Like virtually all works of historical writing, Amy Chua’s “Day of Empire” has more to do with the present than the past, and more to do with the writer’s own society than with its purported objects of study, which range from the Persian Empire to the Tang Dynasty of imperial China and the 17th century Dutch Republic.
Chua is a professor at Yale Law School whose 2002 bestseller, “World on Fire,” offered compelling evidence of the devastation inflicted on the developing world in the name of economic globalization. In particular, Chua effectively demolished the myth that so-called free markets breed democracy and progressive social change. “Day of Empire” derives from a similar impulse to resist widespread and potentially dominant dogmas of the day — in this case, not the dogmas of neoliberal economists but those of neoconservative foreign-policy wizards and their allies.
You certainly can’t complain that Chua’s book lacks breadth or ambition. In fewer than 350 pages, she tries to survey the history of imperial “hyperpowers” — beginning with Cyrus the Great of Persia in 550 B.C. and passing through Rome, China, the Mongol Empire, medieval Spain, Holland, the British Empire and Nazi Germany, with a few other stops on the road to post-9/11 America.
Meanwhile, like some knight errant in a legendary romance, she must fight off not one but two fearsome monsters along the way. On one flank, Chua struggles to spear the clanking pseudo-pragmatist argument put forward by historian Niall Ferguson and neocon think-tanker Max Boot, among others — and all but explicitly adopted by the Bush administration — that the United States must embrace its imperial mission and civilize the globe, by force if necessary. On the other, she seeks to banish the hollow-eyed specter of a paranoid, xenophobic society, seeking to protect its “national identity” and core “Anglo-Protestant” values, in the words of Samuel Huntington, with border fences, immigration crackdowns and English-only laws.
One of the central points in “Day of Empire” is that the positions thus represented, while they may sometimes be held by the same people, are not compatible. If Chua’s reading of history is correct, imperial powers have universally thrived by accepting and accommodating cultural diversity, at least in relative terms. On the other hand, when imperial societies have turned inward, closed themselves off from the outside world and retreated into ethnic or cultural chauvinism, the end was generally in sight. Indeed, she finds in history near-inevitable progress from monster A to monster B: Nations rise to global hegemony by being extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant, but such imperial expansion eventually reaches a tipping point, triggering internal conflict and xenophobia, which leads to imperial decline.
Chua clearly wants to argue that the United States should put down the white man’s burden, abandon any imperial ambitions and back gradually away from its anguished, perched-on-the-precipice position as the world’s sole hyperpower (which admittedly hasn’t gone so well lately). Being a “mere superpower” in a multipolar century, potentially counterbalanced by the European Union, Russia and China, she suggests, may be a better prescription for longevity. Of course, she also wants to argue against nativism, isolationism and chauvinism, and draws appealingly on her own experiences as the American-born daughter of Filipino-Chinese immigrants.
Like much of Chua’s down-with-Bush, out-of-Iraq audience, I’m inclined to agree with both of these positions. That doesn’t make them necessarily connected; it’s perfectly possible to hold one view without the other. Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, for example, might all share the “liberal” notion that America’s global predominance is intimately linked to our ever-shifting national tapestry of ethnicity, race and religion — and that to embrace the first you must embrace the second. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, on the other hand, would like to retreat from hegemony, bring our troops home from Iraq (and anywhere else they happen to be at the moment) and let the Middle East sort out its own problems — while expelling illegal immigrants and slamming down an iron curtain along the Mexican border.
As Democratic presidential candidates are reportedly, and uncomfortably, discovering on the campaign trail, anti-immigrant fervor is not restricted to the right wing. It may be an irrational response to economic anxiety, but it is real, persistent and evidently immune to arguments about the price of restaurant meals or supermarket lettuce. (Paul remains the longest of long shots as a Republican candidate, but he’s pretty much the only contender in either party who’s telling Middle American voters exactly what they want to hear on both immigration and Iraq.)
In this context — a nation waging a failing and cripplingly expensive overseas war while internally destabilized by acrimonious debate — Chua’s appeal to an alternate vision of the U.S. as “a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism and moral force” seems like a wistful glance into the rear-view mirror rather than a look at the road ahead.
“Day of Empire” is a lively read, full of intriguing factoids and persuasive rhetoric, and the potential applicability of its case histories to America’s current quandary, at least, is clear enough. Chua works hard not to oversimplify her encapsulated imperial histories, making clear, for instance, that the “tolerance” and “diversity” of the Achaemenid Persian Empire were instrumental methods of subjugating and absorbing conquered peoples, a long way from any modern conceptions of human rights or international law. Still, under Cyrus and his successor Darius the Great, the Achaemenid court became the most cosmopolitan place the world had yet seen, bringing together “Egyptian doctors, Greek scientists and Babylonian astronomers.” (At its peak, Darius’ realm extended as far east as India and as far west as the Danube River.) Local laws, customs and religions were widely tolerated — most famously, Cyrus freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at his own expense — just as long as taxes and tribute kept flowing.
Apparently the empire’s “official” languages included Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Lydian and Lycian (take that, English-only campaigners!), although Darius probably couldn’t read any of them. Like most subsequent empires, Chua contends, the Achaemenid dynasty came unstuck for the simplest of reasons: It lacked adequate social and political “glue.” “No common religion, language or culture bound the sprawling empire together,” she writes; the Persians offered no conception of imperial identity or citizenship to conquered peoples, who were assumed to be innately inferior. Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians went right on being Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians under tolerant Persian rule, and when Darius’ son Xerxes and his successors apparently turned cruel and intolerant — demolishing Egyptian cities and despoiling Athenian shrines, according to some reports — “the distinct peoples … eventually turned on the empire itself.”
In many ways, the Persian Empire is the cleanest and clearest instance of Chua’s repeated historical narrative — an empire is built on widespread tolerance, then crumbles when imperial glue melts under the heat of internal conflict — which makes me a little suspicious, since it’s also the case furthest away in history and the one about which scholars know the least. She dispenses with the Roman Empire in 29 pages and the British Empire in 38, making essentially the same points about both: New and highly effective ideas about glue were pioneered, whether this meant the Roman notion of widespread male citizenship or the British idea of empowering an English-speaking and English-educated elite; but in the long haul their dominions were torn apart by ethnic or religious bigotry and infighting.
Chua isn’t a historian, and spends too much time apologizing for that fact. But she does have a keen eye for the telling detail in these truncated, scattershot accounts. If the Romans viewed nearly all foreigners as barbarians in need of civilizing, there is no evidence that they viewed skin color — what we would today call race — as important in any way. (Why would they? The light-skinned people they encountered in northern Europe were probably more primitive, on the whole, than the dark-skinned people they met in southern countries.) At least one emperor, Septimius Severus, was born in North Africa, and the son of a Berber tribesman from modern-day Algeria grew up to become Quintius Lollius Urbicus, governor of Britain and finally city prefect of Rome.
She also notes that the English-Scottish union of 1707 helped launch the British Empire’s global reach, by enabling the Crown to divert the formidable entrepreneurial, intellectual and warlike energies of the impoverished people on England’s northern frontier to new projects all over the world. And Chua is absolutely right that Britain’s failure to successfully absorb another neighboring people (the Irish) presaged the “racial and ethnic arrogance” that fatally undermined British rule in India, proverbial jewel in the imperial crown. In what I’m afraid is probably a typical overcondensation, however, she boils the Anglo-Irish relationship down to a single issue (religious bigotry), when the truth — if there’s any truth to be found in 800 tormented and incestuous years of history — is quite a bit more complicated.
I was excited to read Chua’s bite-size accounts of other imperial civilizations about which I know next to nothing. She acerbically discusses the Tang Dynasty, which presided over the most prosperous, powerful and accomplished age of the world’s most xenophobic major nation — and was founded in the 7th century by Taizong, a northern warlord of mixed Chinese and Turkish ancestry. Once the religious and ethnic tolerance epitomized by Taizong and the later Ming Huang were abandoned in subsequent centuries, Chua argues, imperial China slipped into a long, slow, inward-looking decline that left it culturally and technologically far behind the West.
She’s also fascinating on the subject of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the “cosmopolitan barbarians” who thrived on adopting the best elements of every culture they came across, and who, despite lacking any science, engineering, agriculture or written language of their own, conquered Baghdad, Belgrade, Moscow and Damascus. For that matter, Chua does a nice job of summarizing the story of the Dutch Republic, which became a commercial (but never military) superpower almost overnight by welcoming Jews and Protestants who had been driven out of many other European countries by religious persecution — along with their money.
But how far do you have to twist the definition before the Netherlands, a tiny European country that as late as 1579 was ruled directly by the Spanish crown, becomes an imperial “hyperpower”? Without question, the 17th century Dutch Republic played an enormous role in spreading capitalism to every available corner of the globe. It was probably the richest nation in the world — shopkeepers were said to clothe their wives in silk, satin and jewels — and because of that also the best educated and the most liberal. Women had extraordinary freedom. Clerical strictures on vice and pleasure were widely ignored. Amsterdam became a center of artistic and intellectual life; if Rembrandt and Vermeer were Dutch by birth, Descartes, Spinoza and John Locke all settled there.
One could add that Holland enjoyed all this prosperity precisely because it perfected the art of buying and selling, and never tried to conquer the world militarily. Indeed, the principal Dutch military venture of this period brought an end to whatever superpower status it briefly held. In 1688, the Dutch nobleman William of Orange invaded England and usurped the British throne from King James II, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. By transplanting the Dutch navy, its Sephardic Jewish financiers and a talent pool of skilled workers to London — along with, as Chua puts it, the Dutch “business model” of welcoming immigrants and religious minorities — William laid the foundation for the rise of a genuine hyperpower.
What’s wrong with “Day of Empire” isn’t so much that Chua gets the details wrong sometimes, makes dubious arguments or oversimplifies her case studies, although I bet that happens more times than I’ve been able to identify. It’s something more ambiguous, something harder to pin down. It seems to me that her ideas about history — what it is, what it does and the kinds of lessons it can offer us — are themselves a little simplistic.
In her introduction, she discusses the potential risks of “selection bias,” the tendency in social science to choose only examples that support one’s existing thesis, but her entire book is about selecting data points from wildly different times and places and cramming them into a one-size-fits-all interpretation. It isn’t that she’s wrong in observing that the Achaemenids, Romans, Tang Chinese and British built long-lasting empires by accommodating diversity in various ways and to various degrees, while the opposite approach (viz., Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) has proven strikingly unsuccessful. But that observation doesn’t tell you anything except that empires, like polar bears and elephants, tend to be large and dangerous things.
Any graduate of a third-rate business school can draw up a PowerPoint display to convince you that organizations will be judged on how they manage complexity. On the other side of Chua’s coin, anybody who wasn’t stoned during high-school physics can tell you that all systems of energy eventually decay into entropy. It’s only half facetious to say that she assembles a miscellaneous mass of more or less intriguing evidence to support those two ideas, on the way toward a brief and interesting chapter that sways from optimism to fatalism and back again while discussing the U.S. and its current dilemma.
As Chua reluctantly admits, the examples of high imperial history — the Romans, the British, the Tang — have little to do with the present case. Pluralistic to its core yet perennially plagued by nativist hatred, the United States has become a combination of the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled by military force but made no effort to “Persianize” its subjects, and the Dutch Republic, which employed internal policies of immigration and toleration to build a commercial powerhouse that bought chocolate low and sold it high. Presumably, the U.S. could defeat any other nation in open military conflict — something America’s opponents are now savvy enough to avoid — and despite mounting national debt and a massive trade imbalance, it remains the world’s largest economic power.
Unlike the Roman and British empires, the American imperium so ardently desired by Ferguson, Boot and others has little to offer the rest of the world beyond a cultural and ideological bill of goods that is viewed with increasing suspicion. It’s a new kind of empire facing an old problem: not enough glue. Pax-Americana advocates may be eager to invade all kinds of vastly smaller nations, but the last thing they want is to extend U.S. citizenship to Iraqis or Iranians or North Koreans or Venezuelans. Inviting the best students from those countries here to study might have been acceptable in the flush years after World War II, but something tells me that wouldn’t go over big right now.
Instead, our decrepit colossus lumbers around the world feeling unloved, bearing freedom’s cup in one hand and an M16 rifle in the other. But the cup is made of plastic and came free with a BK Double. The American promise of a blend of democracy and capitalism that could make the whole world America-like is hardly taken seriously by anyone anymore, and it’s only Americans, cosseted by a soft ‘n’ squishy mountain of consumer debt and buffeted by wall-to-wall media coverage of Britney’s latest indiscretion, who don’t know it.
Do we seriously believe the world hasn’t noticed that American democracy has been eaten out from within, like a cotton boll infested with weevils, and that American consumer capitalism, cruel as it can be, bears almost no resemblance to the “free markets” inflicted on the developing world? After surveying the global wave of anti-Americanism that flowed from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the xenophobic post-9/11 backlash within the U.S., Chua concludes that transforming the country into “an aggressively militaristic hyperpower” would be massively costly both in human and financial terms, “without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past.”
That’s a fine conclusion as far as it goes. Chua’s mistake, I believe, is to assume — naively, after all the reading she’s done — that political leaders in 21st century America still possess the will, the ability or even the power to stop the inexorable process of imperial decay.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
This month, a federal judge in New York dealt a blow to “stop-and-frisk,” a policy that resulted in 685,000 recorded police stops in 2011. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were African American and Latino, mostly youths.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin granted class-action certification to a stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The plaintiffs allege that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy regularly violates the Constitution by illegally stopping and searching scores of people belonging to a particular demographic — black and Latino. Pending the city’s appeal, the class-action ruling will put stop-and-frisk on trial.
Plaintiffs in Floyd et al. vs City of New York also argue that they were stopped by police who did not have the legally necessary “reasonable suspicion” that they had committed or were going to commit a crime. What’s more, the suit alleges, police often performed frisks, but not because they saw a bulge they suspected to be a weapon, another legal requirement.
In her written decision, Scheindlin said the alleged constitutional violations result not from the actions of rogue officers, but from a policy handed down from the very top. “The stop-and-frisk program is centralized and hierarchical,” said Scheindlin. “Those stops were made pursuant to a policy that is designed, implemented and monitored by the NYPD’s administration.”
Scheindlin’s ruling cites “overwhelming evidence” — a spike in stop-and-frisks and the NYPD’s own words — indicating that at the “highest levels of the department” police are enforcing a policy that leaves behind a trail of daily injustices.
For years, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have used distortions and misinformation to promote and justify a policy that violates the constitutional rights of those who were stopped. Now, the Scheindlin findings have exposed the NYPD game for what it is, an illegal system of quotas and racial profiling imposed on field police from the top of the NYPD.
“Suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin wrote in her decision, adding that, “Defendants’ cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” Stop-and-frisk, which the data shows is a form of racial profiling, violates not only the Fourth Amendment — protection from unreasonable searches — but also the 14th Amendment, which includes the equal protection clause, the plaintiffs charge.
The Scheindlin decision was informative and comprehensive, including a number of important facts and observations. Here are eight important points from the decision.
1. Soaring numbers. The rate of stops has grown exponentially under the Bloomberg administration. Scheindlin’s ruling notes that police conducted 2.8 million documented stops of people between 2004 and 2009, about half of whom were frisked. In contrast, in 1998, Scheindlin explains, NYPD officers made roughly 150,000 stops per year. In 2004 alone, officers recorded more than 313,000 stops, “and since then the number has increased every year except 2007, rising to over 684,000 in 2011.” Scheindlin cites the large increase as evidence of a centralized policy change.
2. No reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in a crime is necessary for a legal stop. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped, however, are not charged with any crime. As Scheindlin noted, the data shows that “according to their own records and judgment, officers’ ‘suspicions’ were wrong nearly nine times out of ten.”
3. Imaginary bulges. Officers’ suspicions were similarly unsubstantiated when reportedly searching for guns. A “suspicious bulge” was cited as a reason for about 10 percent of all stops, but guns were seized in less than 1 percent. “For every 69 stops that police officers justified specifically on the basis of a suspicious bulge, they found one gun,” the decision notes.
4. Stops for no reason. The absence of a legally necessary, interpretable “suspected crime” cited on official forms grew from 1.1 percent in 2004 to 35.9 percent (more than 200,000 reported stops) in 2009. During those years, “Overall, in more than half a million documented stops — 18.4 percent of the total — officers listed no coherent suspected crime,” Scheindlin wrote, meaning they either ignored the section altogether or did not cite suspected behavior that is indeed illegal.
5. Unlawful stops. Scheindlin writes, “According to their own explanations for their actions, NYPD officers conducted at least 170,000 unlawful stops between 2004 and 2009.” Stops based on nothing more than “furtive movement” or a “high-crime area” were the justifications of at least 100,000 stops, but as Scheindlin says, are illegal due to the Fourth Amendment law protecting Americans from unreasonable search.
6. Racial profiling. The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program targets blacks and Latinos because of their skin color. Scheindlin admitted the testimony of Columbia University professor Jeffrey Fagan, who found that police stopped blacks and Latinos far more than white residents. Isolated from other factors like crime rates and neighborhood racial composition, racial disparity from racial targeting was statistically significant, strongly underscoring that skin color is the essential factor in determining who gets stopped and throwing weight behind allegations of 14th Amendment violations. Fagan’s research also found that “the search for weapons is (a) unrelated to crime, (b) takes place primarily where weapons offenses are less frequent than other crimes, and (c) is targeted at places where the black and Hispanic populations are highest.” Cops are more likely to list no suspected crime category, or what Scheindlin called “an incoherent one,” like “furtive movements,” when stopping blacks and Latinos than when stopping whites. They also are more likely to use force against people of color.
7. NYPD illegal quotas. Scheindlin links the rising number of stops and the targeting of black and Latinos to NYPD quotas and to Commissioner Kelly’s own admission that the NYPD has a quota policy, albeit disguised. In a recent operations order, Commissioner Kelly explained departmental policy under the euphemism “performance goal.” Kelly said in the order, “Department managers can and must set performance goals,” for “the issuance of summonses, the stopping and questioning of suspicious individuals, and the arrests of criminals.”
The order also explains a weekly review during which a sergeant compares each officer’s monthly “activity” with the “daily assignment,” whereby police who “do not demonstrate activities” — or keep their numbers up — “will be evaluated accordingly and their assignments re-assessed.” In other words, there will be consequences for officers who don’t meet quotas, even though New York labor law says penalizing cops for failing to meet quotas is illegal.
Former NYPD officers turned whistleblowers Adhyl Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft have collected evidence documenting NYPD quotas in practice. From 2008 to 2009, Polanco, from the 41st Precinct, and Schoolcraft, from the 81st, recorded roll calls revealing supervisors’ and other high-ranking officers’ enforcement of quotas. In Scheindlin’s own words, Schoolcraft’s audio files expose supervisors “repeatedly telling officers to conduct unlawful stops and arrests and explaining that the instructions for higher performance numbers are coming down the chain of command.”
Similarly, Polanco testified that “his commanding officers announced specific quotas for arrests and summons (quotas that rose dramatically between early 2008 and 2009) and for UF-250s” (a term for the forms used in stops), said Scheindlin, “and threatened overtime and undesirable assignments for those who failed to meet them.”
8. Repeat performances. According to the NYCLU, in 2011 the NYPD stopped more young, black men than live in New York; that is, some individuals are stopped and frisked repeatedly. To protect their rights, plaintiffs are seeking “systemic relief” — an end to the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk.
Kristen Gwynne covers drugs at AlterNet. She graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism and psychology.
The Census Bureau has announced that a majority of new-born infants in the U.S. now belong to categories other than what the U.S. federal government calls “non-Hispanic white.”
While so-called “non-Hispanic whites” still account for 49.6 percent of American newborns, immigration has expanded the Hispanic and Asian categories, while the African-American or black share of the U.S. population has remained roughly constant. Whether they celebrate or dread it, progressive champions of the “rainbow coalition” and white conservative nativists at least agree on one fact: In the future, whites in the U.S. will be a minority.
But what if both the multicultural left and the nativist right are wrong? Definitions of racial identity in the U.S. have changed over time. In the twentieth century, Americans with different degrees of African ancestry who in earlier generations would have been described as negroes, quadroons and octoroons were all lumped together in a single category as blacks. And in the nineteenth century, eminent American ethnologists debated the question of whether Irish-Americans belonged to the same race as Anglo-Americans.
In the 1970s, the federal government came up with the bizarre “non-Hispanic white” label, lumping together Arab-Americans, Norwegian-Americans and Irish-Americans into a single government-created pseudo-race. To compound the absurdity, at the same time the federal government invented a category of “Hispanics” who, as government forms invariably note, “may be of any race.” The artificial “Hispanic” category is even more preposterous than the “non-Hispanic white” category, including blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of predominantly African descent.
These government racial labels are increasingly out of touch with America’s fluid demographic reality. But for the sake of argument, let us take America’s official racial classifications, all too reminiscent of Soviet nationality labels, at face value. According to polls, a slight majority of Hispanics (or Latinos) identify themselves as “white.” Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of government-labeled Hispanics who identified as “other race” dropped in percentage from 42 to 37 while those who identified as white rose from 48 to 53 percent.
If self-described “white” Hispanics are annexed to the “non-Hispanic white” group in order to form a single category of “whites” (Hispanic and non-Hispanic), then the emergence of a “nonwhite” majority in the U.S. is postponed by generations and perhaps indefinitely.
What is more, by the third generation, a majority of Hispanics marry outside of their ethnic group, mostly but not exclusively into the non-Hispanic white population. It is possible that their children will identify themselves as “mixed race” or “other race” — categories for self-labeling that have been allowed in recent Census counts. But it is more likely that the unscientific but powerful cultural category of “whiteness” will be enlarged to include Hispanics and Asians and their children as “non-Hispanic whites.”
In a widely-reprinted 1998 article for the New York Times Magazine, “The Beige and the Black,” I pointed out that America’s nonrational caste system has been binary: not white/nonwhite, but black/nonblack. Because “white” really means “nonblack,” the arbitrary white category is infinitely elastic, capable of being enlarged to include practically anybody who is not clearly of black African descent. While Hispanics and Asians have suffered from vicious bigotry in American history, anti-black prejudice has always been the organizing principle of caste in American culture.
As I wrote 14 years ago:
In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.
(This is a prediction on my part, not a prescription. Rather than witness the redefinition of whiteness, from Anglo-American to Euro-American to Euro-Latino-Asian American, I would rather live to see a truly post-racist America in which caste is completely expunged from culture and consciousness. But I am reporting trends, not creating them; please don’t shoot the messenger.)
If this analysis is right, then present-day Republican racial politics is doomed — and so is Democratic racial politics.
Today’s Republican right seems intent on treating the ridiculous government category of “non-Hispanic white” as though it represented a core community of “real Americans,” excluding black Americans and protected from demographic inundation by Hispanics, or “Third World hordes” as the gentlemanly Patrick Buchanan politely calls our fellow citizens of Latin American descent. Quite apart from betraying its roots in the Republicanism of Lincoln and the abolitionists, a Republican Party whose image of the American nation excludes not only blacks but also Hispanics and their descendants is doomed in electoral politics.
Democrats are right about that. But progressives are wrong to imagine that a new “majority of minorities” is about to emerge and create a lasting majority for the Democrats. The success of white nativists in the GOP in driving away Hispanic voters may help the Democrats for a few more electoral cycles, but sooner or later Republican politicians who are tired of losing will challenge the neo-Confederate wing of their party and practice a more racially-inclusive politics of the kind pioneered by George W. Bush and his brother Jeb Bush, with his Hispanic wife and mixed-race children.
Nor should progressives assume that Hispanics and their mixed-race progeny will remain loyal to the Democrats for generations to come. The fact that Anglo-American nativists in the Republican Party in the early 1900s tried to keep their ancestors out of the country does not deter most working-class white “ethnics” of Irish and Italian descent in the U.S. from voting for today’s GOP. Like earlier waves of immigrants, Hispanics are likely to change in their political values as a result of assimilation and upward mobility.
What does this mean for black Americans? On the one hand, the persistence of an informal “white” majority defined in opposition to the black minority would mean further delay in the realization of a truly post-racist America.
On the other hand, black Americans made much more rapid advances during the New Deal/Civil Rights era, when the melting of European ethnic differences created an overwhelming “white” majority for a time, than they have done since mass immigration made them the second largest official “minority” in the U.S. after Hispanics. The truth is that the “rainbow coalition” strategy of uniting minorities has helped other groups more than blacks. Affirmative action in higher education, for example, while doing little to help the majority of black Americans who do not go to college, has benefited upper-middle-class white women, who are part of the white majority (and, if they are affluent, part of the social elite within the dominant group). Programs like affirmative action and minority business set-asides, originally designed to help the descendants of American slaves, lost all moral credibility when they were opened up to white women and recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants, notwithstanding the feeble “diversity” rationale that America’s white oligarchy invented to rationalize them.
It remains to be seen how changing racial conceptions shape American politics. But if demography is destiny, one thing is clear — in the long run, both the diversitarian left and the nativist right are doomed.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.
The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.
A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.
What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)
Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.
Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.
Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.
Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.
Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)
Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.
Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.
Further reading
Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories
The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.
The extraordinary box office success of "The Hunger Games" has launched a heated discussion of Hollywood's peculiar habit of casting white actors in nonwhite roles. Why does this happen? We decided to turn to a very important studio chief for answers -- channeled here by comedian (and "Daily Show" correspondent) Aasif Mandvi.
All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed — it’s a tradition — and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand.
First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There’s nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic “judgment” eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a white person, and suddenly your outrage turns to understanding and laughter.
Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. “Short Circuit” was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!
My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman. White people spend more money on shit than anyone else. (Except on fast food, which is mostly blacks and Mexicans … at least that’s what I have heard. I’m a vegan.) So hey, non-Caucasians, stop buying tacos and start buying Cadillacs.
White people are also cheaper to light than dark-skinned people, and just so you know, you the moviegoer end up paying for that extra cost. Sometimes it’s just too unbelievable to cast an ethnic actor. I turned away a lovely Indian actress once who auditioned for the role of a hobbit. I mean there are no Indian hobbits. Audiences would never believe that.
Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. America has changed and Hollywood should attempt to portray a truer depiction of the ethnic diversity that makes up this country. The fact that many television shows now hire a certain percentage of non-white actors is a step in the right direction, right? I am even prepared to make a deal with you ethnic people out there. Every time you let me cast a non-Caucasian character with a Caucasian actor, I will give you two or three non-white actors in smaller supporting roles. Why not lead roles? Because I’m trying to make a living here. I have spent a lot of time and money throughout history convincing everyone that white is normal. I have even convinced non-white people that white is better, prettier, smarter, stronger, and that only white people can truly be the heroes. Everyone has bought into it, and now you want me to just abandon all my hard work? OK, I will make an exception for some of you non-whites: If you are a hot Latina, you can be the lead. Why? Because white guys want to fuck Jennifer Lopez.
Here are a few more key elements to remember when watching a movie the way white people have been programmed to react. Laugh at the funny accents, because they are funny. Ignore the source material; I’m making movies, I don’t give a shit about staying true to your comic books. And … hold on! Why the fuck is Idris Elba playing a Norse God!?
To view a slide show of Hollywood’s egregious moments in white-washing, click on the link below — and share your own most memorable moments in the comments. (Slide show by Max Rivlin-Nadler)
View the slide show
(Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri) 
A still from "The Intouchables" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
