Calvin Baker - A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America

Grace

Dominion

Once Two Heroes

Naming the New World

Y oure the first extranjero who has ever been in my home, he said. Maybe he meant foreigner; maybe he meant stranger. I wasnt sure. It was late in the evening and I didnt ask him to clarify. We were in the living room of a one-story cinder-block building, a brick-by-brick undertaking still taking shape. The kind of house you build yourselfas circumstances dictateaccording to your courage of imagination to meet them. It was my final night on the island, near the southern coast of Mexico, between Cancer and the Equator. It was five hours by rough roads to the nearest city and two hours from the market town, where people from the smaller villages went to find provisions: hardware, appliances, an honest agent to broker what affairs they might have with the larger world. I had arrived there largely by chance, in search of a quality of solitude vanishingly rare.

There were only a few hundred families on the island, mostly fisherfolk who had moved in after the logging companies stripped the area of hardwood and left behind the road they had constructed to transport the timber to market, which went by way of the sea. They said that before Corts arrived, there was an older habitation there, but only a few traces remained, turning up only when someone was digging deep to lay the foundation of a new building.

His wife had taught me some words in Mayan, and their preteen children wanted to know if Id seen an outlandish Hollywood movie whose protagonist shared my name. We were all in stitches as they recounted the plot. Besides that, our conversation was about history, land rights, property values, and climate. It was a conversation that might be had anywhere, especially between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego: property, laws, value, policy, culture, change. All of these were flowing, perhaps more in one direction than the other. Nothing about any of it felt remarkable except the prelapsarian beauty of the island and neighbors who greeted even a stranger on roads where one might walk a mile without seeing anyone. But I have spent a lot of time walking around talking to people the powerful never listen to. We were speaking Castilian, a lingua franca with a local inflection, which was neither of our mother tongues. We live, after all, in an age of global humanity.

Far from being a new phenomenon, the current historical epoch began across the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, when Europe reemerged from the isolation of the Dark Ages, reencountered her neighbors in Afro-Eurasia, and soon ventured to the Americas on the same trade winds.

We are only too familiar with the accidents, massacres, and tragedies that later unfolded, but the ability to travel great distances also sparked the modern global movement of people that has increased exponentially in the ensuing years. However one may feel about it, at some unseen inflection point we crossed the event horizon, and this process became irreversible. We will never again be anything other than a global species.

Before the Portuguese reached the River Senegal, before Marco Polo met Kublai Khan, from the very beginning of anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago, and even earlier, people were already on the move. First, we traveled from East Africa across the continent, then, 70,000 years ago, journeyed eastward into Asia. Forty thousand years ago, according to current consensus, humans ventured west into Europe and finally, 15,000 years ago, populated the Americas.

Africa, Europe, and Asia occupy a single landmass, of course, a fact we often overlook. At various points in geological time, America was also connected. Those early hunter-gatherers were following the herds in search of resources, as were the farmers who spread from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. So too were the early Portuguese, who wanted to circumvent Muslim control of the trans-Saharan trade routes in search of gold. It wasnt this simple, naturally. History is sometimes an arrow, sometimes a wave. But it seems that human nature and the shape of the globe mean we were, one way or another, fated to meet again.

More recently, as colonialism was felled and democracy spread after World War II, this migration shifted from the periphery of empires to metropolitan centers, as people sought relief from collapsing economic systems based on exploitation. In our own time, as centers of power and capital continue to shift, this movement has multiplied across the entire world. People now relocate for economic, environmental, political, educational, familial, and purely personal reasons, at a pace and scale that make this movement a central fact of contemporary life. It is also a fact that threatens and overwhelms traditional societies and eighteenth-century ethno-national ideas of states.

I am glossing over a great deal, but the tension between global humanity and ethno-nationalism, along with its fraternal twin, race, seems to me the fundamental backdrop against which current events are unfolding. This owes in large degree to the fact that for most people race, a flawed, antiquated explanation for the physical differences among people, codified in the eighteenth century, remains in this century the central totem of the self. Certainly, to speak of things I know best, this is true in my own country, which so often proclaims itself the light of the world. It does not matter that the alleged science behind race has long since been proven as erroneous as a flat Earth; it long ago became a foundational myth of who we are, taught early and reinforced often. In the United States race is, even more than national tribe, a useful fiction to explain to us who we are and how we are oriented toward the world. As such, it is less a valid idea than an organizing belief. In this case a form of magical thinking impervious to fact but ever threatened by truth.