Old Mix Americans, cont’d (or why the mixed-ethnic history of many Americans really matters)

Mail-in voter registration form [Alabama]

Someone left a comment on my recent post about Old Mix Americans which I found very thought-provoking.

It occurred to me that I should address some of the points raised.

Sorry for the lengthy explication.

Words sometimes seem to spill out in spite of any attempt at brevity.

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“White today only means light skinned…people should just stop fueling this shit, we’re in 2024.”

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If it is true that “white” only means “light-skinned”, why do so many government forms still insist on asking us to self-identify as “white” or “black”?

Questions about our skin color seem to be subliminally reinforcing the idea that “white” is about more than a mere lack of skin pigmentation.

It seems as if a “white” self-description is really trying to act as a proxy for ethnicity.

If “white” is really seen as nothing more than a skin color nowadays, why on earth would the government even need to ask us if we are “light-skinned”?

One can only assume that government agencies are in fact using skin colors as a sort of shorthand for “European-American” or “African-American” – yet even those terms say almost nothing about real ethnicity.

Even if we were to break down “European-American” into historical points of origin – Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Czechia, et al – we would still not be dealing with ethnicities.  We would be dealing with NATIONALITIES, which is not the same thing at all.  Modern nation-states everywhere encompass a myriad of ethnicities.

And almost no modern nation state has seen the level of inter-ethnic mixing seen in the USA.

Those whose colonizer ancestors arrived in North America earliest (say, pre-American Revolution) are the ones most likely to have ancestors from every continent, including Africa.  To be American, especially “Old Mix American“, is to be the antithesis of ethnic “purity”.

Almost the only thing of value which can be gleaned from questions about our skin color is a broad-population-level comparative analysis of things like income, education, crime statistics, home ownership, life expectancy, and health between groups SEEN as “white” and groups SEEN as “black”.

Such an analysis can offer insights into the many ways in which being SEEN as a certain color might affect transgenerational poverty, social mobility and dysfunction, and general trends in life outcomes.

It is an unfortunate fact that 400 years of a color-based caste system has made it virtually impossible for many Americans to even conceive of the idea that there are no biological boundaries between “races”, let alone embrace the concept that “races” simply do not exist.

My work on the Before We Were White blog and podcast is intended precisely to demonstrate that almost all Americans are profoundly mixed and interrelated, and to even attempt to speak of distinct, separate “races” is ludicrous, absurd, profoundly unscientific, and most of all, baseless in the face of real world evidence.

Is there such a thing as “experiencing Blackness”?  Damn right there is.  But it’s still the result of a human construction.

We could just as easily say that people with red hair and freckles are a separate “race”…

Girls in Afghanistan “experience Islam”, even if that form of Islam is wholly constructed in the minds of men.

My goal here is most certainly NOT to create new divisive micro-ethnicities.

“Old Mix American” is intended as a broad descriptor CROSSING traditional “racial” boundaries.

It is meant to bring people together, not push them farther apart.

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“Basing ethnic identity on mutual DNA rather than mutual culture values and tradition is a near exclusive American mentality.”

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This is the crux of a BIG problem.  Throughout human history, all people have tended to be placed into or chosen to self-assemble into groups.

Hunter gatherers are often extended kinship groups.

Urban dwellers often identify mostly with their home cities.  Think ancient Athens, medieval Venice, modern New York…

People are segregated or self-segregate according to class or wealth.  Think of the British House of Lords versus House of Commons, or gated communities versus ghettos…

People are also defined by or self-identify themselves by their religion or ideology.

People are often described in terms of their citizenship, loyalty, or allegiance to tribal leaders, monarchs, political leaders, or nations.

People have been, and often still are, segregated or self-segregated by appearance, ancestry, ethnicity, or caste.

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Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?

Which US cultural values and traditions supercede all of the above-named categories of identity?

Justice?  In a country with a compromised and partisan court system, where only the people with the money to “lawyer-up” mightily have the slightest chance of justice?

Freedom?  How can a country in which 78% of its people live paycheck to paycheck claim to be “the land of the free”? Where is freedom when a single health emergency can bankrupt a family for life?

Opportunity?  How can a young person save up to buy a house when they can barely afford rent and groceries? When 1% of the population controls 90% of the wealth?

I ask again.  Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?

Celebrity culture?  Consumer culture?  Military culture?  Religious culture?  The NFL and NBA?  Tacos and cheeseburgers?

This lack of a genuine and deeply shared pan-USA culture, this sense of untetheredness, of “something being no longer quite right”, is exactly what gave rise to the MAGA cult.

MAGA cheerleaders point to a semi-imaginary time during the mid-20th century, in which everything still seemed to make sense to their own community.

Men had good-paying jobs.  Mothers stayed at home cooking, cleaning, and minding the kids.  People went to church and Sunday School.  Fathers took their boys fishing.  Girls dreamed of who they might marry one day.

But people were very, very good at not noticing certain things back then.

Factories poisoning rivers.  US-backed coups in Iran.  Domestic violence against women and children.  US-backed dictators in Latin America.  Housewives on Valium.  Backstreet abortions.  Lynchings.

The American hallucination of itself was represented on TV by almost surreal saccharine dross like “Leave it to Beaver“, “The Andy Griffith Show“, “Happy Days“, and “The Love Boat“.

And most of all, the people who were doing all right within the system pretended not to notice that back in this “Golden Age” when America was supposedly “great”, it was only great for white folks.

Mexican fruit pickers and African-American school janitors were just kind of “there”, a sort of human wallpaper, noticed only in passing, somehow barely audible, barely visible.

Unless they were singing.  Or God forbid, protesting.

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Many people in the USA still have a particular historical and ongoing problem in which they conflate “color” or appearance with specific cultural values or behaviors – even ascribing higher levels of innate intelligence or greater capabilities to certain “races”.

Many Americans genuinely believe that people of a certain color have a greater propensity for violence and crime.  Not because of 400 years of dehumanization and disadvantage, but because of something IN THEM.

As a writer, I have a particular interest in sharing research which lays bare the multi-ethnic ancestry of those Americans who persist in repeating these racist tropes, using racist dog whistles, or advocating for “white supremacy” and “New Eugenics”.

IT IS OUTRAGEOUS THAT RACISM, BOTH CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, CAN EXIST IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE OF MIXED ANCESTRY – BLACK, WHITE, AND BROWN.

As someone raised mostly in rural and small town America who would have been seen by many as “white trash”, as someone who was bussed into Black schools during the 70s, as someone who joined the army on his 17th birthday and sat in a 5 ton truck parked up in the snow on dark nights in Germany along the Iron Curtain talking to Black soldiers, I am in a position to suggest that social dysfunction is caused by many things, both recent and historical.

But mostly, it is caused by the greed, racism, and bigotry of those in power who sow division among the underclasses.