Reflecting on How Our Concept of Race Is Changing
The Times has a wonderful piece today which takes a deep look into how the concept of race is evolving in America today:
MILWAUKEE — Although the civil rights movement gave Samuel Sallis equality under the law a long time ago, he was left wanting most of his life, he says, for the subtle courtesies and respect he thought would come with it. Being a working-class black man downtown here meant being mostly ignored, living a life invisible and unacknowledged in a larger white world.
Then Mr. Sallis, 69, noticed a change.
“I’ve been working downtown for 30 years, so I’ve got a good feeling for it,” Mr. Sallis said. “Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it’s: ‘Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?’ I’m talking about strangers. Calling me ‘sir.’ ”
He added: “It makes you feel different, like, hey — maybe we are all equals. I’m no different than before. It’s just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me.”
As the readers of this blog know well we believe this nation is in the midst of perhaps its most profound demographic transformation since the arrival of the Europeans here in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Due to large waves of non-white immigration over the past 45 years, America has seen its minority population triple, ending what was America's longstanding white-black, majority-minority racial construct. Current projections have American becoming a majority minority country in the next 30 years.
It was inevitable, given how our population was changing, that the America of the 21st century would end up having a very different - and much more tolerant - attitude towards race than any America that had come before. But the election and early success of our remarkable President, Barack Hussein Obama, the self-described "mutt," has hastened this process, allowing this nation to begin to truly realize, perhaps more than any time in our history, the radical promise of equality of opportunity offered by our Founding Fathers.
I was born in 1963, the last years of an America before the changes brought about by the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Immigration Acts of the mid 1960s. The legacy of this period, of Lyndon Johnson and JFK, of Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others is so profound that sometimes I am literally overwhelmed by all this. But this week, as we saw images of President Obama horsing around in the Oval Office with Caroline Kennedy, we are reminded that the two beautiful children of our President today are not John-John and Caroline but Malia and Sasha - and what a different, and better world, this is today.
- Simon Rosenberg's blog
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fcs
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an a lot more to come
Indeed, the times article was on point, some how I was looking for some latino to be quoted, but no luck. The speed and the profound changes that is going tru i the US, it´s amazing and about time, in a world were communication it´s instant, were money finds no borders and knowledge it´s becoming universal to all of them who is looking for, racial issues it seems are becoming things "of the past" Still, Latinos will be more in quantity in the comming decades, leaving african-americans behind in numbers, today the US has a black president, how long do you think will pass to see a latino President?, that´s the question. I´m in Ecuador, I live in Quito, the capital of the country, where more than 3 million of Ecuadorians live overseas, (25% of the population of 12 million) and we see closely every action taken by president Obama, because it will have a direct impact in the lives of millions of my fellow ecuadorians, just to make a point of how deep and far the election of presidente Barack obama has done to the world. Best regards William Murillo Former Immigration Minister of Ecuador
a lot more to come, reply
William thanks for writing and lets stay in touch in the future.....
A Latino President will come some day in the US, and will depend now more on the talent of an individual candidate than the societal attitudes towards Latinos. I think we have already crossed that line here in the US with Obama, but in dozens of other ways too.
As you reference one of the great stories of the coming America of the 21st century is that we now have, with 45 million Latinos here, the 3rd largest Latino population of all the countries of the Americas (only Mexico and Brazil have more). Our identity as a nation will be increasingly Latin and our foreign policy will look ever more to the South. Given the priority the Obama team has put on Latin America in their early days it is clear they understand this, and are helping forge a much more modern approach to the region and to the realities of the current demographics in the US.
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