriages in the South. No one remarks on it anymore, as it should be.
If you come across a white supremacist, let me know.
Great looking kids!
And of course, I’m reminded of a joke:
An Englishman and American were discussing the subject of their respective family trees.
The American said, “What is it with you British and your pride in the 100% purity of your heritage? Take me for example. I’m one quarter English, one quarter French, one eighth German, one eighth Polish, one eighth Italian, and one eighth Greek. What do you have to say about that?”
The Englishman replied, “Very sporting of your mother.”
What an adorable bunch!! I think about MLK alot and what he would have thought about today. His daughter is always at the March for Life rallies. I hope your grand kids don’t get caught up in all the labeling and immersed in this new racism. They look happy and should stay that way if they are raised to be color blind. It seems the more integrated we are becoming as a society, the less tolerant we are. That seems to say it has nothing to do with race, but with political and other agendas. Great post Bath!
We live in a nation where a white woman gave birth to our first black president. It would be nice to think we are at a point where we could just remove those boxes from all government forms . . . but there is a grievance industry that cares very much which box people check.
In the meantime, it looks like Grandpa has a lot to be proud of.
On every form that asks for race, for the past thirty years or so I’ve entered ‘human.’
I liked this post so much I made a haiku.
more mixed marriage
less identity nonsense
a hopeful trend
It’s almost like racism is a problem that can be…er…loved out of existance.
Make love not war.
What a lovely bunch! Hugs to all of them!
Great post. Oddly, some countries with one race have discrimination based on shade of skin tone. I don’t think we’ll go there. I think we hit peak MLK in Nov. 2008.
I remember in my anthropology class in college the professor said: If two groups of people come together they may or may not bleed, but they will always breed.
Such lovey children. What a great shot!
Why are children so great? Because they are who they are. They have been given a gift which we gladly provide, of love acceptance, encouragement. And we adults are blessed to remember and re-experience that.
The photograph and story, with comments, calls to mind How Jack Became Black:
Remember that laws once identified people as negro if even some small portion of their heritage was dark or their skin was a shade deeper than bronze. The racism of Democrats could be applied even to someone of a half-dozen or more ancestral ethnicities today.
In other words, it might seem that the frequency of interracial marriage undermines racism, but it is not so in societies given to Orwellian absurdities.
I have been told some 20th-century African feuds concerned tribes which were distinguished by arbitrary political measures rather than by ancestry. Where no distinct races exist, they can be invented.
The Right cannot call out Democrats’ abuse of King’s name often enough.
Ten beautiful reasons to be happy and thankful.
A well written and accurate post. Let us hope they read about the current absurdities regarding the racial vocabulary as a ridiculous and brief point in history.
What happy healthy friendly kids. I wish them all long and wonderful lives.
Race is simply an arrow in the left’s quiver. I think they are figuring out what we already know: it is a myth. We will see…
Thirteen years ago I made my only bicycle ride to the deep south (if you count east-central Alabama as deep south.) On these trips Mrs R and I go our separate ways during the day. She goes by car and I go by bicycle. One evening she reported that she had gone to a rural restaurant for lunch. It was a noisy place until a mixed-race family (with children) came in. Then it suddenly fell silent, and maybe some people stared. But nothing happened beyond that.
It made me think about how mixed-race (so-called) families are so common where we’re from as to not be much noticed anymore. And that was 13 years ago; they are even more common now.
And they are untainted by the garbage that adults create – innocent.
“Southern 500” works for me . . .
All humanity is born tainted. Every cell has a nucleus that demands that programs us to be violent, superstitious and bigoted. We are savage primates full of snakes no matter how cute we are as infants.
I’m an agnostic but the fallen nature of man is so obvious that no religious explanation is necessary.
You are missing the upside of The Fall, big guy. Perfect, self-contained, angelic beings have little need for one another and are quite possibly boring. Humility, laughter, hope, desperate love and the freshness of a baby’s smile are the province of flawed beings who swim against the tide of our imperfections and against which we can better appreciate the good and our need for one another. And without flaws, there is nothing for a Mark Twain to do.
Or looking at the notion of redemption another way, when Dorothy finally discovered that she had the ruby slippers and the power to go home any time, instead of telling Glenda “thanks a pantload for not including the user manual, bubble girl” she agreed that the weird journey through OZ was worth it. Here’s to the weird journey. Cheers.
I simply don’t enjoy the journey. It’s like a movie that everybody else likes but you can never really like it and you are mildly disgusted by the characters in the movie.
On the whole I would fail this world if I were grading it. – David Gelenter
This post and the comments put the lie to the Left’s assertion that to be conservative is to be racist. The sentiments expressed here should be what all people strive for in their lives regarding race — Martin Luther King, Jr.’s beautiful dream of a colorblind society. Makes me proud to be a member of Ricochet.
The last time a woman could decide wher to eat.