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Opinion: There yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue...

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Gregory Rodriguez takes a fresh look at whiteness today, with a column on Hillary Clinton’s white-voter outreach that has been tearing up our traffic and drawing fiery comments. (Reader ‘Wilbur Varela’ wants to know if Rodriguez did all his research at the Grove or the Ivy, and gives a somewhat-too-on-the-nose exhortation for ‘us latinos’ to ‘take back california.’) A sample of the argument:

[I]n other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to ‘black districts’ or ‘Latino districts’ and speak of the necessity of those jurisdictions to be represented by black or Latino elected officials. Well, then, because the American population is 66% white, maybe the United States is a de facto white district that should be represented accordingly.... Is this white supremacy? No, in fact it might be its opposite, an acknowledgment that white privilege has its limits. With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elites that are threatened by the changes; rather, it’s the nearly 70% of whites who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans. Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants -- legal or otherwise -- and that their culture is being subsumed. When Clinton promises to make their voices heard, she’s appealing not to Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism but to the fear of white decline.

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Part of the problem here is whether we’re talking about white decline or the decline of whiteness as a default category. ‘The idea,’ as Tom Buchanan notes, ‘is if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’ But in fact Tom’s favorite writer, or the real-life version of same, would have been horrified at the idea of Irish or Southern Italians or Lebanese being counted as white at all. Take a gander at the helpful map of Europe that accompanies Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, and you’ll see that Alpines, Slavic Alpines, Mediterraneans and the like are forever on the edge of pushing true Nordics into the sea.

On the other hand, or maybe on the same hand, definitions of whiteness have proven flexible throughout history. What group will get added to the dwindling majority next? What group can still be The Other in the post-Cablinasian era? And will the last racist on Earth have to resort to drawing distinctions so fine he will constitute an ethnicity all by himself?

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