Demographics

Duggar Economics: The Costs of 19 Kids | Wall Street Journal

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:04:00 -0400

As demographer Phillip Longman observes, young white men since the 1970s have seen a 40% decline in income relative to their fathers--for young black men the ... and more »

California’s Identity Crisis

Erin Drankoski — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:47:00 -0400

Angry Old Men

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:00:00 -0400

What's going on? All along I thought hordes of angry young men posed the greatest threat to society. Experts are always telling us to worry about the social menace from brooding young Turks with too much energy and time on their hands. They commit the lion's share of crimes and terrorist acts. They generally have the least to lose.

Headed Toward Extinction

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:52:00 -0400

World population will hit 7 billion by 2012, according to a recent United Nations report. Given that we just hit the 6 billion mark in October 1999, it is easy to conclude that there are just too many people in the world. How are we ever going to overcome global warming, feed the masses, get that beachfront property, let alone find parking, if the population keeps jumping by nearly one billion per decade?

Mexican American Assimilation

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:22:00 -0400

Changes in Attitudes Toward Race Change Slowly Despite Obama

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:27:00 -0500

Now that we've had time to let it sink in that Barack Obama will be the first African-American president, it's time to deal with the implications of this historic election for American race relations. Some observers have already hammered a marker into the road of history that designates the past as "Before Obama" and time going forward as "After Obama." As they see it, After Obama is the period when racism is no more. But they are letting the bright light of Obama's election blind them. We've got a long way to go in race relations.

A 'Mutt' Could Make Us Purer

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:04:00 -0500

Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, made a lame attempt to invalidate the idea that Barack Obama's victory is a symbol of American racial progress. It's not a surprise really. The United States' enemies long have used racial inequality as the stick with which to beat us. And unfortunately, it's a stick that we've handed them over and over again. Domestic discrimination has been at odds with our national mission of democratizing the world.

But Zawahiri's message suggests the ascendance of a black man to the presidency has flummoxed and confused Al Qaeda's strategists. For their purposes, they need the U.S. to be perceived as a racist nation, and one way to turn Obama's victory upside down is to call him a "house Negro," a term Malcolm X used to criticize successful African Americans whom he accused of doing the bidding of white folks, of not really being black.

For more than a century, the U.S. has sought to prove the superiority of its system by highlighting its fair treatment of its minorities. In 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt made Oscar Straus the first Jew ever to serve in a Cabinet, he told his new secretary of Labor and Commerce that he wanted "to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country."

During World War II, many Americans came to believe that racism was at odds with the principles of our democracy. The struggle against Nazism inspired the belief that prejudice was un-American. For African Americans, the war effort gave them hope for a "double V," a victory abroad against fascism and stateside against racism.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government became increasingly sensitive to foreign press coverage about domestic discrimination. After all, freedom was our trump card over the communists. In 1946, then-Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote that "the existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other counties. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesmen that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired. ... Frequently we find it next to impossible to formulate a satisfactory answer to our critics."

A decade later, the Justice Department's amicus brief in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education stated clearly that "the United States is trying to prove to the people of the world, of every nationality, race and color, that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man."

Of course, despite its international public relations efforts, for the longest time the U.S. actually was practicing and exporting notions of white supremacy, racial purity and segregation. As the country stretched itself into an empire, it took its racial prejudice and Jim Crow practices with it. Anthropologist Virginia Dominguez has written that before Americans arrived in Hawaii, the indigenous population simply did not view race and racial distinctions in the way the American government would later insist they should.

Our foreign-affairs gurus' theories were right, of course, even if we didn't fulfill them. The election of a black man to the presidency does tell the world that the U.S. is closer to fulfilling the ideals it so zealously champions around the globe. The better we are at creating equality at home, the more likely we are to confound our enemies. But the racial symbolism of Obama might take us even further than gloating about "treating our minorities better than you treat yours." That's because the man who ran as a black candidate may govern as a racially mixed president. On his first day as president-elect, Obama playfully referred to himself as a "mutt" (he was talking about choosing a dog for his daughters), which is a nicer way to say "mongrel." If the new president keeps on in that vein, if he chooses to highlight his mixed background, he could truly vanquish our old ideas of racial purity and segregation.

For more than a hundred years, Americans have often pointed to the "melting pot" as the ideal method of making this diverse society cohere. The differences among us disappear, in other words. But we've long known that widespread denial of race mixing, along with racism, prejudice and anti-miscegenation laws, meant that "melting" was really reserved only for ethnic whites. The deeper racial significance of Obama might be that we can finally come to terms with the fact that the proverbial pot has and will mix races as well as ethnicities. Out of many, one. Really.

Talk about confounding our enemies.

The Ugly Side of 'Beyond Race'

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:58:00 -0500

The chattering classes on the post-racial right say Barack Obama's win is one more nail in the coffin of affirmative action. It proves blacks are equal, they say, and therefore they don't need "special considerations" anymore. Abigail Thernstrom wrote it in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Maybe they're right, and gays' attack on blacks for voting to ban gay marriage is the proof. Since when have blacks been the target of left-wing opprobrium about the way they vote? At least since Obama was elected president.

Imagine if Proposition 8 had won and John McCain had pulled out a squeaker. Would California's black voters still have been singled out as turncoat oppressors? Probably not.

But things have shifted. It wasn't too long ago that condescending liberals routinely stripped minorities of any moral accountability, as if they were children. More than a few campus race warriors argued with straight faces that African Americans could not be racist; it was impossible. Difference plus power, they insisted, equaled racism. Those with no power, therefore, could not be racist, and by extension, they were unlikely to be bigoted in other ways as well.

The ascension of an African American to the presidency changes that calculus, primarily because of the symbolism of a black man in the White House. I was struck by a clip I saw on the local news. A dejected gay protester at a Proposition 8 march essentially argued that blacks got theirs -- in the form of a president -- but did nothing to help the little guys. "We're the last minority left," he said plaintively. Whether he knew it or not, he was accusing blacks of doing what many other ethnic groups have done, joining the mainstream by stepping on the group below them.

I hate to say it, but that's the American way -- a constant struggle by outsiders to become insiders. The competition isn't always pretty, and it's not likely to go away. At any given moment in our society, there are "in" groups and "out" groups, and those who are in will struggle mightily not to be associated with those on the outs. That's why, in this era of anti-Muslim sentiment, Armenians tend to blurt out that they are Christians, and why, during World War II, Chinese Americans wore buttons that emphatically declared that they were not Japanese Americans. Much as academics and journalists have created the romantic narrative that all minorities are locked arm and arm in a collective struggle against oppression, it's not true.

For too many years now, Americans on both sides of the aisle have nurtured a linear view of racial progress. They may disagree on the timing, but they both speak the language of transcendence, overcoming and getting beyond race. But if the controversy about blacks and Proposition 8 tells us anything, it's that, even as discriminatory barriers fall, groups in our diverse society will continue to jostle for power, position and whose vision of the country will prevail.

Paradoxically, even as critics are trying to make black voters morally accountable for their votes, they continue to lock African Americans into their traditional racial roles. Implicit in the criticism of black support for Proposition 8 is the idea that, as historically oppressed people, African Americans should have greater empathy for gays. The assumption here is that they cast their ballots as a liberal or even progressive bloc of "black voters."

But the reason blacks supported Proposition 8 is most likely a matter of religion, not race. As Madison Shockley, pastor of Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Carlsbad (and an opponent of Proposition 8), told The Times: "Black folks go to church ... and the churches they go to tend to be very traditional." Many observers suggest African Americans didn't cast their ballots in competition with another group (the way whites voted to end affirmative action via Proposition 209 in California in 1996) but as Christians with a fundamental belief about how to define marriage.

I don't buy the argument that, two weeks ago, blacks suddenly achieved absolute equality with whites. But black support for Proposition 8 may indeed be post-racial. Unfortunately, despite all our hopes, getting "beyond race" may not be as utopian as it's cracked up to be. If we all insist on keeping score on which group voted with or against us, it could get even uglier.

Phillip Longman in the Windsor Star | 'A Brood and the Brass Ring'

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:55:00 -0500

As the authoritative 2004 Phillip Longman study The Empty Cradle explained, aging populations and plummeting birthrates are now a fact of life everywhere, including the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. LINK

The Meaning of Obama

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:53:00 -0500

There's little doubt that Barack Obama's redemptive message of change grabbed Americans by the throat. After all, it's in times full of fear and despair that people are hungry for hope. Obama's triumph and victory speech were moving not only because they reminded us that this country is based on the idea of possibilities but because, for at least a moment, much of the nation believed that hope was reborn. And that raises a question: Why are Americans so obsessed with hope?

The American dream -- anyone can succeed, second chances abound, we are what we make ourselves -- is one way to define "hope." An October survey by J. Walter Thompson revealed that 77% of Americans think the American dream is part of what makes this country so dynamic. That helps explain why 78% also agreed that the next president "needs to breathe new life" into that dream. So hope is an inextricable part of our national identity. Without it, most agree, America wouldn't be America.

Historically, writers have ascribed this essential idealism or optimism to the nation's awesome natural abundance and its wide-open spaces, which have allowed for geographic -- and social -- mobility. In the 1780s, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur made the connection between abundance and the incipient American culture of aspiration: "There is room for every body in America; has he any particular talent, or industry ... he exerts it in order to procure a livelihood, and it succeeds." But as inspiring as that observation may be, it doesn't cut to the heart of the matter. That's because the greatest inspiration for hope is, well, fear. The fear of failure.

Think about it. Puritan dogma, from which much of American ideology stems, held that those early migrants had been selected by God for "an errand into the wilderness." When John Winthrop, aboard the Arabella as it approached the New World, urged his flock to create "a city upon a hill," his words were as much a warning as an exhortation. He believed that the Puritans had entered into a covenant with God and that they were ordained to establish God's kingdom and be an example to the world. If they failed, he said in his famous 1630 sermon, "we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of this good land whither we are going."

Fail, and you're damned. Add that to one other bit of bedrock Americanness -- that we're a "nation of immigrants" -- and voila, you get a people terrified of screwing up.

Why? Because even though throughout our history immigrants have been some of the scrappiest and most resourceful of Americans, it's also true that they tended to be people who had failed, for whatever reason, to achieve in their home countries. We talk about immigrants striving for the future. We forget that they're almost always running from their failed pasts.

In the early 19th century, when Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that "ambition is the universal feeling" in America, he also claimed that, in the U.S., the rich as well as the poor were spurred to success by "the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world."

It's not easy living in a future-oriented country whose culture is based on the idea of mobility, rebirth and hope. Mobility and the constant process of "becoming" breed insecurity. As historian David M. Potter wrote in 1954, the more we believe in mobility, the more we reject the idea that, high and low, each person has his or her rightful place in society. "Whereas the principle of status affirms that a minor position may be worthy, the principle of mobility, as Americans have construed it, regards such a station as ... the proof of personal failure." He goes on to say that "the denial of [set] status deprives the individual of one of his deepest psychological needs" and describes the "hazards and insecurities" of the fluidity of American life.

Our national cult of hope, therefore, is a balm to soothe our social and culture instability. We fetishize hope because it helps us as we grasp at a favorable future. We wrap ourselves in it like no other people in the world because we tell ourselves failure isn't an option. We have no choice but to cheer when a president-elect tells us we can put our hands "on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."

And we're right to cheer. If America ever did fail to come up with future prospects, plans, dreams and hopes, it would, in all the most important ways, surely cease to exist.