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In mid 2010, I engaged in a spontaneous conversation in passing with a man who told me that he was the manager of the diving facilities of the Rockford Country Club in Illinois. I was stunned to learn that that country club had only two black members out of what must have been at least a thousand, if not more. He told me there were not many “people of color in positions” in the city. I stood there stunned. In 2010, people still have that mentality? He said the city was twenty years behind.  I would say more something more like forty. Yet strangely, he noted that because families had changed, he had recently changed the dress code in one of the dining areas so kids from the pool could be accommodated. So, we are to believe that the situation of blacks hasn’t changed, but families have. To be sure, the family structure and dynamics had indeed changed in the last quarter of the twentieth century as women entered the workplace en masse and the number (and proportion) of diverces increased. However, it is unclear to me how these changes translate into making a dining area “informal."

The caucasion manager’s selective view of societal change—being no doubt convenient for him—struck me as strange. I got the impression that people in that city must be averse to (or scared of) virually any kind of change. How is it, I thought to myself as he spoke, that people could find so much satisfaction in the status quo? The manager told me that status and race were still important in that city. Relatedly, he characterized the city of 150,000 as a southern town interlarded in the north. His country club was the epitome of consciousness based on status and race.  Moreover, that club evinced what both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson called the artificial aristocrisy, which is comprised of wealth and birth.  This kind of elitism is distinct from the natural sort, which the two American founders took to be based on virtue and talent. Racism, and the segregation that ensues from it, is of the artificial sort.

Lest any kind of segregation be excoriated against, it should be noted that it can be quite natural for polite people to want to segregate themselves from the vulgar. There is indeed a marked difference in how people have been raised, and in how they conduct themselves.  This is not to say, however, that manners are on the side of the country club, for arrogance and elitism are quite rude qualities.  It seems to me that politeness can be reckoned as a virtue, and thus placed in the natural aristocrisy.  Perhaps education too, or at least valuing it, is also akin to virtue. The city in which the country club is located is at least historically heavily blue-collar.  Traditionally, the people holding such jobs felt threatened by education, and thus looked down on it.  Is it not natural that a highly educated person would rightfully want some distance from being disvalued?  There is, I submit, a natural aristocrasy that legitimates the natural grouping tendency of human beings.  We tend naturally to segregate ourselves. It is difficult to generalize against this propensity.  A mother of young kids is apt to segregate her family from a known child molester (one of the Catholic churches in the city had one as a priest). Ex-smokers are apt to segregate themselves from people who impose with their addition.  Furthermore, people with common interests are apt to associate. An apologist for the country club might say that it is composed of members who have common interests and generally get along. In this respect, it seems quite natural. However, it is not clear to me that these qualities cannot pertain to people of different races. Such artificial delimiters are perhaps why artificial aristocrisy is so squalid; there is also a rather significant opportunity cost to it. Sadly, the manager seemed utterly unaware that he subscribed to it at all, yet fully sure of himself nonetheless.

A venture more useful than bashing presumption at a country club involves coming up with a criterion on which “good” from “bad” segregation can be determined. Generally speaking, segregating a virtue from its associated vices is justifiable. Immediately a problem can be detected. Namely, although there are a cluster of virtues on which most people would agree, there is no fixed number. Furthermore, people such as the dining manager at that country club can use a virtue (e.g., gaining a vocational position through talent and effort) to attempt to justify what is really just garden variety racism and elitism.  In short, segregation of virtue from vice, while in itself laudable, can involve a slippery slope that can essentially whitewash segregation that could be considered as a vice.  Can we trust in nature, such that the natural associative instinct can be distinguished from the squalid instances of segregation?  Furthermore, are there certain virtues that can be deemed as legitimate sources of segregation—such virtues being agreed to explicitly or tacitly in a social contract?  In modern society, segregation by race is explicitly excoriated against, though I’m not sure if it is implicitly agreed to by all. There might be a natural instinct to associate with similar people. Just as people include physical appearance in determining whom to date, external features could be part of the mix in how humans are hardwired to associate. Likeness might be associated in evolution with survival as like is not apt to fight with like.  However, external features are an imperfect indicator of whom a person is apt to get along with—though not irrelevant.  So modern man may well have to sometimes choose to override instinct in the knowledge that going by virtue can have more survival value.  Similar values can trump similar skin-color, even if the clubby vestiges of racism make it more difficult to trust across the artificial lines even in the twenty-first century.

Barak Obama has a tendency to modify his manner of speaking, and even his dialect, to fit with his audience. Listening to his speech to the National Urban League, I was stunned; early on, he pivoted off from his ordinary manner of speaking to speak in what was surely a more familiar way to much of his audience. The crowd loved it. The audience must have been looking at him as the first black US President. It occurred to me while listening to him and observing his strategy to connect to his audience that although there would be less political advantage in it, he could have run for president by presenting himself as multi-racial (technically, mulatto). To be sure, there are less multi-racial Americans who would identify with him, but is that even the point? The multi-racial segment of the US population is small, but growing.  It points to what most states will look like in fifty or a hundred years from 2010, when I heard the multi-racial US President speak. Were Barak Obama to make explicit his multi-racial identity (his mother was caucasion and his dad was black), he could personify the leading edge of what America will become, and thus serve innately as a leader.  That is to say, he will have led through his person—as a symbol personified—as the a sign of things to come.  The USA  is finally becoming a real melting pot, transcending “black vs. white.”  Nature’s integration will solve the artificial problem of racism far more than any government program or even a US President who identifies himself with one “side.”

Perhaps it is the tacit duplicity in a multiracial man permitting himself to be labeled as black, presumably for political expediency, that lies at the core of why some people do not trust him (e.g., the “birthers”).  Such duplicity is like a subterranean fault-line undergirding the tension between campaigning for real change and then stocking people of the old guard, such as Larry Summers, in his administration.  The duplicity of promising systemic change then dropping his insistence on a public option and no mandate for health coverage—essentially guaranteeing a new mass market to the same health insurance companies that actively purged people with pre-existing conditions—finds a resonance in the multi-racial man using the term “black.”  Were it to be said that the “one drop” criterion still applies so he really is black, we would need to start calling a whole lot of caucasions black as well. Moreover, to use an antiquated and faulty criterion as though it justified Barak’s practice is itself a mark of duplicity.  Barak Obama is as much white as he is black.  Were he to “run with this,” he would instantiate a leader on the forefront even though there is little political capital to be made on it.  However, the US Presidency is an office that is geared to representing the people of the US—the office does this most tangably when functioning abroad. As an explicit multi-racial symbol, President Obama would show to the world where America is headed, and that we are facing that future with our heads held high and with  pride. While perhaps not helpful in elections here at home, such a function, which can only be done by the US President, is sorely needed, given America’s image abroad. We are finally becoming the melting pot that has been proclaimed for so long—finally getting past the need for duplicity.  President Obama can symbolize this in his person, and thus do America a service far more valuable than any legislation.

In October, 2009, it was widely publicized in the press that a justice of the peace in Lousiana had been refusing to marry interracial couples (what if both people are multiracial?). He was subsequently fired. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, said it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long. "I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children." As astounding as this sounds in the twenty-first century in a modern society, the case demonstrates the thesis that an empire, or Union of many States, is inherently diverse--incredibly diverse in fact. Europeans tend to view the United States as though it were itself akin to a state (i.e., homogenious). In truth, the United States are indeed as diverse as is the European Union (language is not the only basis of diversity).  A person in Boston reading a newspaper about the justice in the peace in Lousiana could be excused for thinking for a moment that Lousiana is another country. To be sure, the large states in the U.S. are equivalent in size to the large member-states in the E.U. Territory does matter in terms of cultural diversity.

While the diversity befitting an empire-scale political union must be given breathing room, it is also not the case that a Union can or should tolerate absolutely everything in an “anything goes” relativism if a practice violates the fundamental ideational or volitional tenets of the Union. For otherwise there would be no foundation to the union; the parchment would be a farce.  Yet at the same time, stifling the inherent diversity is a recipe to disunion.  There is a balance to be struck, and ironically even in calling for limits to the diversity, I am pointing to the need for diversity legislatively precisely because the U.S. is on the empire-scale.

Both  the U.S. and E.U., being on the scale of empire (e.g., containing republics), must allow for a certain degree of tolerance because one size can’t fit all where diversity is natural.   The difficult question is of course where to draw the line, and this is why I have raised the case of interracial marriage.  If we draw the line too close to our own values at the expense of those of others in another region of the continent, we risk the Union exploding from the pressure of “one size fits all.”    That is, if we require every official to marry interracial couples, the Union will feel oppressive to those who oppose the practice. An ongoing habit of imposing a “progressive” agenda on the entire Union is apt to push the more conservative regions out and therefore compromise the Union.  However, some may argue that there really is too much difference between Maine and Arkansas for them to be in the same political Union. One could argue that there should be a lowest common denominator that must be met in any given State for it to be in the Union.  To take two hyperbolic examples, a lot of people would object today to being in a Union that includes a State where slavery based on race is legal.  Yet for a long time, the practice was not a motive sufficient to kick out the slave States—actually it was some of them that decided to leave the Union.  In a way, we can be too accommodating.

In short, there is a balance involved in a federal empire remaining viable owing to the nature of the thing.  In my view, prohibiting interracial marriage is extrinsic to what our Union stands for. At the same time, I see the slippery slope because everyone has his or her own insufferable that could be added to the list—and pretty soon we are left with one size fits all and the natural diversity stifled and pressurized for future expressions.  Overall, I believe far too much “one size fits all” exists through the agency of the U.S. Government.  Congress, one might say, is acting like a State legislature.  Sandra Day O’Conner, who served on the US Supreme Court, made that remark several years ago to a small group where I was present.  I think it would behoove us to look at the EU in terms of the governance system enabling both uniformity and cultural diversity via a balanced approach to multi-level governance. The trick for us will be devising institutional or governmental safeguards that would keep one level—that of the Union—from dominating the levels that are more protective of the innate diversity.  That is to say, the State governments can play a greater role in domestic (and foreign!) policy such that they could be a check on a runaway US Government—while the latter should not be eviscerated so it can provide a check on the excessive democracy, or diversity, at the State level.  So this is not “States’ Rights”; rather, I am pointing to the need to balance institutionally and governmentally the common principles and natural diversity that form any empire.

See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33332436/ns/us_news-race_and_ethnicity/

The 2010, the U.S. census reignited the question of racial identity among multi-racial residents.  “I can’t fit in a single box on the census form” was the typical refrain among the fastest growing segment of the US population.  According to The New York Times in February, 2011, "when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand." The number of mixed-race Americans was at the time rising rapidly, largely on account of increases in immigration and intermarriage. In 2010, for example, one in seven new marriages was interracial. Yet it is not as simple as counting people as "multi-racial." Politically, the use of a catch-all category was believed by some racial interest groups to marginalize particular minority races. As a result, the Census Bureau created 63 categories of possible racial combinations (a typical bureaucratic solution to a political problem). Regardless of how the U.S. Goverment slices the deck, the reality on the ground is that the United States was finally turning the corner in the beginning of the twenty-first century--having gone from states outlawing miscegenation (the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations) as late as the 1960s to the multiracial segment being the fastest growing, such that America would undoubtedly look rather different in even a few generations.  Life is a fluid thing, and the world today will undoubtedly be morphed by life's forces into another world tomorrow. Governmental restrictions in the face of natural forces are ultimately like sandcastles facing a rising tide.

That the multiracial “category” is the fastest growing is, I believe, the natural solution to the racial problems that have plagued North America since the time of the colonies.  Whereas New Spain quickly mixed the Indian, black and caucasian races, the British colonies kept the three distinct.  The United States followed the British tradition until into the second half of the twentieth century. That tradition has resulted in some mistakes in how race is labeled because the tradition held that some races are better than others.
Cheryl Contee, for example, writes in a CNN opinion piece, “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot. I can’t ignore the pale skin of my white forebears, the slanted eyes of my Indian relatives nor the full lips and curly hair of my African blood.”  However, because there are many white Africans (e.g., in South Africa), her distinction of “white” and “African” is a false dichotomy.  She is treating two different categories as though they were one.  Better stated, Cheryl has white, black and Indian ancestors, hence she is multi-racial.  Better stated still, “caucasian” should be substited for “white” and “negroid” would be used for “black,” but Americans are not fond of technical terms even in polite conversation.  “White” and “Black” are at least of the same category, namely race, even if the explosion in interracial births will render "white" and "black" obsolete as primary descriptors. Instead, there will be a bell curve with "white" and "black" fading out to the ends. As Cheryl writes, “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot.”  Her melting pot constitution is something for her to be proud of, as instantiates the natural (rather than governmental) solution to what has been an intractable  problem.  Her great grandchildren will likely look at old pictures of Blacks and Whites as strange book-ends.
Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/30/contee.who.am.i/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/us/10count.html?pagewanted=2&hpw