Dana Milbank - Our diversity is our edge
WASHINGTON — The unfriendly airwaves of talk radio this week gave us an inadvertently revealing moment.
Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a Republican immigration hard-liner and part of what The Wall Street Journal just branded “the GOP's Deportation Caucus,” was giving his retort to the paper's pro-business editorialists on Laura Ingraham's radio show Monday: “They need to be patriots, and they need to think about America first,” Brooks said.
America First? How 1940! The congressman went on to condemn those who say the Republican position on immigration is dooming the party by alienating Latinos. “This is a part of the war on whites that's being launched by the Democratic Party,” Brooks said. “And the way in which they're launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It's a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare.”
It was the battle cry of the white man, particularly the Southern white man, feeling besieged. I don't share the fear, but I understand it. The United States is experiencing a rapid decoupling of race and nationality: Whiteness has less and less to do with being American. The Census Bureau forecasts that non-Hispanic whites, now slightly more than 60 percent of the population, will fall below 50 percent in 2043. Within 30 years, there will cease to be a racial majority in the United States. In a political sense, this is bad news for the GOP. But for the country, the disassociation of whiteness and American-ness is to be celebrated. Indeed, it is the key to our survival.
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http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20140807/OPINION04/140809449/Our-diversity-is-our-edge-
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