[Rerun] Embracing our inner mudblood

Originally published November 2023

Picture of my brood when they were younger, like all of my pictures of them

When Jim Fallows interviewed me a while back, we spoke at length about White fears of “replacement,” displacement, loss of privilege, etc. He recalled his own SoCal youth, in counterpoint to my own all-White small-town beginnings in rural Wisconsin, noting that it was about 60-40 Whites/Latinos there. Having grown up with such diversity, he said he was later astounded, when, as an Atlantic writer, he saw the magazine fear-mongering in print, when, in the early 1980s, Californian Whites descended into majority-minority status — a scary harbinger of an uncertain future! As he remembered, it was no big thing locally or for him personally because it was pretty much an already/always thing.

I countered with my favorite story of my 23-year-old White son, who was essentially born into national White majority-minority status in 2000 and has progressed each year with that unfolding and spreading reality. It means nothing to him because it has always been so. Jerry also grew up in a household with two non-straight siblings and three non-White immigrant sisters. They say every kid grows up thinking that the world is exactly like their family, and so Jerome navigates this reality with aplomb — almost disinterest. Arguing against it would seem like arguing against gravity. To him, it simply is.

Jerry putting up with me at Ford Field in Detroit for Thanksgiving game we won

My wife and I now live in a small town in Ohio (Yellow Springs), where the diversity of its inhabitants approaches that of the nation right now. I have lived in integrated neighborhoods before (mostly out East), but this place relaxes me like no other. Vonne and I are down to our two youngest, Metsuwat and Abebu, biological sisters we adopted from Ethiopia 13 years ago. It matters a lot to them to live in a town where they don’t stick out, and where people don’t find them unusual — much less threatening. [Both were told repeatedly to “go back to Africa” by plenty of their classmates in south-central Wisconsin (the Madison suburbs) when Trump was elected in 2016.]

While rural Ohio is very red, Yellow Springs is famous for its enduring hippie vibe — and Dave Chapelle, of course. Our little island of diversity and woke Blueness feels like a haven …

Until a few nights ago when a troubled young White man walked into our next-town-over Walmart looking to kill some Blacks, or so it would seem from his Nazi-infused personal library/collection later discovered. He shot a couple of Black women, along with two Whites, and then killed himself.

I have repeatedly run the scenario over in my head, naturally, given how often we go there to shop (weekly), and I have to admit, my first thought in response would have been that any shooter would naturally be targeting my two kids before me — that somebody in that moment would instinctively want them both dead for no other reason than their skin color.

We can’t really know the shooter’s mental state. My spouse has spent many years as a social worker tending to people with severe mental illness and she will tell you they walk among us in significant numbers — often self-medicating to disastrous effect. I witnessed the same as a taxi driver years back. As a society we’re getting better on that score (at least in terms of societal awareness) but there is tons more to do.

What’s more threatening here (besides merging the mental health crisis with all those guns) is the growing choice of so many young White males to not only go out with a bang (suicide as endgame) but to take as many non-Whites with them as they can. To me, it feels very similar to radical Muslim suicide bombers — just with automatic weaponry: people finding purpose and fulfillment in the murder of “infidels” and mudbloods and “others” of various sorts.

This growing sense of hatred of “others” within the US, as I argue in America’s New Map, is but a microcosm of how America in general feels about globalization: in both instances there is a sense of an American creation being “poisoned” by “others.” Whites are heading to majority-minority status in the US (2044) and the future of globalization, in terms of consumption that drives tastes and markets, is overwhelmingly non-White, non-American, non-European, and non-Western.

Naturally, plenty of American Whites see inherent “chaos” in such things — even the end of the world. Trump tapped into those fears, and recently he’s turned to feeding it right back to his base without any attempt to dog-whistle-disguise them: these people are “poisoning” our nation’s “blood” and he will “crush” them all when he returns to power.

Also in both instances this racial turnabout seems to have come out of the blue — just suddenly realized and thus deeply animating in its fear-spreading. For example, until very recently globalization was viewed the world over as Americanization or at least Westernization. Nobody really argues that line anymore, do they?

Back inside America, I can remember Vonne attending a social-worker conference on “White Privilege” in Madison a decade ago. I was like, Huh? What is that? What does that mean? Fast forward a bit: thanks to the 1619 Project (brilliant podcast), Black Lives Matter, etc., that controversial concept is everywhere, leading hard-right Whites to declare anti-whiteness the new racism.

Thus, when I contemplate a Trumpian Restoration, it is indeed unnerving. Half my kids are non-White immigrants, 1/3rd are LGBTQ. My extended family has Jews, Muslims, liberal Christians, Turks, Latinos, Chinese, non-binary, atheists … even Bears Fans!

It’s hard not to feel like there are a lot of Americans out there who are none-too-subtly attracted to the Gotterdammerung mindset of White Christian Nationalism, to include a hard-right Catholic dominated Supreme Court intent of establishing some sort of religious-law makeover of the Constitution. Thus, I can find no refuge right now in the faith of my upbringing. I can admire Pope Francis for what he’s trying to accomplish, but American Catholicism leaves me feeling decidedly on the outside. I have too many family members inherently unacceptable to the Church as presently defined. I simply don’t feel like I belong there anymore — like so many other Americans ditching organized religion right now (only after having all six of ours confirmed, mind you, so the instinct remains strong).

I don’t really have any punchline here. Sundays I tend to worry about the world and America in general and so I pen this to simply work it out of my head before watching a nice rom-com or sci-fi thriller with my wife and kids. I write because I have to, otherwise I don’t sleep.

I might also blame it on the lack of a Packer game today.

I have been in the save-the-world business my entire life. I was brought up on Jesus and it just struck me as natural: the man died for humanity’s sins, so what are you planning to contribute, young fella?

I wrote America’s New Map primarily to draw a line between these two fears: Whites fearing America’s inevitable future and Americans fearing globalization’s inevitable future. In my mind, they are highly interrelated, cut of same fear-cloth, and, in their combination, devastating in their negative impact on our nation’s democracy and our ability to continue serving as a global leader during an era of immense world-structural change (climate change, demographic aging, ascendancy of a global majority middle class).

I will admit that I felt like a lost soul across most of the 2010s, for a variety of reasons to include the reality that that decade comprised my fifties (as in, midlife crisis time).

Two things saved me: first was my spouse pushing us to adopt three girls internationally following our having three kids the old-fashioned way. [Yes, I will admit that alcohol and sex were involved in all six instances of decision-making, or what passes as my conscious decision-making in such things.] This was always Vonne’s intense desire and it was only very recently that she gave up on trying to find #4. I went along because I am the 8th of nine kids in my family of origin, so a big family strikes me as highly natural, however achieved. We also realized, when looking at our intense and multi-year fight with our firstborn’s pediatric cancer, that both of us had an intense need to relive that crisis journey by “saving” young girls roughly the same age as Emily was when she fell ill (two-years-old). [That’s the noble telling of our decision to adopt; the simpler and truest version is that we’re greedy when it comes to kids and that we adopted all three to satisfy our own personal needs as much or more than to “save” anybody.]

All that introspection aside, adopting girls from Asia and Africa made me feel like a citizen of the world, so to speak, despite my intense Americanism (this country is my religion). It also kept me in kids-at-home parenting mode throughout my midlife crisis, and that was intensely sustaining until Scott Williams and Throughline came along with the idea of what became America’s New Map. By rekindling my desire to write (returning to that life-long addiction), Scott and Company got me back in the saving-America/the-world mode, where I am happiest and thus most mentally robust.

So where am I going with all this?

Nowhere really. I guess I’m just gearing up for Monday.

And that’s reason enough.