How ethnic can our politicians be?

That said, whiteness is malleable. In How the Irish Became White, historian Noel Ignatiev described how a once-despised minority was incorporated into the dominant social caste in the U.S. Rather than embrace enslaved African-Americans as allies in a struggle against injustice, Irish laborers used the franchise to become part of the governing class and to share in the cultural and economic privileges of whiteness. In doing so, they set a pattern that has since been embraced by other immigrant groups, including, some argue, recent waves of Latino and Asian immigrants. Indeed, the fact that intermarriage rates between whites and Latinos and whites and Asians remain higher than rates between whites and African-Americans suggests that cultural conceptions of whiteness continue to expand. In a sense, one can argue that Nikki Haley weathered the “raghead” attack because a decent number of conservative white South Carolinians consider her one of them. Despite the fact that she’s the daughter of immigrants, she is, in every socially relevant sense, a white person with a slightly darker-than-Mediterranean complexion…

One wonders where this leaves the unassimilable or unmeltable ethnics, who choose not to intermarry or to convert to Christianity or some other “mainstream” faith. At present, there are 13 self-identified Jewish members in the U.S. Senate, and two more members with one Jewish parent. In an earlier era, this would have been all but unimaginable. Now we consider it entirely unremarkable, not least because the Jewish community has been part of the fabric of American life for centuries. Can we imagine similar representation of Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims? The obvious answer is no, at least not in our lifetimes. And that’s entirely understandable. In any democratic polity, the voting public wants to identify with its leaders. But let’s keep the fact that some of our citizens are too exotic for leadership roles in mind before we congratulate ourselves on our tolerance and our embrace of diversity.