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Will the GOP Consider Latinos White?

By matt carter ⋅ November 11, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

From TAPPED:

There’s been lots of discussion during the past week about the future of conservatism. David Brooks and First Read consider the topic today. In short, the GOP can’t continue to appeal primarily to less educated, Southern, rural, and racist voters in an age of increasing education levels, diversity, tolerance, and migration back into cities and close-in suburbs. What’s the solution?

When looking at the history of whiteness and the creation of ethnicity in this country, the short answer to this question of whether the GOP will consider Latinos white is a resoundingly blunt “No.” For a good reference to this history, I’d recommend the book Working Towards Whiteness by the historian David Roediger.

Again, Dana Goldstein:

In our round table discussion on identity politics and the election, Brentin Mock, Adam Serwer, and I agree that one possibility is conservatives cutting loose the nativist right and embracing Latinos as “white.” Many Latino immigrants already consider themselves white, in part because of different racial attitudes in their home countries. And an appeal to these voters’ religiosity and social conservatism could, as Karl Rove and George W. Bush intended, eventually woo them back into a GOP that stops demagoguing on immigration, but continues to evince enough discomfort with African Americans and secular culture to hold onto the white Southern base. Here’s how Adam puts it:

Serwer: I think the studies showing changing demographics obscure the fact that most Latinos identify as white. So one of two things will happen: The GOP will continue to marginalize itself with hostility to Latinos, or it will redefine whiteness to include many of them. I’m betting on the latter.

Yes, Latinos tend to think of themselves as white, but the self-perception of Latinos is not what will determine their ultimate adoption within whiteness in America. After all, Irish and Italian immigrants during the early 20th century also thought of themselves as white and European.

And yet, they were not adopted into the white mainstream until much later, only after they dropped their cultural distinctiveness from their public lives, deciding to remain Italian, for instance, only at home. It was only then that they had a chance at whiteness, but even then a new term — ethnic — had to be appropriated to describe their peripheral whiteness.

Latinos on the whole do not now appear to be interested in dropping their cultural distinctiveness, and what writers like David Brooks and Adam Serwer seem to forget is that it took from the early twentieth century until the 70s for white ethnics/the “new immigrants” to become Reagan Democrats. It took decades of housing choices and intergenerational mobility for that transformation to full-fledged participation in the GOP’s white base to occur.

Will the GOP suddenly embrace these Catholic brown-skinned Spanish speakers in a rational realization that our country’s demographics are working against them? If history is a guide, Obama and the Democratic Party shouldn’t worry too much about that happening anytime soon.

Tags: ethnicity, racism