Old race game over, future is light brown

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Just under three-quarters of the present American population (73.1 percent) is classified as 'non-Hispanic white' by the U.S. Census Bureau. But within fifty years, it predicts, white Americans will be barely half the population (52.8 percent). 13.6 percent of Americans will be black (about the same as now), Asians will double to 8.2 percent, and most of the rest will be 'Hispanic'.

The U.S. Census Bureau is almost certainly wrong. The man who has it right is Tiger Woods, the 21-year-old golfer who electrified the United States by winning the Masters tournament -- and then outraged practically everybody by announcing on the Oprah Winfrey show that he does not see himself as 'black', but as 'Cablinasian'.

It's a word that describes what may be the largest American 'race' by 2050: a mixed-race group in various shades of light brown that combines the genetic heritage of most major groups on the planet. Canada promises to be an even more comprehensive mixture, and Australia and even Britain are moving in the same direction.

Woods made the word 'Cablinasian' up because he had no word to describe himself. His father had one white, one native Indian and two black grand-parents, and his mother was half Chinese, half Thai. "Growing up, I came up with this name -- I'm a Cablinasian," Woods explained -- a mix of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian.

Sounds exotic. But in the heart of the 'West', it is less exotic all the time. Quite suddenly the old racial barriers have dropped, and racial inter-marriage has taken off.

In Britain, a stunning 30 percent of people of West Indian origin under the age of thirty who are married or in a long-term relationship have a white partner. And public opinion supports the change: well over two-thirds of Britons strongly disapproved of mixed marriages as recently as 1958, while now just over a quarter would object even if close relatives were involved.

The rate of inter-marriage is lower among British Asians, maybe because most of them are Moslems, Hindus or Sikhs for whom religious differences are an extra barrier to inter-marriage. But just go into the schools in big British cities and you can see the scale of the ethnic mixing that is happening -- and this is in a country with only 7 percent foreign-born in its population.

In Canada, where 20 percent of the population is foreign-born, the process seems even more advanced. One Saturday night recently I stood on the corner of Robson and Howe in downtown Vancouver and watched for a quarter-hour. I estimate that between a third and a quarter of the young couples who passed by were multi- racial.

The United States has far fewer recent immigrants (only 8 percent of the population is foreign-born), and its unique past as the only industrialized country where slavery was once a major domestic institution has cursed it with an obsession about race. even in America, the racial walls are breaking down.

Only 4 percent of U.S. marriages are inter-racial, but that bald figure conceals a huge generational shift. In the 1940s and 1950s, less than 2 percent of black men married white women. In the past decade, the figure has soared to nearly 10 percent. And other non-white Americans, who do not suffer the special prejudice that weighs on African-American descendants of former slaves, are now 'marrying out' at a staggering rate.

Some 60 percent of Asian-born Americans in their 1920s marry somebody of another race, and nearly 70 percent of native American Indians under the age of 25 are doing the same. "In recent years the proportion of both men and women from all racial groups who 'marry out' has increased," concluded University of Michigan demographer Reynolds Farley in a study published last month.

The 'melting pot' is finally working, even in the U.S. Why? There are many previous examples of widespread racial mixing. Most people in northern India are descended for long-ago unions between Aryan (white) invaders and the darker previous inhabitants. Many West Indian 'blacks' (and most American 'blacks') actually carry the genes of former slave-owners as well as former slaves.

In South Africa there is a whole people, the Coloreds, who come from the mixing of Europeans, 'Malays' (actually Indonesians), the Bushman/Hottentot original inhabitants, and black Africans, in the early days of the Cape Colony. But all these cases of inter-marriage just led to the drawing of new distinctions, for they were all based on relationships of unequal power.

The caste system in India probably arose as a strategy for combating the racial mixing that was undermining the conquerors' cohesiveness and power -- and over three thousand years later Indian newspapers still carry advertisements by people seeking spouses who are 'light' in color.

In the West Indies the class system is color-coded even more sharply: Jamaica has yet to have a prime minister who looks at all African. White America abolished the ideological embarrassment of mixed-race people by adopting the 'one drop' principle: one-eight African blood made you, not seven-eighths European, but 'black'.

And the spectacularly complex ethno-cultural group that began to emerge in the Cape 300 years ago was aborted by dividing it on the crude basis of skin color: 'white' Afrikaans-speaking Protestants (who owned everything), and 'Colored' Afrikaans- speaking Protestants and Moslems (who did what they were told).

But the current phenomenon is different because the new inter- racial links are voluntary and equal. The most significant bit of data about the new inter-marriage is this: white American women who have served in the U.S. armed forces are seven times more likely to marry black American males than civilian white women.

Why? In the U.S. armed forces, almost uniquely in American society, a very large minority of blacks lives and works alongside other races in a genuinely non-racist institution. Since many blacks are long-service professionals, they also have high status. And that is all it takes to overcome the centuries of prejudice.

It was never really about color. It was always about power. People like Tiger Woods, born of inter-racial relationships in a society with egalitarian values, will not submit to being sorted by the shade of their skins. It will take another generation or two, but the old racist games are over -- and the future is light brown.