NEW YORK – On a beautiful sunny afternoon in late June, my family and I took an Uber ride from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, back to our hotel at Waikiki Beach, in Honolulu.
The driver welcomed us warmly, told us he had Indian roots – his parents were of Indian origin; they had immigrated from Jamaica to America decades ago, settled down in Hawaii.
The driver was loquacious, with infectious laughter. I gleaned some tips on nondescript restaurants in the city for quality local cuisine.
He also mentioned worthwhile spots to visit, with less tourist footfalls. He persuaded us to savor a malasada – a delectable Portuguese sugar-fried pastry stuffed with molasses and a touch of cinnamon – which I got hooked to. He dissuaded us from splurging on an exorbitant lūʻau, a traditional extravagant Hawaiian feast.
There was a traffic jam. He opened up some more, on his family front. I was sitting in the front passenger seat. He revealed he was separated, in a custody battle for his two children; his wife is a White woman. He showed me photos of his children on his phone – two teens, a girl and a boy. They looked very Caucasian.
Without any prompt, he smiled, and asked me rhetorically, “They don’t look like my children, do they?”, and added, “When I am out with them, most times I get long looks; people wonder what the heck is this guy doing with these White kids!”
I remembered the conversation with the Hawaiian Uber driver when I read the news and saw a photo of Brandon Sakbun, who this month would take oath as Mayor of Terre Haute, a city in Indiana with just under 60,000 population, and best known for being the place where Coca Cola began the design of its bottle in 1915.
At 27 years, Sakbun, who is of mixed parentage – his parents are from Cambodia and Jamaica – would become the youngest person ever to assume the mayor’s office. He has a passing resemblance to that driver in Hawaii I had the pleasure to interact with.
A Democrat, Sakbun routed four-term Republican incumbent Duke Bennett in the municipal elections. He even got a congratulatory phone call from Vice President Kamala Harris, lauding him for his achievement.
I was intrigued by the name Sakbun. I wondered if he had ‘Indian’ in him. When I saw his photograph, he looked distinctively of Indian origin. When I read of his Jamaican lineage, I was certain it would lead to Indian roots and clinch my suspicion.
I read he was the son of Dr. Vannara Sakbun and Carlene Sakbun. I looked at their family photos. They didn’t look Indian. His mother is a Black woman; father of Cambodian origin.
When I put the name Sakbun through the forebears.com database, which draws conclusions based on a compilation of four billion people, it confirmed what I already knew by now. There were evidently no Indian roots in the family’s history.
I realized I was fooled when I looked at the picture of the children of the Uber driver in Hawaii, who despite having an Indian-origin father, didn’t look Indian at all. And again, I got fooled by looking at the name and photo of a man who looked Indian. Sakbun had no Indian roots at all, at least from his parents’ side.
In both cases, I was wrong.
If one were to add the names of Vivek Ramaswamy and Bobby Jindal right now to the mix, it would be a veritable Connections game from the New York Times. Except that when you think you have a comfortable connection for wannabe Republican Presidents in Jindal, Nikki Haley and Ramaswamy, you draw a confounding blank for the 4th; realize Harris (a product of Jamaican and Tamil heritage) won’t game it. You realize you’re stumped, dealt with a curveball.
White nationalists and supremacists have for decades espoused the dangers of the replacement theory, expounded by the French author Renaud Camus. While racist and xenophobic rhetoric of that philosophy is despicable and condemnable, the glaring truth is that the White population in America is, indeed, a fast-dwindling lot.
Rampant immigration year after year this century and rapid expansion of interracial marriages has turned an erstwhile White majority America into more of an interracial society. More and more neighborhoods in cities across America resemble as diverse a population as seen on any given day in Times Square. Doubts, if any, would be dispelled by a visit to elementary schools in cities. There’s a chockful of diversity in each classroom.
If you’re disdainful, you’re an absolute exception. The writer Karen Draper summed it up aptly: “Diversity doesn’t look like anyone. It looks like everyone.”
While plenty has been written of the predictions of non-Hispanic Whites becoming a ‘majority minority’ in just over two decades from now, by 2044, the fact that non-Hispanic White Americans under 18 being already a minority in the US three years ago, in 2020, has been glossed over.
A year after that significant landmark, in 2021, the population in America expanded at its slowest rate in history, and for the first time, that year, the majority of its population growth came from immigration. Canada and Australia too are on track to join America in a future where minority populations recede to a majority.
According to a Brookings report, in 2045, Whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the US population, in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.
Among the minority populations, the greatest growth is projected for multiracial populations, Asians and Hispanics with 2018–2060 growth rates of 176, 93, and 86 percent, respectively, Brookings analyzed. The projected growth rate for blacks is 34 percent.
Since the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that lifted restrictions on intermarriage in many states in America, the percentage of multiethnic married couples rose from 3 percent to 17 percent in 2015, according to the Census Bureau. In the 2020 census, 33.8 million individuals or 10.2 percent of the population, self-identified as multiracial.
America has indeed come a long way since the first interracial marriage was recorded in 1614 between Matoaka – popularly known as Pocahontas, the daughter of a Powhatan chief, and tobacco planter John Rolfe.
Today interracial marriages are the norm in America, and more importantly, inevitable in society. America in its evolving diversity is turning out to be the most un-racial country in the world.
America is you, me, and him.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of India Overseas Report)