As should be needless to say, I agree with Noah Smith’s plea at Bloomberg View to “embrace diversity”:
During the past four decades, the U.S. has become much more racially and ethnically diverse. The share of non-Hispanic white people residing in the country is now only 62 percent, while Hispanics and Asians together make up 22.5 percent. Since 2014, less than half of the kids born in the U.S. have been born to two non-Hispanic white parents. Some states, such as Texas, are already majority-minority.
This rapid demographic change, which is due both to immigration and to high fertility rates among Hispanic-Americans, has sparked unease and even fear among some, and probably contributed to the election of President Donald Trump. This heightened anxiety comes even as immigration from Latin America is declining and Hispanic fertility rates have fallen:
[graph]
Meanwhile, about 39 percent of American-born Hispanic newlyweds and 46 percent of American-born Asian newlyweds marry people of other races (mostly whites) — a figure that will probably climb even higher in the years to come. Some of the children and grandchildren of those unions will probably identify as white. So the demographic decline of white America is probably overstated.
However, just to amuse myself I did a quick review of the opinion writers represented on the Bloomberg View front page as of Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 11:00am cDT. All of the bylines were white men with the exception of one Indian man, one Indian woman, and one Chinese woman. It isn’t remotely representative let alone diverse.
I think that Mr. Smith owes us another column in which he explains to us why that is. Meanwhile, what are we to conclude? I mean other than that journalists have a remarkable lack of self-awareness.
In the 19th Century Americans spoke of a “new spirit of the age”: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.
Today we have a creative-class spirit of the age: praise vicissitude as a shallow platitude.
If you confronted Noah Smith on this he’d block your Twitter account, and so far as I can see that’s as good a representation of the modern, self-satisfied elite as any.
I’d also point out that diversity isn’t just about skin color or gender.
But even if it were their roster fails.
If I’ve got where he lives figured out correctly, it’s about the most lily-white place imaginable. I’m not accusing him of hypocrisy but of lack of self-awareness.
“I’d also point out that diversity isn’t just about skin color or gender.”
For sure. I would like to see a lot more people writing who grew up in small towns, rural areas, poor areas and with different educational back grounds.
Steve
In a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic country, all politics are racial. That is simply unavoidable, a feature of human genetics. Such countries are held together by brute force. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is a good recent example. The American future is the same. We will have identitarian politics, coalitions of racially defined parties, and a dictatorship.
As Chateau Heartiste wrote: “Diversity + Proximity = War.”