The Way of the White Hispanic

The National Latino Institute for Policy is all over the latest neocon attempt to reassure America that predictions that a majority minority nation are overblown. First, they e-mailed me this anxious piece by long-time white-identified Hispanic (and former Reagan administration employee) Linda Chávez (bet she doesn't know her name takes an accent). The basis of her argument is that intermarriage will assure that Hispanics take their rightful place alongside Germans, Italians, Poles, etc. in the Great American Melting Pot and be erased from the rolls of the encroaching minority hordes. 

          Chávez, who proudly claims English and Irish ancestry, as well as being one of those "special" New Mexicans with an uninterrupted Spanish lineage, is the forerunner of neoliberal attempts to fetishize intermarriage as the solution to the Hispanic Problem championed by New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodríguez (again, accent added).

       Today, Jeff Jacoby, who was suspended in 2000 by his newspaper, The Boston Globe, for "journalistic misconduct," has a whole new rationale. The census bureau's calculations are based on stats that don't count Hispanic whites as white! So take heart, white supremacists...oops, I mean, those who prefer an objective assessment of the total white population (by extrapolating from an unrelated observation by Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson), "of the 46.6 million Hispanics in the United States today, at least some 22 million are white."

          This of course, begs the question. If you think you're white, are you white? Or, if you think you're not a racist, are you not a racist?

          Obviously these are questions for minds far more powerful and exacting than mine. Perhaps I should take the advice, given by both Chávez and Jacoby, which I'll quote here.

First, Linda:

Isn't it time we quit obsessing about race and ethnicity? America has successfully integrated millions of people from every region of the world.

Then, Jeff:

With a little luck, common sense, and goodwill, it will seem as odd in 2050 to focus on "non-Hispanic whites" as it would today to insist only "non-German whites" are really white. Better still, perhaps by then we will have really progressed, and abandoned the pernicious notion of racial categories altogether.

I'm not even going to bring up the fact that neither commentator mentioned African Americans vis a vis assimilation, rates of intermarriage, or the Melting Pot.

What will Obama do with this talking point? Ignore at his own peril?