Still, the “blending” of America could be overstated, especially given the relatively low rate of black-white intermarriage compared with other groups, and continuing racial perceptions and divisions, according to some sociologists.
“Children of white-Asian and white-Hispanic parents will have no problems calling themselves white, if that’s their choice,” said Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queens College of the City University of New York and the author of a book about race.
“But offspring of black and another ethnic parent won’t have that option,” Professor Hacker said. “They’ll be black because that’s the way they’re seen. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, have all known that. Will that change? Don’t hold your breath.

—

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

So, ‘blending’ means passing as white? Also, assuming whiteness/white privilege seems to be significantly more than ‘calling oneself white’.

Idk I hate this article. Its like “lets talk about interracial marriage as a way to talk about expanding the boundaries of whiteness rather than challenging white supremacy”

WHITE MEN - FROM NORWAY, FOR EXAMPLE, WHERE THEY ARE NORWEGIANS - BECAME WHITE: BY SLAUGHTERING THE CATTLE, POISONING THE WELLS, TORCHING THE HOUSES, MASSACRING NATIVE AMERICANS, RAPING BLACK WOMEN.

— james baldwin, ‘on being ‘white’ … and other lies’ (1984) [pdf] [via]

I ask you, ‘What does reasonable suspicion mean?” Letona said through a megaphone. “It means not looking white. It means not sounding white. It means those who do not conform to a certain idea of what Americans should look like.

— Boston: Activists denounce Arizona immigration law [via]  

The most ridiculous question a black person can ask a cop is, ‘why did you shoot me?’ How does one account for the gratuitous? The cop is at a disadvantage: ‘I shot you because you are black; you are black because I shot you.’ Here is the tautology at the heart of the colonial experience. The inverse of which Fanon has already depicted: ‘In the colonies…[the] cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’

— Frank Wilderson, III [via&via]

It is often pointed out that the blog Stuff White People Like is really about a type and class of white people, and not really about all white people. The class of white people that is represented by the blog is urban, educated, and liberal. So, for the purpose of accuracy, should the blogger Christian Lander change his blog’s name to Stuff Liberal and Educated White People in the Big Cities Like? No, he should not. Here is why: All white people want to become urban, educated, and liberal. Even if they do not know it, and even if they resist it, they must eventually become this type/class of whiteness. This type/class represents the terminal point for the varieties of whites in the lower depths. To become urban, educated, and liberal is the goal for someone who is, say, rural, uneducated, and generally stupid. And because most white Americans are rural, uneducated, and generally stupid does not mean being white is being like them. Being white is, instead, being the opposite of them. Why? Because the movement, socially speaking, is not from urban, educated, and liberal down to rural, uneducated, and generally stupid. The movement is the other way around—a white person goes up, rises to the condition of someone who recycles, shops at farmers markets, drinks good coffee, listens to Mos Def, and so on and so forth. Stuff White People Like is about what all white people, no matter where they are in the lower depths, will eventually become: urban, educated, and liberal.

— White Noise

One of the problems with the immigrant movement, as I see it, is the failure to develop an understanding of why white people act politically the way they do. After all, why don’t white working class people find common cause with folks of color from their same class? This question is the eternal demand made of revolutionary actors and theoreticians in the US. Answering it is important.
We here at PCWC subscribe to an analysis of American society that says that whiteness is a political identity rather than a racial one — an alliance — in which what we call ‘white people’ create a cross-class bargain, poor and rich, to defend collectively a privileged position for some people over others in exchange for not overturning the apple cart of capitalism. This undermines class unity and pits whites against people of color and, in the bigger scheme, defends capitalism and the exploitation of everyone — including white workers, ironically. After all, in the end, even white working class people are exploited by capitalism.

— Rusty Childress and the False Class Consciousness of the Minutemen — Revisited.

As races are invented categories - designations coined for the sake of grouping and separating people along lines of presumed difference – Caucasians are made not born. White privilege in various forms has been a constant in American political culture since colonial times, but whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a series of historical vicissitudes. In the case of Rollins v. Alabama (1922), for instance, an Alabama Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of one Jim Rollins, a black man convicted of the crime of miscegenation, on the grounds that the state had produced “no competent evidence to show that the woman in question, Edith Labue, was a white woman.” Labue was a Sicilian immigrant, a fact that, this court held, “can in no sense be taken as conclusive that she was therefore a white woman, or that she was not a negro or descendant of a negro.” Although it is important to underscore that this court did not find that a Sicilian was necessarily nonwhite, its finding that a Sicilian was inconclusively white does speak volumes about whiteness in 1920s Alabama. If the court left room for the possibility that Edith Labue may have been white, the ruling also made clear that she was not the sort of white woman whose purity was to be “protected” by the bulwark of white supremacism, the miscegenation statute.

— from Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race  by Matthew Frye Jacobson [via]

White people have a long history of defining themselves in opposition to the supposed inherent qualities of other races. When white people defined non-white people as savages, or as hypersexual, unintelligent or enslaved, they also defined themselves as the superior opposite—as civilized, restrained, intelligent, and free. In the same way, many white interactions with non-white people continue to be narcissistic, because they use non-white people to reflect back in a self-defining way on themselves.
When white hipster humorists perform a racial identity that involves interaction with non-white people, it’s often all about the white person at the center. Using people of color so that you can pretend to be a racist in order to get laughs because you’re mocking racists is not a genuinely respectful and anti-racist form of racial interaction. Instead, it’s a way of acting in an ultimately racist manner, by using overt racism to suggest covertly, but falsely, that you yourself would never do anything racist. And since it’s all really about you, and you’re just using people of color for your own self-defining purposes, it amounts to little more than white self-centeredness all over again.

— act like a racist in order to demonstrate that you’re not a racist [via]

But that begins to fall away, and the simultaneous rise of their success as a genre speaks to not just people’s willingness to celebrate these icons, but white desire for this kind of unproblematic consumption. You have to really ask some fundamental questions about white fan consumption of hip-hop. It just rarely gets asked! What is it about this that’s so exciting? You can sort of make some excuses for black young people liking it, but what is it about this that makes it so exciting and interesting?

— Tricia Rose on The Hip-Hop Wars, Race, and Culture - Part 1 [via]