The Great Christmas of '20

It's a difficult thought to express. After all, this is a season of grief for many people and one of cruel suffering or crushing work for many others. The thought here is only appropriate as a sort of greeting among all whose burden is limited to disappointment, inconvenience, boredom, or loneliness. Where the holiday imagery is not universal, please understand that the spirit is.

Through the first half of the twentieth century and into the second, the Great Snow of '88 was a touchstone of shared experience, then a generational boast, and ultimately a running joke among Americans. By the time "'88" could mean something other than 1888, even the joke had become a mark of advancing years.

The snow wasn't funny when it blew in. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us of a

winter storm that pummeled the Atlantic coast of the United States, from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, in March 1888. The blizzard caused more than $20 million in property damage in New York City alone and killed more than 400 people, including about 100 seamen, across the eastern seaboard.

In later years, though, there were many who could look back on it as a scene of sublime terror giving way to great adventures and prized hardships: being stranded in the impromptu society of strangers on a snowbound train or in a shop; coming and going by an upper-story window of your house because the first story -- or two -- had been snowed in. Walking ever so many miles to school through a trackless white wilderness. The Great Snow generation had memories far out of the ordinary.

When all is said and done, ordinary winters beat extraordinary ones. A holiday season without the hardships of a pandemic is the kind we want, really. But when life gives you lemons, the thing to do is whip up an eggnog of a different flavor. We may not quite relish the thing itself, but we'll relish the memory of it. The feeling will become recondite knowledge, a lost chord of piquancy that can never be reproduced. What, exactly, will we have to hold in mind, and how will we hold it?

The memory starts putting itself into words even now. "In the year 2020, something extraordinary happened all over the world. I was caught up in it. Those were strange times, and this is how I got through them. When I was away from home, I wore a mask and kept my distance from other people. We did such things for the common good. At home, I kept myself company (if one was all alone). I returned gratefully to the old sense of recreation. And when the dark year-end days wore on without festivities or friends, I put on another pot of coffee and took down another book."

People of Flesh and Blood

Free the POC millions! Spring them from that cellblock cunningly marked "people of color" to keep us from seeking particular human beings there.

For Americans, this period following the elections of 2020 is the best chance yet to end the misconceived aggregation of ethnic identities into a notional superminority. Ethnic identity is itself a veil traditionally drawn across myriad and varied personal worlds. The construct "people of color" (POC) carries depersonalization to an unsustainable extreme. Though the phrase goes back multiple centuries, through multiple good intentions, it holds a place in the lexicon today because it serves two ends: political coalition-building and rhetorical leverage.

By rhetorical leverage I mean the effect achieved when a writer begins a discourse with "As a person of color, I..." rather than, say, "As a Polynesian, I...." It fills the mental frame with an impressive cross-sectional wall of supporters like those seen behind politicians at rallies. It maximizes the essay's claim on our attention and places the essayist among the voices of a vast constituency. Individuals who want to make "people of color" work for them can do so in this way.

But the main use of the POC construct is coalition-building. In principle, it does make sense for minority groups to join forces. The use of the words “people of color” was once a code for solidarity with black Americans. It served to reinforce the 13% of the population that had historically suffered under slavery and Jim Crow with peers for whom the racial burden might be no heavier than the annoyance of stereotyping. However, a coalition is implicitly a transactional thing; and a coalition that rests on an artificial formulation cannot long stand.

The formulation "people of color" is artificial. Though people of various races share the one attribute of being non-white (which is barely even an attribute), they share no POC history. No POC cultural heritage, no POC language code, no POC food for the soul. Such things, which exist only for traditional groups, are bound to exert a differentiating influence until the very concepts of race and ethnicity lose currency. White progressives tend to overlook that influence. Activists of any hue may depreciate it in their enthusiasm for scaled-up politics. Many of the people being scaled up, however, remain alive to it and correspondingly dead to their supposed bond with other members of the coalition.

The illusory nature of a solidly progressive POC bloc became apparent in the results of the recent elections, which were disappointing for Democrats below the presidential level. Jay Caspian Kang of The New York Times Magazine subsequently wrote on the Times Op-Ed page,

In the past, antiracist messages relied on categorizations like Asian-American, Latino and the umbrella of “people of color.” All three are abstractions that have little grounding in the everyday lives of immigrants. My uncle, who has lived in Los Angeles for 40 years, might now understand in a purely taxonomic sense that he is “Asian,” but he would laugh at the idea of “people of color.” His interactions with his fellow “people of color” have mostly come in kitchens where he works as a chef and speaks a hybrid Korean-Spanish with his Latino co-workers.

As Kang reminds us in passing, even the original category “Asian” is bloodless nonsense. If we hadn’t grown up with the geographical concept of Asia, we’d recognize that it’s wildly broad and arbitrary. We use it because, once upon a time, someone (perhaps Herodotus) started using such a term for the land just across the Aegean Sea from Greece, and over the years Europeans came to let it stand for more and more territory east of that. Now we passively imagine an “Asia” that stretches over an immense range of latitudes and longitudes (but curiously stops in the middle of a landmass), peopled by “Asians” who exhibit no unity of race, language, religion, traditional economy, or culture. As in other parts of the Old World, there’s historically no love lost between neighboring ethnic groups. If their offspring in the US know any communality, it’s that which lies in the “American” part of “Asian-American”. To plead for the “Asian” part is to pay tribute to the ultimate Eurocentric conceit.

It may seem that giving up the term “Asia” would mean losing the one good shorthand we have for denoting a certain region of the world, but we need to remind ourselves that there is no such region and start taking the trouble to deal with discrete realities. We must liberate a multitude of people from our conception of them as Asians. So it is with “Latinos”. So it is, above all, with “people of color”, a formulation that carries breadth and arbitrariness to an extreme.

The term “of color” has a certain appeal as a noble substitute for the negative “non-white”, but both terms become odious when we recognize them as identity thieves and insults to our intelligence. They presuppose a distinct "white" set of people who share a certain experience of whiteness and consequently enviable status. Against this they posit a residual set of people who must, if they are to function as a political interest group, possess something approaching a shared experience of color and consequently unenviable status. But they don’t. Their diversity in appearance, consciousness, lived experience, and status is as great as that of “Asians”. They’re not going to coalesce except in pipe smoke.

The 2020 election results are only the most quantifiable evidence that the POC experiment must fail. We were already seeing signs of a revolt against identity-pooling by black Americans, or at least by activists among them. Far from expanding their political community to encompass non-black non-whites, they had begun to subdivide it between those blacks with roots running through slavery and those without. Vertical heritage is asserting itself against lateral coalition-building.

The apparent sacrifice of numerical strength that comes with the idea of discarding the POC category is not a real sacrifice. In the first place, the trend in the US population to a non-white majority is hardly more epoch-making than the Millennium Bug of 2000. As for political outcomes, it might have been guessed even before the 2020 elections that people would not necessarily vote their skin color. As for economic power and social influence, any shift as a result of demographic change ought to be so gradual that it could be overtaken by a decline in the significance of racial identity. After all, whites will not one day become a beleaguered minority. They will simply go from being a majority of the population to being the largest single category and then, perhaps, to being the second largest for years to come. Nor will power and privilege necessarily change hands in any ordained way.

In the second place, the vision of a superminority -- destined to become a majority -- of people united by non-whiteness is necessarily a mirage. Those members of the constituent minorities who value racial identity will prefer the thick kind to the thin. Those who devalue it will be altogether lost for purposes of aggregation. Minority people will tend to merge with the more advantaged elements of the population when possible, and not linger in the ranks of "people of color" for the sake of grim solidarity. Even now I strongly suspect that at the end of each day, when all the public talking has been done and people retire into their private lives, the words "people of color" mean the most to white progressives. As for their own place in the shifting kaleidoscope of colors, the Harvard geneticist David Reich (cited in a New Yorker article by Douglas Preston) has found

that as recently as eight thousand years ago there were at least four distinct groups of Europeans, as genetically different from one another as the British are from the Chinese today, some with brown skin color. As he put it in an e-mail, "'White people' simply didn’t exist ~8,000 years ago."

POC partisans' triumphalist heralding of demographic revolution in recent years alarmed many white Americans and smoothed the way for a demagogue while distracting people in the liberal spectrum from genuine sources of strength. Shared rhetoric is not shared consciousness. Coalitions are not bonds. Color is not destiny. The most reliable allies are not identified by racial origin, but by moral destination. Your closest political kin are the like-minded.

So free all the people of flesh and blood. Set loose all the minds. Dissolve the biological bars, and discover the ties that benignly bind. Let there be politics.