America’s Long Goodbye to the Whites

There’s no doubting that the United States was an extremely racist country in earlier times. The movie “12 Years a Slave” is currently showing there, a film covering the real story of a black man from the northern U.S. who was abducted and taken to a southern state where he was sold into slavery.

The film is shocking, disturbing and at times almost too much to bear; the images of mistreatment that happened on the plantations are reminiscent of what took place in the Gulag Archipelago.

But U.S. racism was not directed solely against blacks but also against Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, Germans, Irish, Italians and Eastern European Jews. Nearly every flood of immigrants to the United States was met with a xenophobic response.

Put more precisely, the xenophobia began—paradoxically—right at the moment each wave of immigration was receding. The current opposition to illegal immigration, for example, began at a time when more Mexicans were emigrating from the U.S. back to Mexico than were crossing the Rio Grande in the other direction.

How Racist Is the United States Today?

How relevant are such debates? How racist is the United States today? And how does racism there compare with racism in Europe? We’re probably getting close to a good answer if we take a stroll along the Calle Ocho in Miami.

Clean as a whistle, shiny white storefronts stand right next to dusty old stalls. Stands offer tamales, papitas fritas and ropa vieja. Any customer who speaks nothing but English in these shops are often met with a surprised “Que?” in response.

Miami has been a Cuban city for years now; the transformation began around 1960 and was complete 10 years later. Whites of non-Hispanic origin in 2010 were a minority, 11.9 percent of the population, outnumbered even by blacks at 19.2 percent. Nearly all other Miami residents are Hispanic-Americans — 60.7 percent. Besides Cubans, they include Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and immigrants from the Dominican Republic.

Turkish as a Lingua Franca in Hamburg?

Can you imagine such a scenario in Europe without an outraged backlash? Imagine a city such as Hamburg or Rotterdam, in which Turkish were the lingua franca and when you ordered a döner kebab in German you got the reply “Neler oluyor?” (Turkish for “What do you want on it?”).

These examples haven’t been chosen at random. Hamburg and Rotterdam are considered international cities; they are already experiencing problems with Muslim immigrants — religious fundamentalism and repression of women — that should not be played down.

But the numbers there are far different from Miami: More than 50 percent of Rotterdam residents are ethnic Dutch. In Hamburg, the numbers are even more dramatic: 71 percent ethnic Germans compared to just 6 percent Asian and 5 percent Turkish as of 2010.

Even if the immigrants redouble their efforts to produce offspring and even as the native population gets smaller due to old age, it would still take a few hundred years until the nightmares of European racists become reality.

Right-Wing Populists with no Real Political Home

The British publication The Economist recently ran a cover story about European equivalents to America’s tea party movement. The article included in that category such political parties as France’s “Front National,” Hungary’s “Jobbik” party, the Norwegian “Fortschrittspartei,” the Dutch ”Freiheitspartei” and Belgium’s “Vlaams Belang.”

The Economist determined that all those European populist parties differed from America’s tea party movement in that none of them had found political shelter offered by any larger political organization. Essentially, it is a case of many small political groups randomly scattered across the countryside. The tea party movement, on the other hand, at least can claim to be a faction of America’s powerful Republican Party.

The Economist is of course right, but it overlooks a more important difference: Those arguing in favor of white supremacy in Europe have a demographic majority behind them. Fortunately, most of the members of that majority aren’t prone to racism and vote for democratic parties.

Whites Will Soon Be a Minority

In the United States, on the other hand, white racists belong to a segment of the population that is melting away like snow under an August sun. It can be fairly accurately calculated when they will become an ethnic minority — namely, around the year 2043. That’s when Asians, Hispanic-Americans and whites — regardless whether they’re of Irish, Jewish, Italian or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant extraction — will be overtaken demographically.

In other words, Miami is the United States in microcosm. And white racism in Miami — in contrast to Europe — reflects an actual trend. The trend is hysteria, not paranoia.

Nonracists need not fear this demographic trend toward multiculturalism, but it is worth considering the political implications: What’s the prognosis for the Republican Party in an America where whites are a minority?

These days, Republicans are coming off worse than ever before in their history. The Republicans, Abraham Lincoln’s heirs, are more unpopular than any other political party in the United States.

Republicans Have To Reinvent Themselves

That’s bad news for liberals as well; the country desperately needs a real center-right party. If they want to survive, Republicans will have to reinvent themselves as a party that is as dedicated to preserving the rights of the underprivileged as it is to free market principles; as a party that as conservatives welcomes immigrants with open arms; as American patriots who also care about the rest of the world.

If Abraham Lincoln’s heirs are still seen 10 years from now as a club for rich, old white men, we probably won’t be hearing much about them.