Tomorrow People

According to polls, it was not until the election of Barack Obama that positive ratings for the U.S. returned to their pre-Iraq war level. A Pew Research survey conducted in May-June of 2009 found a dramatic improvement in America’s overall image. Countries from Kenya, Pakistan, Indonesia and even European countries like Great Britain and Sweden expressed more confidence in Obama as president than in his predecessor George W. Bush. And at the other end of the spectrum, social scientists such as those at the Habari Network wondered if the Obama Effect would extend to the value assigned to black men. After all, Obama was the product of a black man and a white woman. He had defied the odds to become the most powerful man in a country of white people. Our overall question was: Would Obama’s presidency bring forth a new generation of mixed children? Was it plausible to think that despite what a great many black and white families had said to their children, it was acceptable to marry a different race?

This editorial is written with three things in mind: According to The Economist, if you are a college-educated black woman with a good job and you wish to marry a black man who is your socioeconomic equal, the odds are not good. Closely related to this, we wonder why black women do not end up with white men so that they can have some tomorrow people. This concept of ‘tomorrow people’ is not about the British television show or about Ziggy Marley’s song. Tomorrow people are children born of black people and other races: blacks with white; with Asians; and every one else in between including Latinos. The point to all this is that tomorrow people could be the key to ending racism. If as many people had interactions with people of color, children of color, then tomorrow, color – especially the black skin – would not be so ‘frowned upon.’ Stanford University’s Michael Rosenfield postulates that when you have the ’other’ in your own family, it’s hard to think of them as ’other’ anymore; and this could be a good thing with the blurring of the old racial lines which were artificial in the first place. Besides, if the stigma of racism was put to the side, black women would not have to deal with the fact that a great many eligible bachelors are not so eligible since they are mostly in jail. The Economist article mentioned above provides inkling into this. Take a look and let it make sense to you.

The third aspect is the most important: People’s attitudes to interracial dating are, perhaps, the best indicator or whether we are moving towards a post racial society or not. Surveys taken from 1986 show that the number of people against interracial dating have gone up ever since Obama’s presidency in 2009. Michael Esler argues that the heightened cognitive association between Democrats and African- Americans could open the door for a renewed role of overtly racist attitudes in white Americans. This may, thus, work against the hope that tomorrow people will grow in numbers. This same study shows that because of Obama, the tension between whites and blacks could stop being the politically correct nuance of inadvertent segregation. It might end up into full blown status as the anti Obama cult.

Conversely, it was only 45 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states. Since that landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. It might shock any people of color that a university in South Carolina only dropped its ban on interracial dating in 2000; and yet a year later, 40% of the voters objected when Alabama became the last state to remove a no-longer-enforceable ban on interracial marriages from its constitution.

From an intellectual standpoint, there’s no doubt that interracial dating has its challenges. Many children, like Obama attests, are harassed at school and ostracized in society. This still happens today. Contrariwise, the fact is that humanity is best served when it is free to follow its nature. As long as a woman and a man – or even same sex couples – make the decision to be together, no one – including the church and state – should have the power to come between them. And this goes for parents, relatives, friends and race-mates too. Love is already hard, as it were. Why make it difficult for people that just want to share their lives simply because their skin colors are different?

Dennis Matanda,
Editor – [email protected]