Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [54]
Fortunately for practitioners of race-based persecution politics like Pat Buchanan, demographic changes are working in their favor. In November 1993, the face of a young woman graced the cover of Time magazine. She was dark haired and dark eyed. Her nose was slightly broad, and her lips were slightly thick. Her skin had an olive complexion. She was not real. A computer had generated her face from a mix of several races. She was, according to Time’s editors, “The New Face of America.” The lead article quoted a policy analyst who proclaimed, “We have left the time when the nonwhite, non-Western part of our population could be expected to assimilate to the dominant majority. In the future, the white, Western majority will have to do some assimilation of its own.”60
Pat Buchanan made the same point more pejoratively:
Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society.
Millions of African and Asian Americans might beg to differ. Buchanan is correct, of course, that it took African Americans a couple of centuries to become full participants in American society, but the reason for that should be rather obvious, even to a man like Pat Buchanan.
The irony is that Mexicans and other Latin Americans are not all that different from America’s “white, Western majority,” racially or culturally. Most speak a European language, belong to a European church, and carry a solid chunk of European DNA in their chromosomes. While Latin America is less developed than the United States, the immigrants aren’t exactly Stone Age tribespeople who have never used telephones, and their culture is no more alien to our own than that of the Eastern European immigrants who have been assimilating quite nicely for a century.aw
But the Eastern Europeans have one thing that most Latin Americans lack—pale white skin. Pat Buchanan himself laid out the pigment problem back in 1984:
The burning issue here has almost nothing to do with economics, almost everything to do with race and ethnicity. If British subjects, fleeing a depression, were pouring into this country through Canada, there would be few alarms. The central objection to the present flood of illegals is they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean.61
Forget about the “Spanish-speaking” bit. Americans are accustomed to non-English-speaking immigrants, and Spanish-speaking immigrants from Spain do not disturb us. Forget about the “Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean” bit as well. White English-speakers from Jamaica or South Africa would not bother us either. That leaves only “brown and black people.” That’s the real burning issue here.
To Buchanan, the color of your skin says something important about you—about your cultural traits and possibly your genetic aptitudes. Moreover, the difference between “your” cultural traits and aptitudes and “our” cultural traits and aptitudes constitutes a terrible threat to “us.” In a 1990 column, Buchanan predicted that the United States would become a third world country “if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores.”62 He then connected this invasion of brown people to the demands of black people already in our midst as if the black and the brown teams were joining forces to defeat the white team:
The Negroes of the ’50’s became the blacks of the ’60’s; now, the “African-Americans” of the ’90’s demand racial quotas and set-asides, as the Democrats eagerly assent and a pandering G.O.P. prepares to go along. Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the United States?