Reparations and the Racial Republic
https://www.ocregister.com/2019/06/2...cial-republic/
[These views] do not reflect the on the ground reality in most of America. Housing segregation, for example, has declined in most metropolitan areas, with the notable, and somewhat ironic, exception the most “progressive” cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.
Once restricted to barrios and ghettos, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians have been moving en masse towards the ever more integrated suburbs.
The racial Republic is losing ground with the masses of Americans. Today roughly 86 percent, according to one recent survey, of adult Americans do not believe European roots are necessary to be “truly American.” Two in three said they felt optimistic about breaching racial divides.
Culturally we have become ever more integrated. Despite the bizarre concerns of “cultural appropriation ,” Americans have gone from consuming bland Northern European fare to regular patrons of Italian, Jewish, and, most recently, Asian and Latino fare. If we are indeed, “what we eat,” we are a rapidly diversifying people.
Given our changing demographics, it is difficult to see how a reparations regime would even be workable. Many African-Americans are more than descendants from African slaves; roughly one quarter of their DNA, according to one recent study, comes from Europe, Asia, Latin America or Native Americans. This is particularly true of places like Louisiana, where many African-Americans identify as mixed-race creoles and where a significant number — quarter of New Orleans population in 1830 — lived as free people before the Civil War.
More critically, the fastest growing part of the African-American population is from the Caribbean or Africa. Today, approaching one in ten African-Americans is an immigrant or their offspring; the number of such Americans has grown fourfold since 1970, and now accounts for over 3.7 million residents.
Racial bean counting will become even more difficult due to the remarkable rise of mixed race children, which, notes Pew, has almost tripled to 14 percent since 1980; it is roughly 20 percent in California, and well higher in both red Alaska and blue Hawaii. This will increase in the future as 17 percent of all marriages are now interracial....