IN 2003, the Census Bureau announced that Hispanic-Americans outnumbered African-Americans for the first time. Meanwhile, other racial minorities have also come to represent a larger proportion of the population.
These demographic shifts have changed the way America looks. They do not, however, justify a rejection of the traditional black-white paradigm of race in America. Moreover, these circumstances should not encourage other minority groups to further divide the country in new racial directions.
Vijay Prashad, professor of International Relations at Trinity College, tried to argue the contrary in a lecture last Wednesday sponsored by the University's South Asian Leadership Society and Asian-American Studies Program. If anything, Prashad's talk instead underscored the unique divide between black and white.
Much of Prashad's talk centered on criticism of what he called "post-civil rights racism," under which he includes "colorblindness," "multiculturalism," and the myth of the "model minority." Prashad contended that, while "colorblindness" hurts all minorities by allegedly pretending that race does not matter when in fact it does, the other factors uniquely harm African-Americans.
In Prashad's view, "multiculturalism" -- the belief that "if [you] don't enact [your] culture, [you] are inauthentic" -- tends to favor all minorities but African-Americans. Prashad believes that most would not celebrate black culture under the mantle of multiculturalism. Prashad also pointed out how Asian-Americans are unfairly portrayed as a "model minority" to the detriment of African-Americans. In fact, Prashad noted that in the late 1960s, the U.S. government selectively admitted only well-educated Asian immigrants who would naturally succeed.
As an empirical matter, Prashad is simply wrong to state that multiculturalism disfavors African-American culture. In contrast to the lack of Asian-American pop culture, there is a thriving market for African-American pop culture, even if much of it is caricatured by white consumers.
Regardless of how multiculturalism treats African-Americans, Prashad's points fail to support his conclusion that we should look more broadly at race. Rather, they all underscore the continuing black-white nature of racial problems in America.
The truth of the matter is that probably no slur against any race carries as much weight as the "N-word" does against African-Americans. Few perpetrators have been marauding around and off Grounds shouting slurs at other minorities, or scrawling hate speech on their property. Other minorities do not make up almost half of the U.S. prison population, as do African-Americans, nor do they face the problem of "driving while black," or being stigmatized for "acting white" when they succeed in school.Most importantly, other minorities arrived in America voluntarily, while African-Americans arrived under bondage and still struggle with the consequences thereof.
None of this is to put down African-Americans, nor is it to dismiss the unique issues faced by other racial minorities. Rather, these issues merely reinforce the reality that race in America is still, in fact, very much a black-white problem.
To that end, racial agitators should not engage in the politics of comparative suffering. They should not jump on the victimization boat and try to outdo one another as to which group has been more mistreated. Instead of trying to further split society along racial lines, perhaps other minorities should try to help repair the original black-white breach.
In practice, this means that simply because there is an Office of African-American Affairs and a Program in Afro-American Studies, every minority group does not in turn need its own, Balkanized academic program and autonomous administrative province.
In the end, race is still a black-white problem, notwithstanding Prashad's argument to the contrary. Other minorities do not help the situation when they jump on the multiculturalism bandwagon. If anything, they contribute to the racial problems at the University and in society by wearing race on their sleeves as the first barrier in their everyday interactions.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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