whiteness has always been elastic in the US, but it's always expanded to absorb different kinds of people of European descent.

it's an open q as to whether it will/can expand to subsume groups of Asian Ams or Latinos — and whether their racial formation in the US will allow it.
Italians and the Irish and Germans and European Jews were subsumed into broader USian whiteness, but are the mechanisms by which that happened available today (and available to enough people) of MENA ancestry or Latin American ancestry or South Asian ancestry?
racial formation in the US isn't as simple and neat as "white people have power and new populations will become 'white' in order to access that power."

There's a systemic/structural dynamic to this as well: Does the world *treat* you like a white person?
There's a reason that the people who came to the US via Ellis Island became "white" and the people who came to the US via Angel Island and the US-Mexico border did not and could not.
we can and should talk about the elasticity of whiteness and also not presume that, say, Cubans in FL tell you anything neat about Latino populations.
A lot of attention was paid to the fact that around 1M people who were Hispanic on the 2000 census were identifying as white on the 2010. census. "OMG, Latinos are becoming white."

The gag: a large number of respondents moved in the *opposite* direction over that same period.
This is from some reporting I did back in 2014. ImageImage
2 things:

the existence of Jim Crow and de jure white supremacy created a specific context for the policing of the borders of whiteness — and a calculus for which side new (Euro) populations might want to align themselves with. dropping surnames and the like.
and 2:

whiteness as constructed in the US has been so tied to Euro ancestry specifically that any shift that would allow, say, large numbers of MENA or South Asian people to enter the tent of whiteness would mean rewriting the "rules" first.
that could very well happen! but it's not as neat as just being like: "white people will just make Asian people white then."

(besides the fact that people are not passive participants in this, and maybe many don't *want* to be white?)

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More from @GeeDee215

6 Nov
It doesn’t make sense. A Black registered voter has a 90% chance of voting for Democrats. A Latino voter has a 70ish% chance of doing so. But a white voter has a <50% chance of doing so — and a white Republican way less than *that* — why not focus on Black and Brown turnout?
(Rhetorical question: it’s bc white ppl believe that things can only be legitimate if they center white people.)
The Democrats have not won a majority of the white vote since 1964, and have been obsessed w/ winning those voters back ever since.

Meanwhile, two youngest voting age cohorts, Millennials and Gen-Zers, are 45 and 49% nonwhite, respectively.
Read 7 tweets
6 Nov
Lol one of these people was an organizer who marched with King and the other adamantly opposed a holiday for King in AZ but okay
McCain voted against the 1990 Civil Rights act, a bill that made it easier for ppl to sue employers for discrimination.

The optics of GOP opposition were so bad — David Duke went to DC to cheer its failure in person — that GOP senators tried to override Bush’s veto of the bill.
Read 6 tweets
6 Nov
So much of the “conventional wisdom” espoused by pundits on CNN is just nakedly dumb and wrong

They were chocking up AZ trending blue to a revolt of suburban moms and Cindy McCain’s endorsement of Biden. So these moms rocked with Trump and Joe Arpaio but flipped bc of Cindy? 🤔
If white ladies were revolting against Trump in the traditionally red suburbs of AZ...wouldn’t they also be doing so else in the country?
As a few people pointed out to me yesterday, to the extent that the blue flip in Maricopa County was because of suburban moms, it was because those suburban moms are now *brown* and their energized kids have been doing work:

theintercept.com/2020/11/02/ari…
Read 5 tweets
4 Nov
again, Trump is only a viable candidate because of his overwhelming white support, up and down the income ladder and across generations.

white voters are the constant. if Trump lightly underperformed with white voters in, say, Florida, the map looks different.

But go off.
In Florida, one candidate won SIX in 10 white voters in a state where EIGHT in 10 people identify as white (including a LARGE number of Hispanic people).

It has the effect of overstating Trump's appeal to people who are...not white. Image
this was Ta-Nehisi in 2016. How different does any of this look *now*? Image
Read 7 tweets
4 Nov
Trump's WH bids have rested entirely on running up the score with white voters.

As Robert points out here, the fact that the Trump is unpopular among younger voters is not because younger white people don't rock with Trump – it's that younger gens are much browner.
Regardless of how this campaign turns out, this election is probably the last time that strategy is viable — the GOP is running out of white people.

nym.ag/3e3EkyD
Millennials and Gen-Zers are 45 and 49% POC.

"In 2024, the two younger gens are expected to equal the older ones as a share of actual voters on Election Day. And by 2028, Millennials and Gen Z will dwarf the older generations as a share of both eligible and actual voters."
Read 4 tweets
23 Oct
fuck it. i'm just sitting in this hospital waiting room killing time. let's do it, then.

as DA of SF, KH's signature reform program – she called it a "personal responsibility program," which pretty clearly illustrates the respectabilty thing — was called Back on Track.
to participate in BoT, which was meant to be divert people who had been arrested away from incarceration, people had to accept a plea deal. Harris underlined this a lot — she said we're not gonna pretend you're not a criminal, so you need to accept responsibility for your actions
the stipulation was: we'll expunge that felony conviction from your record once you complete BoT — which included job training, housing support, literacy help and other things — under supervision from the DA's office.

And BoT worked pretty well for the people who completed it.
Read 7 tweets

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