Class, not race, might be the defining discrimination issue of my children’s lifetime.
If Charles A. Murray’s thesis in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 — that people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds cluster together, leaving the less affluent on their own without a communitywide stabilizing influence — comes to pass, my sons’ futures might be determined by whom they wed.
As depressing as that is, it’s only slightly bleaker than the fact that they’re at risk for what’s being called the “Hispanic third-generation U-turn,” or that they’ll live in a country in which social and economic capital eclipses race as the biggest hurdle to national harmony.
Maria Enchautegui coins the “U-turn” phrase in a study by the Urban Institute. Using Census Bureau data on lifetime school enrollment, she tracked a path in which the first generation (immigrant parents) and second generation (their U.S.-bred children) made economic and other gains. But then the third generation fell back down the socioeconomic ladder.
Her theory is that the first generation is full of immigrant zeal, the second generation grows up seeing their parents work hard and attain the American dream, and the third becomes complacent. This comes as no surprise to second-generation people who have struggled to get their kids to unglue themselves from their Xbox or text messages.
And the idea that marriage will make or break their futures? Well, that’s in peril too, since the “third generation” has no special benefit — often referred to as the Hispanic Paradox — and fewer strong cultural bonds to call on.
The Hispanic Paradox is the good health and well-being of recently arrived Hispanics as compared to their generally wealthier and better-educated white U.S. counterparts. They diminish the longer a family resides in the U.S. — much like the conservative nature of a highly religious Latin American culture.
A recent report from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families on family structure and formation among low-income Hispanics in the U.S. illustrates this sad state of affairs.
It notes that over the past several decades, families of all races have seen fewer couples get married, while more cohabit and have babies outside of marriage. “Low-income, foreign-born Hispanic women are more likely than the U.S.-born to be married at the birth of their first child and to still be married,” the report says. “Conversely, low-income, U.S.-born Hispanic women are more likely to have their first birth outside of any union than are the foreign-born.”
Put this in a context in which those who marry and stay married tend to be wealthy — and the reality that, according to the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project, about 25 percent of all Hispanics live in poverty — and the future of intact, third-generation, middle-income Hispanic families looks compromised.
I hope I’m wrong. But right now, it looks like instead of simply transcending race, our future population stands to swap one kind of bigotry for another.
Reach Washington Post columnist Esther Cepeda at
