MANSFIELD: The “Kardashian Effect”: Solving America’s Racial Conundrum?

By Mansfield Frazier

A recent Reentry Policy Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Attorney’s Office (with Ohio Senator Rob Portman as the featured speaker), attracted a standing-room-only crowd to a community college in suburban Cleveland… due, in large part, to the growing interest in the subject of prisoner reentry. However, I suspect that the offering of 5 free continuing educational credit hours for chemical dependency and counseling professionals had something to do with attracting such a large audience from around the state.

As is sometimes usual at events of this nature, the facilitator requested that attendees move out of their comfort zone and have lunch at a table with people they didn’t know. The audience was fairly evenly split between blacks and whites, and when people selected a table of strangers to sit with, tradition kicked in: blacks sat with other blacks, and whites sat with other whites. So much for “post-racial” I guess.

The table of ten I sat at was evenly split gender-wise, and when we introduced ourselves we discovered we hailed from all over Ohio. Social workers, prison officials, halfway house employees, and even two (a woman and a man) who, like me, were formerly incarcerated. The conversation initially revolved around amazement at how prisoner reentry has, in a relatively few short years, captured the attention of the American public, and how much the public has changed.

Everyone politely concurred, and then one woman went seemingly completely off-topic by stating her gauge for how much society is changing is reflected in what she called “look what’s in the baby buggy.” She was commenting on the proliferation of biracial babies being proudly chauffeured about in strollers by white mothers at shopping malls, supermarkets, drug stores, amusement parks and just down the street. She laughingly credited (or blamed it on, according to one’s own perspective) the Kardashian sisters, saying they’d done more to promote integration than all of the civil rights organizations in America combined. “Since those girls started dating and marrying black men the number of white girls pushing strollers carrying tan babies has gone through the roof.”

Everyone at the table — people who hailed from cities and towns large and small from all over the state — chortled and agreed with the woman’s anecdotal observation, at least in terms of the increased numbers. While not everyone felt the Kardashians were necessarily the cause of the increase, the conversation (which was off to the races by then) bore not the slightest hint of censure or opprobrium toward these white mothers since blacks historically have never been as fearful of “race-mixing” as some whites, especially southern whites.

It’s hard to get more “middle-America” than Ohio — that’s why it’s almost perennially considered number one among swing states in presidential elections. We in the hinterlands like to think that we’re reflective of the mores, values and attitudes of the nation as a whole, and thus point with a certain degree of accuracy toward where we’re heading as a society. After the conclusion was reached this is indeed a statewide phenomenon, my cultural interest piqued.

As Warren Betty’s fictional character Jay Bullington Bulworth (in the 1998 film Bulworth) forthrightly stated (and I’m paraphrasing here), the solution to America’s seemingly intractable racial divide is for blacks and whites to get together in sexual congress and make bunches and bunches of tan babies… until the citizens of our nation meld into that beautiful look of many Brazilian and Cuban supermodels. While interestingly stated in the film, it’s a notion that has been around for quite sometime.

Intrigued, I was curious as to how widespread this phenomenon is; so during the following week I conducted my own little very unscientific poll of family, friends and colleagues across the country, both blacks and whites. I sent out 300 emails and over two-thirds responded, virtually all in the affirmative: they too, now that the question was asked, recall seeing a fairly significant increase in the biracial baby phenomenon. This, indeed, appears to be happening nationwide on an increasingly common basis.

Of course some increase in the number of biracial babies is to be expected since the number of interracial marriages, according to a Pew Report released after the last Census, found the number of newlyweds who said they had married outside their race or ethnicity had more than doubled, from 6.8 percent 20 years ago to 14.6 percent in the 2010 Census. But since marriage on the whole is in decline, and the number of biracial babies seems to be increasing fairly rapidly, demographers might be in for a real surprise by the time the 2020 Census rolls around.

Culturally, what does the birth of all of these biracial babies portend? Maybe something, but then again maybe nothing more than to prove once again the power of the cult of celebrity: With Kim Kardashian’s name being among the most Goggled on the planet it’s easy to see why young white women are saying, “Hey, if it’s cool enough for the Kardashians to be with a black dude, then I’m down ‘wit’ it too.” It could be the future Jay Bulworth called for is — due to the power of media — arriving faster than anyone might have imagined… or even thought possible a scant decade ago. Of course, even at such a suspected increased pace it still will take decades, but, in the end, this phenomenon could be the way America’s seemingly intractable racial conundrum is finally solved.

 

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.

 

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