How we approach an issue is most often shaped by personal experiences and relationships. This point was driven home for me again by a letter to the editor in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, in response to Gregory Rodriguez’s recent column belittling a Senator’s proposal to exclude the undocumented from the 2010 Census:

I am a lifelong Republican who voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, but have always been concerned about dehumanizing our immigrant families and workers in the U.S.

I got involved with the Day Workers Center in Laguna Beach originally to get these day laborers out of our neighborhoods. But I have come to know many of the workers. They are hardworking, believers in family values, honest and bent on improving their lives.

They do pay taxes. They do try to get their children educated. They do contribute to our local economy. More important, they teach our Anglo children the meaning of diversity and respect for difference.

Rodriguez is right in insisting that we recognize our productive noncitizen families and workers — not just because they enhance our population for congressional representation and federal spending allocations but because they belong to our local communities.

Carl Schwarz

Aliso Viejo

This guy started out wanting to get rid of day laborers, but in getting to know them he realized they just wanted the same things he did. Wouldn’t it be great if more people would take a chance to get to know “those people” they put down so much? Maybe they’d realize they’re really just a lot like “us.”

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. Since 2006 we’ve been making a magazine, videos, and events for people who give a damn.

You can get a subscription to their magazine at any price you set, AND they donate that amount to a nonprofit of your choice (currently among 12 that they offer). It’s an interesting business model and, as the site claims, “an experiment.”

Because GOOD is independent, they can provide interesting, investigative reporting (of the variety that has virtually disappeared from traditional news media). One example of this is a current article “Death by Detention” (full disclosure: this article was written by my cousin Bill Wheeler), which tells the disturbing stories of people dying unnecessarily in immigrant detention in the U.S. Here’s an excerpt:

In September, 2006, a 50-year-old mechanic named Abdoulai Sall showed up for a green card interview in Fairfax, Virginia. Born in Guinea, Sall had spent the past 17 years working at Washington, D.C., taxi company, and his boss had agreed to sponsor his application. When he showed up at the interview, he was arrested on an outstanding deportation order and was transferred to the Piedmont Regional jail in Farmville.

Sall’s attorney, Paul S. Allen, wrote numerous letters to authorities warning them his client suffered a kidney disorder, that he was not getting the appropriate medication, and that his feet had begun to swell. “I don’t make assumptions that the government is going to do the right thing,” he said recently.

In December of that year, Allen learned his client was dead. Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, wrote to detainees at the Piedmont jail for information about Sall’s death and learned he had indeed been sick for a prolonged period and, in his final days, was seen shivering under a heater for warmth. “Everyone knew that he was requesting care,” said Jawetz. When Sall collapsed, the detainees took it upon themselves to call 911.

If we can’t even provide adequate health care and safety for those in our prisons, what does that say about our society? Check out the article and the website; they’re good.

More precisely, the most recent cover story of The Atlantic asks the provocative question of whether we are witnessing “The End of White America?” It is a timely question and something worth reflecting on. The thrust of this article is that culturally, “whiteness” (be it defined by the privileged class of The Great Gatsby or the rural working class of NASCAR) has lost out to a multiculturalism as expressed through hip-hop music, and that demographically, the U.S. is headed toward a future not dominated by whites.

So, what exactly do we mean by “white” in this context? The most obvious component is skin color, and those of us with exclusively, or mostly, European ancestry – and in my case pretty much limited to the British Isles as far as we know – are typically referred to as white today. This ignores, of course, the fact that at different parts of the history of our country, Jews, Italians and even the Irish were not considered white, although they are today. Generally, whiteness has signified privilege, at least socially if not economically (e.g. even poor whites enjoyed the right to vote or ride in the front of the bus at the expense of African Americans or other groups). As Sociologists tell us, race is socially constructed, meaning that its definitions change and adapt over time, something that is critical to remember in any discussion about race.

As to The Atlantic article’s second point that by sheer demographics, we are becoming less white, that is certainly true, but we still don’t know how this will change how we view race in the future. The dominant black-white paradigm is still very real because of the sad history of slavery and discrimination in our country, but this paradigm has been disrupted over recent decades by the rapid increase in the numbers of Latinos and Asians across the country. (By the way, when I use “race” here I include “ethnicity” which is what the U.S. Census Bureau uses for Hispanic or Latino groups. If you’re interested in more info, go here). In Los Angeles, for example, Latinos represent about half of the population, while whites are less than a third, while Asian Pacific Islanders are about 13% and African Americans about 9%. Whites are a majority in most of the country today, but demographic projections from the Census Bureau indicate that no group will be the majority by 2042.

Now that we’ve elected an African American President, should any of these distinctions matter? Well, no and yes. On the one hand, it would certainly be nice to realize Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a society where his children will “not be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and Obama’s election is hopefully a step in that direction. However, we clearly have a long way to go. When we analyze almost any socioeconomic condition by race, whites clearly tend to enjoy much better conditions than other racial groups. (Asians are in many cases on par with, or even, surpass whites, though that sometimes masks low socioeconomic conditions of some southeast Asian groups). Racial differences are very real and will not disappear over night, and those of us from the privileged group need to acknowledge that fact and work to rectify it.

Clearly, poverty and inequality don’t discriminate and can afflict anyone from any racial group. Our conceptions of race and identity are shifting and will continue to do so as our population becomes even more diverse and bi- or multi-racial. So, are we witnessing the end of White America? Perhaps demographically and even culturally, but unless we create a society truly based on equality we risk replacing “whiteness” with just another construct of privilege, with stark divisions between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”