By Tom Robotham
When I was growing up in Staten Island in the 1960s, kids used to ask each other, “What are you?” No further explanation was needed. Everyone knew it meant, what’s your nationality?
In my neighborhood, most answered, “Italian” or “Irish”—never mind that they’d been born in Brooklyn. Ethnic identity was important—a point of both pride and prejudice. To Italians, the Irish were “micks” and to the Irish, Italians were “guineas.” They mostly got along, though, and if you were something else—“German,” let’s say, well, that was OK, too. Just as long as your ancestry was Western European, and relatively “pure.” If you were from a “mixed marriage,” that meant your mother was Italian and your father was Irish, or something similar. Anything more exotic than that was unheard of. We knew there were Black people on the Island, of course, and Puerto Ricans, but they lived on the other side of town and mostly “kept to themselves.” Interracial marriages—or even dating—certainly would not have been tolerated in my neck of the woods.
I thought of all that recently after Donald Trump asked of Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?”
In that single line, he spoke to the fundamental fear that drives the MAGA cult. It’s not simply a hatred of other races, religions or “suspect” ethnic groups. It’s the terror that “they” will “poison the blood or our country,” as Trump put it, by creating a “mongrel race.” (Trump hasn’t used the latter term, as white supremacists did openly in the 1960s, but he might as well have.)
Deep in their hearts is a desire to return to some imagined golden age when everyone “stuck to their own kind” and group identities were simple and clear cut. Among other things, that made certain groups easy to stereotype and scapegoat. But what do you do with someone who’s Indian and Black? It’s all so confusing.
Interestingly, around the time that this story was breaking, there arose two other controversies that highlighted the radical right’s fear of changing norms and identities. The first was the uproar over the Dionysian tableau during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, which was perceived as a mockery of DaVinci’s iconic “Last Supper.” The fact the tableau featured drag queens sent critics into hysterical fits over the idea of drag queens generally.
“What is their aim?” one person wrote on my Facebook page. “I’ll be damned if I let ‘em near my kids!”
The parallel is clear: While people of other races are out to “poison our blood,” drag queens are trying to “turn our kids gay.”
A few days later, there was another social-media eruption over the fact that the Olympics committee had allowed “a man” to compete in women’s boxing. Never mind that Imane Khelif—the athlete in question—was born with a vagina and identified as female on her birth certificate. Many people assumed that this was just another “man pretending to be a woman”—and no matter how much others challenged that assumption, they dug in their heels.
To be fair, a variety of news reports did reveal that Khelif has much higher levels of testosterone than the average woman does. But that was never the standard insisted upon by the anti-trans crowd. It was simple, they said: Stick to the gender you were assigned at birth.
It’s easy to get discouraged in the face of such hatred toward people who are just trying to live their lives. But it’s important to keep things in perspective. If you look at the trendlines, you could easily make the case that the reactionary responses—whether toward changes in our nation’s racial makeup or the blurring of gender categories—represent the last gasps of a dying breed.
According to the 2020 census, the multiracial population is now the fastest growing demographic group in the country, having increased 276 percent since 2010. There’s every reason to think that this trend will continue, and it’s plausible that in another few generations racial distinctions will have faded into irrelevancy. I’m not saying this purely on the basis of numbers. My own kids—both Millennials—grew up in an interracial environment that contrasted starkly with the racial segregation and ethnic preoccupations of my youth, and my college students—mostly Gen Z—seem to regard multiculturalism and racial mixing as the norm to an even greater degree.
Certainly, the same can be said of generational attitudes toward sexuality and gender.
Support of gay rights has grown dramatically in my lifetime to the point where more than six in 10 Americans now say that legalization of same-sex marriage is “good for society,” according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Not surprisingly, support is even higher among those between 18 and 29. Even 64 percent of Republicans in that age group are behind it—not just tolerant of it, but viewing it as a positive development.
Attitudes toward the concept of being transgender are more complex. Some friends of mine—who are liberal in most respects—have privately expressed uneasiness over the idea of providing, to minors at least, medical care for transitioning, and another Pew study suggests that this belief is common. Forty-three percent of respondents say views on the issue are changing too quickly—but again, that figure is much lower among young people, according to both the survey and my anecdotal experiences in discussing the issue with Millennials and Gen-Z. That said, a substantial majority (64 percent) favor laws protecting transgender people from discrimination.
Again, I’m struck by how much things have changed. My touchstone is a conversation I had in 1979 after Walter Carlos—the electronic-music pioneer—revealed that “he” was really a she and had undergone reassignment surgery. (Since then, she’s gone by the name Wendy.) I told my friends that while I couldn’t quite understand how someone could do that (it was really the first time I was even aware that transgender people existed), we should respect her decision. My friends, however, found it disgusting and incomprehensible. I long ago lost touch with them, but I strongly suspect that their views on the matter have at least been tempered over time, just as the views of Americans in general have.
My own understanding of the matter deepened a few years ago after I wrote a lengthy magazine article about the lives of transgender people, based on in-depth conversations with them.
This leads to an important point that lies at the crux of this entire consideration. Whether we’re talking about racism, homophobia or any other kind of prejudice, it’s almost always based on superficial impressions of individuals of the targeted group—or those who appear to be representative of it. Thus, it was easy for people to judge—and hate—Imane Khelif. On social media, she was instantly turned into a cartoonish villain, rather than a person. I’m sure that if any of these haters had an opportunity to sit down with her and hear her story, they would at least begin to understand its complexity. The same goes for Kamala Harris and her multi-cultural heritage.
The beauty of our youngest generations is that they are growing up in a different world. People who have complex, non-traditional identities aren’t just the subject of memes or sensationalized news stories; they sit among their peers in classrooms and are part of diverse social groups. As such, they are advancing our founding ideal: that all people are created equal and deserve the right to pursue happiness as they define it.
I don’t want to sound overly optimistic. I’m not so naïve as to think that the bigotry currently on display will disappear during my lifetime. But the trendline is clear: The MAGA mindset—which desperately clings to outmoded categories and labels—does not represent America’s future. It represents a world view that is currently burning with intensity only because it is nearing the end, like some star that swells into a red giant right before shrinking into cold, white dwarf.
