I remember the "white" kids I used to play with in the 1950s and remember snatches of their conversations. At that point in U.S. history, many (if not most) "whites" were "mutts" and proud of it. My first girlfriend (maybe second) was part Jewish and part Swedish. My Boy Scout friend Tom O'Laughlin had an Irish name -- but he wasn't all Irish. So, when the conversations shifted to "what are you?" I would hear things like French-Welsh, Irish-Italian, German-English-Indian, Polish-German, Norwegian-English-German and so forth. Then they would all go back to doing whatever they had previously been doing.....together as American kids.

I recall A.D. Powell saying sometime ago that the criteria for "whiteness" is much wider than most people think. Along those lines, new ethnicities are penetrating and entering the realm of "whiteness". This is happening even as we speak more and more of "multiracialism". Children who are the products of Latinos and "whites" and children who are the products of Asians and "whites" generally have the option of claiming "whiteness" and thus self-identifying as American kids (with no hyphen and no alternative allegiances). In this sense Latino ancestry and Asian ancestry has been "decriminalized" and treated as a component of the makeup of someone in the mainstream, as opposed to an ancestry which automatically places one in a different social grouping outside the mainstream.

West African ancestry will be decriminalized in the future -- possibly in the near future. And, more than likely, "white" and "black" will lose their power to bond or to separate. Why? Because, unlike religion and ethnicity, one's color (or ancestry) has no built-in fuelers for hatred. The hatred visited upon those of African ancestry in the U.S. required certain things (among others) for it's existence:

*enforced segregation
*separate schooling
*extreme job differentiation
*disparaties in civil rights
*prohibitions on mixed marriages

It has been approximately 35-40 years since the worst of the above social practices have been in play in the U.S. Not a long time. Yet think about the contrast in the social landscape in the U.S. now and in 1962.

Does anyone here actually doubt that African ancestry has been sharply decriminalized already? And that more of the same is in our future?

Maybe sometime in the near future around a schoolyard basketball court we'll be hearing this:

Sid: "Hey Joe! I hear you're going on vacation after this term!"
Joe: "Yeah. I gotta go to Eduador to see my grandparents. What a way to spoil a vacation!"
Fred: "I know what you mean. This 'going to the old country crap' is just that. Crap. Do you know how miserable I was in Ghana last year?
Joe: "Why were you miserable?"
Fred: "Please!!"
Sid: "Well if you were like me you'd just go to the reservation and look at a tree."

Probably these guys would chase the same girls. Maybe they would be mixed with things other than Ecuadorian, Ghanaian and Apache. In any event no one would give a damn.

William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.

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