Will The “Multicultural Elite” Destroy America’s Obsession With Race?
“Our white majority has been split along educational lines.
So, [America’s] rural, blue-collar, kind of “inland” whites are so different from the whites that live in New York City and Los Angeles and attend Oxford and Yale.
Those two groups of whites are so alienated from each other… they have so little interaction… that they are almost what social scientists think of as different ethnic groups.
It is much more common for a white person who attends NYU or Yale or Columbia to marry an Asian-American or a South Asian from the same educational background…
Than it is for that cosmopolitan elite white to marry someone from rural Alabama, I mean there is no interaction” — Amy Chua, Oxford Union Series Interview, 31:45–32:53
In this quote, we see Yale Law professor, best-selling author, and 2011 member of Time’s 100 Most Influential People Amy Chua describe a coming socio-political reality that American society has in no way come to grapple with:
The 21st century “multicultural elite” could destroy America’s obsession with race.
Throughout this article, we will provide you with census data, educational attainment statistics, and financial facts to certify this claim…
And wrap it all up with a hopefully optimistic vision for the future of what this shining beacon on a hill these United States could look like over the next 50 years.
But before our plane lifts off…
Sit back, relax, and enjoy a quick story about how all this talk of a multicultural elite isn’t a prediction…
It’s already here.
What Makes You American?
A little about me:
In some ways I’m your garden-variety American.
East Coast born and raised to a family of Southerners with whom I spent summers and holidays, been on cross-country trips through the Midwest and Great Plains, college on The West Coast, visited 40 of the 50 states.
The only major difference?
I’ve been living in Europe on and off for the last 7 years.
And not just “any old Europe”… a country formerly behind the Iron Curtain. I speak a Slavic language daily.
In fact, I still live there to this day, and not in a major capital.
That means that I can go weeks without even seeing a fellow American, let alone speaking to one.
Having that kind of distance from our culture for long periods of time means when I actually do come home or get in an area full of Americans…
I have a VERY different perspective on “what makes someone American” than I would living back in the States.
Now that you know that about me, imagine my surprise when spending a week in Santorini, Greece a few months back and the minute I walked out of the hotel…
Hearing nothing, absolutely nothing but American voices.
How To Spot A Yank
At first I didn’t really think much of it.
I knew that the Greek Islands (particularly Santorini) were a very common tourist destination for us Freedom Lovers.
It was easy enough to identify “us”:
- We’re louder than everyone else
- We look anxious when customer service takes too long
- All of our ladies under the age of 30 have an absolute obsession with Ray-Ban sunglasses for some reason.
No surprises there, and I’m sure everyone can relate, but notice one thing I didn’t mention:
How somebody’s BODY or phenotype looks.
After a few days I started to see you can ONLY tell someone is an American by their voice, clothing, and, ahem, “temperament”.
I didn’t say, “well there were a lot of white people with baseball caps on so I knew they were American… or there were a ton of brothers and sisters in their Sunday best so I knew they were from the States”.
Even though a lot of 21st century discourse tells us that economically America is harshly divided on racial and ethnic lines…
When you’re actually sitting in an expensive, hard-to-get-to location in a foreign country… filled with Americans who clearly have the means to get there…
You fully take in the sheer magnitude of how diverse we are -
And the ONLY overlap you can gauge from this is that everyone on this pricey island somehow “won the American game” to the point they could show up.
Therefore, as I was sitting at a seaside cafe with the Aegan Sea staring back at me…
When I heard a clear, succinct, Silicon Valley VC type of American male voice jumping between telling his kids to finish their food and saying to his wife how happy he was to have sometime off work…
I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a dark skinned American man of Indian descent enjoying a great meal with his American wife… of East Asian descent.
I looked back at my travel partner, a first-generation Nigerian-American graduate of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and simply said…
“See, I told you there are a ton of Americans on this island.”
This is 21st century America.
And maybe more importantly… this is the 21st century America that can afford to come to Santorini.
The Making of A Mixed Aristocracy
Now, here’s where we are:
In 2017, 10.6% of all births in the United States were a white + minority mixed ethnicity.
That is a large proportion: well above the Asian-only US birth rate and about 3/4ths of the black-only births, for example. — Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion, pgs. 4, 75
Moreover…
“Intermarriage generally involves minority parents with above-average levels of education… on average, an infant growing up with one minority parent and one white one will be more advantaged than an infant with two parents of the same minority origin” — The Great Demographic Illusion, pg. 93
In other words, if a child is born mixed minority + white, they statistically actually have a leg up on being born of two parents of the same minority race (including Asian).
In fact, as you adjust for educational attainment, rates of intermarriage increase:
“The linkage is especially strong for Hispanics. For instance, while only one-sixth of (Latinos) with a high school diploma or less intermarry, the rate is almost 50% for those with a baccalaureate. For black men… the incidence of intermarriage also climbs steeply with education… [additionally] Asians with some college exposure have higher frequencies of intermarriage than those with at most a high school diploma” — The Great Demographic Illusion, pg. 73
Therefore, in the 21st century we are seeing increasing rates of a mixed-race and multicultural educational elite across all major ethnic admixtures…
And we have no reason to see this slowing down, particularly in the case of Hispanics and Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States.
The “American” Identity Will Come First For Many
Furthermore, over the course of a couple generations, people of Hispanic or Latino descent identify as simply “American”, rather than Hispanic or Latino, at an exponential rate:
As time passes on in the 21st century and we see more people of Hispanic or Latino origin enter the halls of economic and educational power, the “American” identity will continue to take precedence over racial (or sometimes even ethnic) personal classification.
Similarly, Asian-Americans are more likely than any other minority to say that the best way to solve inequality in the US is developing “necessary changes by working within current systems”:
Therefore, the two fastest growing ethnic groups (in terms of population and educational attainment) are telling us what the future will look like:
“We will increasingly align with the American cultural project, identify as American, and trust in the process.”
“The canonical ideas that people have about assimilation… the idea that you are changing from one group to another, that isn’t a good way to understand things. That isn’t even historically accurate… if you think about what happened to the white ethnics after World War 2.
[What is] more accurate is to think that people were joining into some kind of mainstream society where they retained a muted sense of their identity — of their original identity, their family origins — but these didn’t play much of a role in terms of the way they interacted with people on an everyday basis.
The political scientist Yascha Monk has this metaphor of a public park… this is the way that integration occurs. It’s not that everybody becomes one, but it’s that they’re able to cooperate in a public setting.
I would go further because it’s not just a public setting… but that they’re able to really form close bonds like families without that much regard for the origin differences among the participants.” Professor Richard Alba, The Candid World Interview August 2022
The Roles of Black Folk
Now as you probably noticed in the above chart, Black Americans are vastly more likely to say “U.S. laws/institutions need to be completely rebuilt” than any other major racial or ethnic group.
(It is usually at this point in the discussion that a bottle of kerosene is dumped on all prior points and a match is lit)
However, even when we look at Blacks in the United States… there are specific subgroups of African-Americans that are entering the new Multicultural Elite with astounding speed.
(Hint: I already mentioned one of these groups earlier in the article)
Indeed, Nigerian-Americans are regularly listed as the most successful ethnic group in America, depending on how you define “success.
To put this into perspective, one study found that 2nd generation Nigerian-American men have 247% greater odds than white men in America of achieving a higher educational level.
Nigerian-American women put up even higher numbers, with their 2nd generation cohort having 261% greater odds of achieving a higher educational level than white women.
Studies have found that West Indian Black immigrants also put up impressive numbers when integrating into the American system, with them faring “better than native-born African Americans on a wide array of economic measures, including labor force participation, earnings, and occupational prestige”.
Therefore, even in the case of racial groups that are historically seen as constantly oppressed and/or “outsiders” in the American mainstream…
We can see that 21st century elite circles will have to interact with a growing number of successful African-Americans, if for no other reason that many Black immigrants are following every step in the tried-and-true How To Get Ahead In America playbook.
The Multicultural Future Is Faster Than You Think
In short, no matter what we do, the American elite of the 21st century will be an increasingly diverse cohort…
However it remains to be seen if that group will act, feel, or “succeed differently” than it has in the past.
While our 2010s and 2020s Culture War has thrust a pedantic “all diversity good vs. everything is white replacement” binary upon all discussion around multiculturalism -
The truth is many cultures are “here to play ball” and already are.
It’s not set in stone that a “browning” and “beiging” of the American mainstream will lead to a more ‘racialized’ and contentious America.
In fact, it may just lead to the opposite:
The future multicultural elite may be the unexpected death knell to America’s current obsession with race.
