GENtrification!

Matt Yglesias and I are on the exact same wavelength when it comes to race in America:

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates casually refer to Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O as a “white girl.” In reality she is, as they say, “Half Korean, 100% Rock Star”. Nevertheless, I think there’s a clear sense in which it strikes people as more intuitive to refer to a half-white, half-Korean indie rock star born in Korea and raised by both parents in New Jersey as “white” than it is to refer to a half-white, half-Kenyan President born in Hawaii and raised by his white mom and grandparents as “white.”

All of which is to say that there’s a decent chance that we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between “white” and “non-white” but between “black” and “non-black.”...

Perhaps the best way to think about this is to recall that many currently “white” ethnic groups—Jews, Italians, Irish, etc.—weren’t always understood as being white. And it seems quite plausible that more and more Asians and Hispanics will, over time, come to attain “white” status. In political terms, meanwhile, once upon a time white Catholics were a core Democratic Party constituency. But over time, things just changed and the GOP coalition expanded from a white Protestant one to a broader white Christian one.

There are so many excellent points here.

First, there's the idea of "white". The meaning of this term has changed a lot over the past few centuries. We had Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s calling the Chinese "white." We had Benjamin Franklin arguing for banning German and Swedish immigrants on the grounds that they were non-white. And as Yglesias points out, we had Irish, Italians, and Jews become "white" somewhere around the middle of last century. "White" is a mishmash ethnicity, and will probably grow to include most Hispanics, Arabs, Persians, etc.

Second, there's the point about the future of the Republican coalition. As soon as Republicans can bring themselves to stop thinking of Hispanics as aliens, they'll use the same tactics that they used to convert "white ethnic" Catholics. They'll reach out to Hispanics' Christian morality and business interests, and conservatism will be back. If conservatives want to make a faster comeback, they should force themselves to start thinking of Hispanics as "white" ASAP.

But most importantly, Yglesias is right when he says that America will soon start to think about race in terms of "black" vs. "non-black". The salient difference between black people and all other American ethnic groups is that all the others - whites, Hispanics, and Asians of all stripes - came here voluntarily. Blacks, with the exception of a small handful of recent immigrants (e.g. Obama's dad), did not. And that, more than anything else, explains why black people have mostly failed to assimilate into American society, and will continue to lag far behind groups like Hispanics and Asians in degree of assimilation (and thus, eventually, in wealth). If there is hope for America's black community, it lies in the power of a new wave of African immigration to change black attitudes toward their nation.

As a final point, although he mentions her extensively in his post, Yglesias fails to post a picture of Karen O herself. I have rectified this mistake.