Without the accompanying image of US Vice President JD Vance, his wife Usha Vance, and their daughter Mirabel, a group text I saw on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration would have been baffling. But even with the photo, the text – 'Has America reached its post-racial moment?' – seemed off. In fact, it sounded bizarre.
If anything, the opposite is true, with the inauguration of the 47th president signalling the triumphant celebration of an America that existed before the sweeping changes of the mid-1960s. That America, for Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) base, is a lost – or a mythical – paradise, evoking intense nostalgia, and they are determined to reclaim as many of its privileges, real or imagined, as possible.
Calling this a ‘post-racial’ era makes no sense.
Post-Obama 'White-lash'
Many will recall that word from the Barack Obama years, which promised, but failed spectacularly to usher in a post-racial era. What the Obama presidency led to was a backlash, or, as the CNN commentator Van Jones put it, 'white-lash', resulting in the election of Trump as the 45th president in 2016.
Post-racial, according to the dictionary, means “having overcome or moved beyond racism.” What we saw, however, on 20 January was the whitewashing of racism.
Under Trump, 'diversity' has become dangerous. And despised. DEI – instead of being ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ – is now ‘Discrimination, Exclusion, and Indoctrination’, as Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, had dubbed it.
By banning DEI initiatives, Trump seems to be making Elon Musk’s infamous tweet – “DEI must DIE” – the law of the land.
It was a dizzying day that saw the pendulum swing from the left to the right, even the far right. The subsequent days have been dizzier, with mass deportations, tariffs, mass firings, and initiatives that make the 'Black Lives Matter' period seem as distant as the last century.
Now we seem to be in the era of ‘White’ Lives Matter More. Yes, the quotes are deliberate.
A New Day for MAGA
There are people, including those I know, who reject and resent this fixation on race. “Look,” they tell me, “a lot of non-whites supported (and continue to support) Trump. So, get over it.”
Or: “It’s not about race; it’s about class.”
Or: “It’s about legal versus illegal, and why the rights of citizens matter more.”
And: “We live in a society of many ethnicities and races, don’t we?”
Yes, we do. But that doesn’t mean it’s a society that’s colour blind (“not subject to racial prejudices”).
Saying that our society will be “colour blind and merit-based,” as Trump did in his inauguration speech, might seem commendable, except that it came across as a ruse to turn the clock back.
One only needs to think of all the statements Trump has made, the officials he is appointing in high positions, the many executive orders he has signed, and the harsh policies his administration is rolling out at a frenetic pace, to understand what MAGA is really about.
Nativist and authoritarian, MAGA is at its core an ethno-religious nationalist movement.
This brings me back to the text I saw on 20 January this year. The image showed the Vance couple, along with their biracial children, as JD Vance was being sworn in by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. What the texter meant, surely, was multiracial, not post-racial.
America is indeed multiracial, and families like the Vance family and the Harris family (which is blended as well) are increasingly common in this country.
White And Whiter
The US has in recent decades seen a dramatic rise in interracial marriages, with an even more dramatic increase in the public’s acceptance of such marriages. From three percent in 1967 (when the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriage was legal), the proportion of married opposite-sex couples rose to 19 percent by 2022, according to the US Census Bureau.
It’s much higher for married same-sex couples (31 percent). Does that augur the end of racial hierarchy? Hardly. Race, like class, is ingrained in American society, and both continue to play a key role in people’s lives.
What’s been changing is the idea of ‘whiteness’ and the shifting borders that define the dominant group. Who is included, or excluded, changes.
The experience of ‘white ethnics’ (those who did not have northern or western European ancestry) is illustrative.
For a long time, they were not considered fully (or perhaps even partly) white, and their entry into the US was restricted by the Immigration Act of 1924. Now they belong to the dominant group and are seen as no different from WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), who trace their roots to northern or western Europe.
Similarly, one could argue, the boundaries have shifted to include some immigrants of non-European ancestry but not others, and include some mixed-race Americans but not others.
It's like India’s traditional upper caste, which, as Isabel Wilkerson points out, is fixed and rigid. She’s the author of the bestselling Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
“Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States,” Wilkerson writes.
“While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained a constant from its inception – whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and principles of the dominant caste.”
All's in the Label
Labels like 'Indian American' are also not immutable. The hyphen, which I’d invariably use, is outdated. I can see why – individuals may disagree on how they define themselves.
For instance, because I grew up in India, the ‘Indian’ in Indian American remains important to me. It may not have the same resonance for somebody who was raised in the US.
Earlier, an immigrant from India wasn’t even called Indian American. People would have mistaken that for American Indian, now classified as Native American. Asian Indian, used by the Census Bureau, was the preferred label. Another tag was East Indian, which now sounds old-fashioned and colonialist.
NRI (Non-Resident Indian) and PIO (Person of Indian Origin) are mostly used in India, and they refer to any diasporic Indian. South Asian American is still used, but it’s more prevalent in academia and activist circles.
Indian American is more consistent with how other ethnic groups are labelled. We say Korean American, not East Asian American. Another problem with ‘South Asian’ could be that it doesn’t include all South Asian nationalities.
Of course, for ultranationalists and right-wing populists like Trump and his MAGA electorate, the non-American part of the label is totally irrelevant. In other words, it’s not Indian American or Irish American or Iranian American. It’s just, as a bumper sticker says, 'American American'.
(Murali Kamma is a managing editor and writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)