Frank Rich: Safely Returned From 2050

I have to admit that in these tough economic times, alas no one sends me their old NYT Literary Supplement, or old NYT newspapers, to enable me somehow to get all the news from “back home”. Unfortunately, I’m forced to scrap around online, where, as we know, information is slender at best. Doing so, I see, for instance, that Frank Rich has seemingly given a great deal of thought to last Sunday’s column:

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive…

Or perhaps not, since, actually, this subject is already long beyond “boring”. Yours truly as a Roman Catholic had weeks ago addressed it. And Mr Rich has nothing essentially new to say.

That being so, clearly there’s another reason he has trotted that out, in order to try to re-beat that tired horse:

…The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”…

Mr Rich’s actually stumbles on a point there. (The cliché here about stopped clocks suddenly comes to mind.) But that a good part of the reason has been decades of racial gerrymandering by both parties to try to protect their incumbency eventually manifesting itself in national representation having led to black Democratic House representatives being ensconced in Democratic districts that are often overwhelmingly (“de facto apartheid”?) black, doesn’t enter into Mr Rich’s calculations of course.

Neither has he noticed that the Democratic party is more black than is the U.S. population as a whole. (As the BBC tells us of the North Carolina vote, “According to data from exit polls, Mr Obama won the backing of 90% of North Carolina’s African-American voters, who make up more than a third of the state’s electorate.” More specifically, since so few are Republicans, that would be the Democratic electorate.) Clearly, that latter’s just fine by him. And, as we learn by the conclusion, there’s a big reason why:

…Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

Anyone who also does the math and knows anything about U.S. history also knows it is now a far more Roman Catholic country than it was at its founding. (For instance, those who lived in Massachusetts in 1776 would likely be disgusted at what the commonwealth is now religio-demographically; and yet, Massachusetts somehow has survived even decades of Edward Kennedy being in the U.S. Senate.) But given his warm concern for Roman Catholic sensibilities he presumes to be mortally offended by Sen McCain, apparently Mr Rich already does. And this Catholic genuinely appreciates Mr Rich using his Sunday platform to warn us desperately about the Arizona senator’s egregious bigotries.

And anyone who does the math and knows anything about U.S. history also knows that by the standards of its racial demographics at its founding, the U.S. has already pretty much been a “white-minority” country for decades. That thanks mostly to 19th century southern and eastern European mass immigration, and their children and grandchildren. However, given his assertion that the U.S. actually isn’t there quite yet, on that Mr Rich apparently can’t add and doesn’t.

Yet by the country as a whole becoming “white-minority” Mr Rich is evidently not referring to the coming African-American majority. Blacks — including slaves — made up a quarter of the U.S. population of 1790, and a majority in one state: South Carolina. However, that has since dropped to 12 percent overall today, and to a majority in none.

So Mr Rich must mean Hispanics (most of whom are also Catholics, just to make matters cloudier, although Mr Rich doesn’t pointedly venture there) and blacks combined, given that he tells us just before that above of how:

…The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.

Interesting. For given his own newspaper’s reporting in March of Sen Obama’s lack of appeal to many Hispanics, and Hispanic voting patterns developing a fluidity often at odds with those of blacks’, one doesn’t quite envisage Mr Rich’s soon to come white-sidelining political alliance developing lockstep. Still, he seems to feel there is ample reason to believe that some 40 years on a diverse Hispanic population of today which may include many who consider themselves “non-white”, will not have produced millions of native-born U.S. grandchildren who might be as “white” as the likes of today’s “white ethnic”, say, “Italians” and “Jews”.

Mr Rich’s decidedly un-elastic and illiberal notions of ethnicity (afflictions which seem to include most other “liberals”) is hardly new, and is certainly not restricted to liberal U.S. news providers. Assuming he missed it, Mr Rich would likely have recently enjoyed a piece by BBC writer Emilio San Pedro. The latter’s insightful article posits that there is only one pathway to be a Latino interested in U.S. politics: one must be a raza-supremacist, recent (perhaps illegal) immigrant and ardent Democrat.

That might well be news to you; it would be to certain Puerto Rican relations of yours truly, who are several generations from immigrant, who don’t identify themselves as “black” or “brown”, and include some diehard Republicans — as well as some three to four other Latino/Hispanics out of ten who may feel much the same way, and vote much the same way.

Although, maybe Mr Rich has already time-travelled to the top of the mountain and gazed down from on high upon South Africa America 2050, and knows better. Assuming that’s the case, there’s no time like the present to prepare for the inevitable future. After all, one minute it’s 1960 and “Ja” for Verwoerd and the next thing you know it’s 1990 and future president Mandela.

Mr Rich’s New York Times itself inexplicably doesn’t seem much perturbed to be based in a city which is at best half “white”. In fact, despite that reality Mr Rich hasn’t yet been eased out to make the paper better “reflective” of the local community. For only two black regular columnists and no “obvious” Hispanics, out of 11? That is clearly unsustainable given where the country is headed, and as this 2007 piece in South Africa’s Independent Online informs us:

…For someone to be able to build a bridge or a stadium, they need a good maths and science-based matric, a degree, a postgraduate qualification and X number of years’ experience.

It follows that if our schools are not producing enough black maths and science graduates then no amount of legislation or wishful thinking will ensure the profession will become representative…

…Take the media as another example. A far softer and easier-to-acquire set of skills is needed here, and the industry’s transformation therefore does not face the same constraints. Thus, in the short term, it should have a more stringent set of requirements and, hopefully, should meet the aim of full representativity far more quickly…

So coming from those who truly know, columnists appear a very easy place to get a head start on Mr Rich’s grasp of what will be undoubtedly be the America of three or four decades hence. But, on second thought, perhaps there’s no hurry; and undoubtedly Mr Rich would concur. For we all know also that Armageddon in all its forms is always oddly cited as being close at hand, and yet, strangely, is also always conveniently just far enough career-distant not for us to need to rush into things, right?