February 1, 2003
THE END OF MINORITY:
New Topic in Black Studies Debate: Latinos (FELICIA R. LEE, February 1, 2003, NY Times)As hundreds of scholars get ready to gather in Harlem on Thursday night for a conference on the state of black studies, many find that suddenly their attention is turning to another topic: Hispanics.Last week the Census Bureau announced that the Hispanic population had jumped to roughly 37 million. For the first time, Hispanics nosed past blacks (with 36.2 million) as the largest minority group in the United States.
To some, the figures promise to shake up a field that has always relied to some extent on a political and cultural landscape that cast racial problems in black and white.
"African-Americans and the African-American leadership community are about to enter an identity crisis, the extent of which we've not begun to imagine," Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard University said of the new census numbers.
"For 200 years, the terms `race' or `minority' connoted black-white race relations in America," he said. "All of a sudden, these same terms connote black, white, Hispanic. Our privileged status is about to be disrupted in profound ways."
That's a surprisingly frank admission, that rather than being a drawback--as politicians, activists, and academics usually claim--being black in modern America grants a privileged status. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2003 6:46 AM
All God's chill'n got race.
Posted by: Tom Roberts at February 1, 2003 8:53 AMWhat about the asians? When are they going to become a "race"?
Posted by: scooterboy at February 1, 2003 10:35 AMMr. Judd's gloss is a predictable and sad distorition of what Prof. Gates said. What Gates means, of course, is not that being African American confers privileges such as life-chances, income, etc., as if Dr. King's dream had actually been achieved. Rather, he means that given the sordid histories and enduring effects of slavery and segregation in the US, African-Americans have been at the center of discussions and actions designed to remedy these injustices. Moreover, because African-Americans have responded to their marginalization by uniting and pressing their case, they are a political force that political leaders must consider. In light of the recent demographic data, Gates is calling for something that he and many others in his field have long suggested--that the binary "black/white" is insufficient for the issues at hand; I'm sure there also is some justified fear that the rise in the Hispanic population may dilute the power of organizations like the NAACP, et. al. (This is made even more interesting by the challenge issued by many of those from Central and South America to the catch-all category of "Hispanic" or "Latino," given the profound differences among them.)
In other words, it's a rather complex issue, one ill-served by Mr. Judd's opportunistic and simplistic reading.
Mr. Newman, Ph.D:
I don't think O.J. meant "priviledges" in that sense, nor Gates. I think he meant in the sense of being the primary benefactor and steward of the various race-based programs and policies run by states, the Feds, and private institutions.
I meant it in exactly the way Mr. Newman uses it--that race conveys a special sense of entitlement and absolves of any responsibility for their own plight. The response to every problem facing black America thereby becomes: it's a result of past racism; you owe us; what's the government going to do for us.
Posted by: oj at February 2, 2003 5:35 AMDear Mr. Judd and his epigones,
In hopes that you and your other readers will learn not to allow facile generalizations to substitute for real
thinking (in other words, to be able to count higher than two), I've pasted below a recent exchange between Gates and Cornel West. Chances are you will dismiss their words as mere "rhetoric." According to you and in contrast to their stated opinions about the complex and even supplementary relationship between individuals and institutions, they are simply asking for a handout like so many benighted African Americans. But I thought I'd give it a try.
GATES: Well, how much of this though, is structural and how much is behavioral? How do we as black leaders talk about individual responsibility without being appropriated by the right? But also, structural change, without being appropriated by the left?
WEST: Well, they go hand in hand. I mean there is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
At the same time, there should always be social accountability. We shouldn't talk about one without the other. When we do talk about both, I think we recognize that it is always possible for persons to work hard, to sacrifice and to make a difference in their life. That's true for nearly any set of social conditions as a certain constant in human life, theat even limited years that one has just cracking a smile makes a difference in peoples's lives. People have agency; people have responsibility; people have a choice to do that. Or you could be mean. See that's true in the concentration camp. That's true on Park Avenue.
But as we know, we are a little more complicated than that because you have power, wealth, influence circulating in a variety of different ways. Therefore, it is going to take much more than cracking smiles in order to make the world a better place. You are going to have to organize, mobilize, bring power and pressure to bear on various status quos in place. That's where the structural institution comes in.