I’ve been in dispute with my buddy Walt Bismarck on the question of how Americans with a mixed lineage tend to identify and the implications that the answer has for political trends. Walt has insisted that people who are part white and part anything else (except black) will aspire to be absorbed into the pasty goo of “whiteness” in a process he refers to as “bleaching.” I don’t see this as accurate, and since Walt has explicitly embraced standpoint epistemology, I guess that means he should defer to me on this considering that I’m a half-white biracial. For the record, I generally abominate standpoint epistemology and political psychoanalysis, but Walt is more open to these methods and so I’ll appeal partly to my “lived experience” (as opposed to postmortem or pregestational experience?) here to advance my case. This article will probably be a one-time thing because I don’t wish to be one of those people whose writing is nothing more than solipsistic dribble about his life as a [insert demographic category] person.
“Bleaching” isn’t happening because:
1. The civil rights regime has been encouraging a “flight from white”
2. Slave morality, when combined with the historical narrative of US history curricula, disincentivizes identification with the category white
3. America’s too white for ambiguous features not to stand out but not so white that they’ll fade over generations
4. People enjoy feeling unique and special; they see white as bland and boring
The proper solution to racial polarization in modern America isn’t to hope the proportion of whites will be artificially inflated as a result of miscegenation but instead to disestablish racial categories in institutions.
Bismarck’s Claims
Walt has said US racial politics is depolarizing because:
Every day in this country more and more Hispanics marry corn-fed blonde Midwesterners and produce pale Castizo children who only speak English, consider themselves basically White, and vote like Irish and Italians.
While he acknowledges that generally people who have one parent who’s black and one who’s white will generally be categorized as a “light skin” black person, he thinks intermarriage between (non-Hispanic) whites and Hispanics, whites and Asians, whites and Desis, and (European) whites and Middle Easterners and North Africans (MENAs) will result in kids who see themselves as functionally white. He opines:
…it makes it harder for whites and blacks to “blend” in the very seamless way that whites can with Amerindians, Hispanics, MENA people, and (to a lesser extent) South and East Asians. These days being a quarter Korean or half Arab is functionally identical to being part Italian 50 years ago or part Irish/German 100 years ago.
The reality is that even very racist parents usually won’t care that much if you bring home a Mexican girl, so long as she is sweet and feminine. This is because they know your kids aren't going to run around talking about La Raza Cosmica and posting Aztlan maps all over the internet. They’ll just be kind of swarthy white people.
Basically the same principle applies to marrying Asians—you’ll see a bit more hesitation if her parents have an accent or come from a tropical clime, and a bit less if they’re heavily assimilated or specifically Japanese or Korean. With MENA girls the religious factor might pose a big problem in some families, but that’s a separate issue. I think most White Americans see Arab Christians in the same way they see Greeks or Serbs and it would be more of a fun exotic thing for your family in practice.
Likewise, even during the most extreme and purity-spiraling era of the Alt Right, people would call you a psycho if you objected to Gavin McInnes marrying a Native woman or John Derbyshire having part-Chinese kids. Similarly, only the most extreme and disagreeable edgelords would countersignal the inclusion of Levantine / Iranian / Castizo people under the umbrella of Whiteness. This is where the meme comes from that modern White Nationalism is full of Hispanics and Arabs.
In summary, Walt thinks post-65 Americans are going to suddenly want to procreate with whites en masse and have their kids think of themselves as being, at most, a white ethnic like George Stephanopoulos.
The Flight from White
These claims are inconsistent with contemporary observable trends. Nowadays people are actively seeking to disassociate from white because the federal government, as well as certain industries such as entertainment, have erected incentive structures that have made ticking the “bipoc” category aspirational.
In contrast to left-wing narratives about the history of “whiteness,” the US used to have a broader definition of white than it does today. The first immigration act ever passed in US history was enacted in 1790, and it limited naturalization to “free white persons of good character.” The CSA had a Jewish Secretary of War because most people at the time considered Jews white, and by the late nineteenth century Levantine Christians, Copts, Greeks, and other assorted ethnics were arriving in America in droves. There was a famous court case wherein an Indian Parsi attempted to gain US citizenship by arguing that Indo-Aryans fit into the white taxon. This case, in fact, narrowed the definition.
Critical race theorists falsely suggest that “whiteness” has been ever expanding, beginning exclusively with Celtic and Germanic Protestant ethnicities and gradually coming to include people from Europe’s east and south. They claim that whiteness confers status by placing those who participate in it on a pedestal above black people and that therefore every wave of immigrants has aimed to be included in it. Walt appears to accept elements of this progressive mythology, as he has quoted Ben Franklin’s idiosyncratic assertion that “wogs begin at Calais” to imply that white started as an exclusive category that has opened the ranks of its membership because people dream of fitting into it. This quotation reveals little about what most Americans thought constituted white in the early years of the Republic because if it had been mainstream, that period of history, and the decades following it, would’ve been entirely different. The early US had heaps of Huguenots (Paul Revere, for example), France famously intervened on America’s behalf during the War for Independence, and the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were widely read by the Founders. If people from Calais and everything south were considered a race apart, France wouldn’t have been designated a sister republic after its own revolution. Ben Franklin had a peculiar conception of whiteness that failed to influence naturalization laws and interactions with the outside world, so it’s not useful to take it as a starting point for framing the evolution of the concept.
The brainlet response to this is to point out that white ethnics faced discrimination upon their initial arrival in America and to preemptively and prematurely conclude that this implies they weren’t yet considered white. This again assumes the left-wing theory of the US as an inherently white supremacist regime because it implicitly fits into the definition of white the inability to be subjected to ethnic discrimination. It’s possible to be white and an ethnic outsider simultaneously, and sundry examples are visible in different societies today. The term “wog” is still widely employed (often playfully) in Australia as an invective for Mediterranean, yet there were already waves of immigrants from Greece, Italy, and Lebanon to Australia before the White Australia Policy was formally shelved in 1972. Nobody offline considers Ashkenazi Jews to be non-white, yet they’re victims of hate crimes at higher rates than racial minorities in New York City. In Italy Romanians are stereotyped as violent criminals and are thus viewed with more suspicion than Bangladeshis who sell selfie sticks to tourists on the side of the road. Just because Italians were lynched in Louisiana in the nineteenth century doesn’t necessitate that they weren’t deemed a variant of white. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to settle there permanently in the first place.
Instead of enveloping newer groups, the definition of white has contracted as fewer people have been eager to associate with it. This phenomenon is so noticeable that it has been labelled the “flight from white.” AAPI and latinx are manifestly manufactured genera concocted by civil rights bureaucrats of middling intellect. Prior to the sixties, nobody used the former and few used the latter. Hispanics were seen generally as a kind of white ethnic, hence there was no controversy around John Wayne’s three marriages with three Hispanic women. People largely referred to Hispanics by their nationality rather than conceiving of all people with a heritage tracing back to Latin America as belonging to a single race. The civil rights regime’s creation of these categories during the Nixon administration has produced a society that now emphasizes and exacerbates Hispanic distinctiveness with “Hispanic Serving Institutions,” Hispanic Heritage Month, and the designation of marriages between Anglo-Americans and Hispanics as interracial. Now I don’t think most ordinary Hispanics, especially those born abroad, are into this legally constructed identity category, but the Americanized upwardly mobile AOCs of the world certainly are.
For the first time in US history the absolute number of whites declined in 2020 according to the census. This is despite the fact that the census was taken during the tenure of a president who blocked the creation of new minority categories, which should’ve incentivized more people to check the white box. Arab and Iranian American advocacy groups have been lobbying the federal government to add MENA as a new protected class, and Desis—the group that once, as noted above, fought in court to be taxonomized as white—successfully managed to be classified as Asian decades ago. The left-wing Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour once said that before 9/11 she was just a white girl from Brooklyn but that after she donned the hijab, she became a minority.
The civil rights regime, as it’s currently constituted, (perhaps) unintentionally uses carrots, in the form of preferential loans, scholarships, and diversity initiatives, and sticks, in the form of legal risks, to encourage Americans to cling to any non-white belonging they can credibly claim. Until this system is dismantled, people will continue to climb the ladder to bipoc status no matter how nonsensical the categories are. If progressive MENA activists succeed in separating their communities from white America in the eyes of the law, it’ll only be a matter of time before everybody starts trying. If Ralph Nader, Shahar Isaac, and Hasan Piker aren’t white, then it won’t make sense for Drew Pavlou, Jeff Goldblum, or Justin Baldoni to be. In an environment in which Conquistador Americans and Mediterraneans don’t want to be white, it’s doubtful that mixed people will want to be.
Slave Morality
Nietzsche contrasted the pagan ethics of classical antiquity, which upheld virtues associated with strength (pride, valor, achievement, dominance, etc.), with the Christianized morality of the modern West, which valued what had previously been vices (poverty, humility, chastity, submissiveness, etc.). He referred to the former as master morality and the latter as slave morality. According to Nietzsche, Christianity enabled the downtrodden and low-status losers to usurp power in society by exalting their own subaltern status as a defense mechanism against those who should be revered. Walt firmly opposes slave morality and the postmodern decadence engendered by the material prosperity of our techno-feudal economy. He writes:
People don’t feel enough pain in the modern world.
There aren’t any negative consequences for failure these days because liberals have been fabulously successful at creating a kinder, softer, and gentler society. This wasn’t achieved through a leftist nanny state so much as through the lowered standards and complacency that inevitably follow extreme abundance. We are so wealthy that the margin for error has expanded towards infinity and nobody feels the need to try anymore. Everybody gets a second chance and no one is held accountable.
I think he should take his concern with modern America’s slave morality more seriously because it entails conclusions that contradict his presumptions about whiteness. In schools across blue state America and in universities everywhere whites are the reviled villains of US history. Students learn that whites founded the US, enslaved black people, stole land from indigenous tribes, mistreated other groups, and continue to thieve and exploit today. Christopher Columbus was once categorically heralded as a hero, and now his holiday is being repealed and replaced in state after state. The founding fathers are invariably presented with the caveat that they enslaved people, and indigenous tribes are popularly conceived of as a monolith victimized by white pioneers. According to a public opinion survey, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln are cited as the two most admired historical figures, and I’m sure that Lincoln’s moral stature would dissolve if more people were made aware of his racial attitudes beyond the issue of slavery and his prosecution of the Dakota War. Nearly half of Gen Z Republicans think black people are victims of white privilege.
If whites are perceived in popular sensibilities as thieving conquerors and bullies, nobody will want to be neatly placed under the label since American society venerates the oppressed and places a premium on attendant qualities. The civil rights regime, as explained in the previous section, acts as a force multiplier to disincentivize identification with white, and the education system has an analogous effect. In blue state schools, greater emphasis has been accorded to ethnic history, and the ethnic groups tend to follow those invented by civil rights bureaucrats regardless of whether there’s any correspondence between such categories and historical reality. For instance, California textbooks have introduced Asian American history and have been sure to include excerpts on the immigrant experience from the perspective of people belonging to distinct racial groups. Such curricula functionally initiate an ethnogenesis since second- and subsequent generations will identify less with the specific ethnicity of their ancestral country and will rather identify with a manufactured American racial box. In other words, a native-born Cambodian American will be taught that he’s an AAPI and that people in his demographic were interned in camps during WWII even though his family likely arrived decades after this and therefore should have no more in common with Pat Morita than with Andy Garcia. Most people accept what they’re instructed in without serious deliberation and skepticism, hence the use of artificial racial designations in education has observable effects on people’s identities.
The only groups for which there’s a plausible argument to concede separate parallel histories are black and indigenous people because their ancestors didn’t immigrate to the US and were actively barred from mainstream society, but the trickle-down effect of federal taxonomy has produced an education system according to which there are a plethora of other racial subnations on the receiving end of white America’s sins. If Walt recognizes that slave morality afflicts the American mind, he should also detect Americans’ tendency to identify with whichever underdog category they have the opportunity to belong to. Ergo, most mixed people will probably take the off-ramp their non-white side provides so that they can cash in on the anti-Nietzschean social credit system. This explains Olivia Rodrigo’s claims of being a victim of discrimination despite being raised in a heterogeneous area among peers who were majority minority. She’s half-Filipino and half-white and is more enthusiastic about portraying herself as a suppressed minority than as part of the majority.
Race Is Contextual
People debate about whether there’s any scientific validity to the concept of race or whether it’s a social construct based on the superficial characteristics of outward appearance. It’s possible to be a realist about the former without entirely rejecting the latter. Irrespective of whether there’s any biological coherence to race, it’s certainly true that how people are generally categorized is a matter of social attitudes. In a homogeneous society, any features uncommon in the majority ethnicity will stick out. When I was in Saigon, a British friend mentioned that the locals had a tendency to stare at her hair since it was naturally red. I’d imagine that if a kid growing up there were mixed and had colored hair, he’d probably be considered quite exotic. If he were to move to an uber white area, like Hillary Clinton’s town of Chappaqua, he’d probably still be considered exotic because his Asian features would be more apparent since they’d be visually distinct from the features of most of the town’s inhabitants.
This has generally been my own experience. People tended to mistake me for being Hispanic growing up (or Afghan due to my coterie), but when I’d clarify that I’m Amerasian, people would generally consider me Asian even though my overall appearance is more occidental. However, when I was sent to hagwon over the summer where everyone was Korean, I’d be classified as a white person. A friend of mine with a similar background had an equivalent experience. She grew up in a heavily Asian area and tended to be seen as white, then she moved for college and most people saw her as Asian. There are numerous stories similar to these you can find online wherein an ainoco feels like a misfit for being the only Asian in a white area and also feels out of place for being white in an Asian setting.
The recent HBO miniseries The Sympathizer stars a half-French and half-Vietnamese protagonist (though the actor is a full Viet Australian). He’s referred to as a “half-breed” in Vietnam, but in the US a congressman’s Hispanic wife assumes that he’s Vietnamese to which he responds, “My better half.” She then informs him that in America race is an all or nothing classification. Different elements of his countenance stick out more based on who interacts with him.
In general, features that are uncommon are more apparent, and thus people will group others into the category associated with their most unusual and therefore most visible characteristics. Last year while a friend was visiting from overseas, an Indian international student correctly guessed where she was from. She then requested that he guess my ancestry, and he correctly surmised from looking at my face that “one side is from an Asian country, and one side is from a European one.” Since America’s mostly white people, the Asian characteristics (cheekbones, neutral tone, big lips, thick black hair) often stick out more, whereas when I’m around a bunch of fobs, the occidental ones do (pointed nose, round eyes, narrow face, body hair). I’d assume most other mixed people have a similar experience, and because America’s mostly white, their non-white features will be more discernible to people who will then categorize them accordingly.
A high-profile example of this is Obama. Everybody calls Obama the first black president even though the white side of his family raised him, and he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia where there wasn’t much of an opportunity for the traditional “black experience.” Obama doesn’t look full black at all if you see a picture of him next to his father or next to his full-Kenyan half-brothers (see below). Nevertheless, because the features from his Kenyan side are not shared by the majority of people in the country he led, Obama’s considered black. In South Africa he wouldn’t be black but instead “colored” like Trevor Noah. In addition, most African Americans have some mixed ancestry, so Obama already can blend in because of that, but regardless the point stands. Walt has erroneously attributed the case of mixed people in Obama’s demographic to the phenotypic dominance of African features and said “Meghan Markle levels of passing” are rare. The reason Meghan Markle looks relatively white is that her father’s white, and the first-born child tends to bear a resemblance to the father, which evolved to prove paternity before the advent of DNA tests. Someone with a black father and white mother will probably look less white for that reason. For another example, see Candace Owens’s kids who are strikingly pale. It’s an error to assume some groups have “strong genes” when there’s a simpler and more consistent explanation.
Anyway, if America were still 85% white, other groups would probably be “bleached,” to borrow his term, within two generations because there wouldn’t be a sufficient pool of non-whites for mixed people to pair with. The US is now only 60% white, and most marriages aren’t interracial. Thus, it’s more likely that people will remain distinct and that the mejorando la raza that does occur will go both ways. For example, if I were to marry a full-Asian, my kids would be 75% and therefore only have a pinch of Caucasity. In the other direction, Jeb Bush’s son, George P. Bush, looks pretty Mexican, but his wife’s Anglo-American, so presumably the spice has been washed out of their kids. If America were under 50% white, maybe more half-and-halfs like me would be classified as white, but 60% is still high enough that the non-white features still stick out.
It's necessary to clarify a point regarding the likelihood of mixed people to identify with their white half: this is, in my opinion, more likely in the cases of (European) white-MENA and (non-Hispanic) white-Hispanic intermarriages than in the cases of white-Asian or white-black intermarriages (and maybe white-Desi, but I haven’t met enough). MENAs, as previously discussed, are already legally recognized as white (for now), and Levantine and Egyptian Christians generally look no less white than the average Greek or Jew. Thus, if someone’s half-Syrian and half-European, he’ll probably look pretty generically white. If you want proof, look at Steve Jobs, who most people don’t even realize was Arab. Likewise, most Hispanics already have substantial European ancestry via the conquistadors, so if they intermarry with non-Hispanic whites, their children will tend not to look different from someone from the plains states who’s a quarter indigenous. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the kids will follow the flight from white trend, as everyone’s familiar with the white guy who sticks feathers in his head to bolster his claims of indigeneity, but it does indicate that it would be easy to absorb those groups if civil rights law and the education system were reformed.
White Equals Boring
Even without the civil rights regime and slave morality, there’d still be a reason people would want to flee from the white category, namely the feeling that whites are boring and have no distinctive subculture. If you watch a randomly selected YouTube video of people taking DNA tests, whites consistently wish to discover an unexpected and exotic component to their genome and express disappointment when the results match what you’d predict. By the same token, a lot of non-whites interpret a drop of bleach in their 23andme as an unpleasant shock. Jessica Alba publicly displayed severe embarrassment at unveiling the overwhelmingly white composition of her DNA.
Part of this is due to the slave morality described above, but it is also attributable to the fact that whites don’t have a subculture distinct from the American mainstream. Consequently, white isn’t a designation that includes a sense of exclusive belonging and inside knowledge to most ordinary people. Black people have an immensely strong sense of subculture and solidarity as evidenced by the advertisement of black-owned businesses, the use of the term “brother” to refer to each other, the exclusivity of being able to utter two certain syllables in succession, and the existence of distinct media such as BET and The Boondocks.
While it might not be as apparent from the outside, other groups have similarly distinctive elements of subculture. US-born Asians tend to have certain leisure activities that transcend ethnic, but not racial, lines. For example, I can’t conceive of going to a noraebang with a group that’s majority non-Asians unless they’re a bunch of weebs. Although hallyu has somewhat mainstreamed K-dramas and K-pop, it’s still unusual to encounter a non-Asian who’s into the K-wave and who’s not a zany ADHD brain. You occasionally see whites at hotpot restaurants and bubble tea shops, but these venues tend to be mostly second-gen Asians despite their being a single digit percentage of the population. Whites aren’t allowed in on provocative intra-Asian humor such as the joke that East Asians are “fancy Asians” and Southeast Asians are “jungle Asians.”
Certainly Desis and Hispanics have their own equivalents, but I’m not sufficiently familiar to elaborate on those cases in detail, and it’s unnecessary to further belabor the contention. There remain a handful of white ethnics who have noticeably distinct subcultures, but they’re now few and far between. The only ones that do at this point are probably Greeks, Jews, and Caucasians. Nowadays far too many Americans are distantly Italian or Polish for there to be any subculture that separates these ethnic groups from other whites who live in proximity to them. Plus, even if they still did, it lacks the exclusivity of other subcultures since nobody’s going to seriously complain about cultural appropriation or insensitivity if a German American Catholic attends a Columbus Day parade or makes a mafia joke.
We live in a self-centered culture in which everyone wants to be unique and feel special. Hence, mixed people will generally want to identify with their non-white side so that they can feel set apart from the bland mainstream and participate in a pinch of subcultural cool.
Where to Go
As should now be evident, it’s wishful thinking to assume the off-white segments will ignore the civil rights regime’s carrots and sticks and society’s slave morality, especially when considering that the rest of society will notice the statistically unusual aspects of their phenotypes and most people will want to feel unique. I’m not sure there’s much political relevance to the tendency of biracial people to lean towards their non-white side, but I suspect Walt thinks there is in the sense that identifying with whites equals identifying with the right and the opposite equals siding with the left. I have no idea whether this will be the case since the quantity of data available isn’t vast, but this Pew Survey from 2016 is consistent with that assumption.
The most viable solution is to disestablish racial categories in government. People underestimate the role of the state in shaping racial categories and overestimate genetic factors. Despite the obvious cosmetic difference between (East, Southeast, and Central) Asians, Desis, and Pasifika people, the government designates each as AAPI, and the private sector and popular culture have followed the incentives and enshrined this bogus taxon in the American psyche. The same holds true for latinx and is trending to become the case with MENA. The government should therefore treat all Americans descended from immigrants and settlers as belonging to the same nation with a single history. That way, post-65ers will feel no more solidarity with earlier immigrants from the same federally manufactured genera than they do with Ellis Islanders or English settlers. This only makes sense since there’s no more reason for a second-gen Venezuelan to feel a connection with the story of a nineteenth century Chicano in LA than with a Hungarian American from that period. Similarly, it’s purely a working of bureaucracy for a US-born Pakistani kid to feel some shared connection with a Chinese railway worker in 1850s California on the basis of their both being “AAPI.” The only racial questions on the census should be:
1. Are you affiliated with a recognized indigenous tribe? (Y/N)
2. Are you descended from people who were enslaved in the US? (Y/N)
3. What’s your ethnicity? (Write in)
Under this scheme there won’t be the various invented racial labels that currently exist, and it’ll decenter white from the conversation. Asians, Hispanics, Desis, and MENAs will then be functionally no different from whites in the eyes of the law or education system. This will then have the same political (though perhaps not cultural) ramifications as Walt’s bleaching hypothesis. In the end, we’re both worthless shills who want Brazil.
I’d be ecstatic if Walt were to write up a response with AI art, caustic humor, and all included in the counterarguments.
Question 2 is weird, Obama's mother would write yes and his father would write no. You should probably rephrase it to exclude Obama's mother.
Anyway, you could also just ask, are you primarily descended from immigrants? That's everyone except ADOS Blacks and Natives. America is a country of immigrants and their descendants. That's why these two groups have so much trouble assimilating.