The great American secret is that our race and ethnicity change over time. And the great American tragedy is that only some of us get to change them.
Witness the family story of Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated for the Supreme Court earlier this week. Supporters hailed Garland as a “moderate” or a “centrist,” whose judicial opinions don’t fit into convenient categories.
But neither does his ethnicity, which also reflects a complicated set of historical choices. News reports dutifully noted that Garland was the product of a Protestant father and a Jewish mother, and that he was raised a Jew.
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It’s not clear whether Garland’s father, who was born to Jewish immigrants from Latvia, ever actually identified as Protestant or stopped calling himself Jewish. Yet some other members of his family certainly did. Merrick Garland is a second cousin of Terry Branstad, the Republican governor of Iowa. Merrick’s paternal grandfather, Max Harry Garland was the brother of Louis Edward Garland, Branstad’s maternal grandfather.
Louis’s daughter, Rita Garland, was also Jewish. But she married Edward Branstad, a Lutheran, and she became a Lutheran as well. Their son Terry Branstad was brought up in the Lutheran Church, but later converted to Catholicism.
We don’t know what motivated these choices, or what obstacles Merrick Garland’s relatives might have encountered in making them. But surely it got easier as time went on, because Judaism increasingly became an ethnicity rather than a people (or a race). And it’s always easier to change the former than the latter — because we think of race as a biological category, a matter of “blood” rather than history, culture or religion.
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When Max Garland came to America, the Bureau of Immigration still classified Jews as a distinct race. And you couldn’t “choose” a different one, the argument went, any more than a leopard could change its spots.
That conception of Judaism lost currency with the defeat of Nazism, which was dedicated to eliminating the “Jewish race.” But we held on to the idea of race itself, of course, even creating a few new ones along the way.
So when President Obama nominated the first Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, few people paused to note that Sotomayor wasn’t Hispanic when she was born in 1954. That’s because the category didn’t come into use until the 1970s.
It’s still not an official race on the federal census, but it’s surely a de facto one. We’re often reminded about America’s growing fraction of Hispanics, who are inevitably measured against the percentage of whites, blacks and Asians. Government agencies and educational institutions count Hispanics — or, sometimes, Latinos — as a race in affirmative action and diversity reports.
As their numbers grow, however, Hispanics also have more room to define their identities. And the rest of us are less likely to pigeonhole them in racial terms. Amid all the talk of immigration control in this year’s GOP presidential primaries, how many voters identified Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as Hispanic? And if Cruz and Rubio checked “white” on the census — as do most American Hispanics, when asked by the census to name their race — how many of us would care?
But now suppose that Obama — the product of a black father and white mother — declared himself white. It wouldn’t fly. That’s because people of African descent simply don’t have the same choices as the rest of us.
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That’s a product of the ugly history of race in this country, which defined anyone with “one drop” of African blood as “black.” And it lives on, in the all-or-nothing way we still define African-descended citizens. If you’re biracial, you’ll be presumed black; and if you say you’re white, you’ll be seen as a fraud.
In his brief speech in the Rose Garden after his nomination was announced, Merrick Garland choked up as he recalled his grandparents “fleeing anti-Semitism” in Russia and Eastern Europe and “hoping to make a better life for their children in America.” They found one, too, because America eventually let them choose what they wanted to be.
Now it’s time to extend that choice to everyone. The biggest lie of race is that it’s part of our bodies, so it’s immutable to change. And the saddest truth is that we only let certain people change it.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of “Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
