The Changing White Majority

It’s gratifying for me to see someone pointing out what I’ve been remarking on for years. The demise of the U. S.’s white majority is greatly exaggerated. Here’s a snippet of a Washington Post op-ed by USC scholars Dowell Myers and Morris Levy:

It was 2000 when the Census Bureau first projected an end to the white majority of the population in 2059. Four years later, it revised that date to 2050. Then in 2008, it told the public that the passing of the white majority would occur in 2042. At this abrupt rate of change, some anxious whites might see displacement as an imminent threat.

In fact, the Census Bureau projects no fewer than six futures for the white population based on various definitions of whiteness. The most touted set of projections adopts the most exclusive definition, restricting the white population to those who self-identify as white and also no other race or ethnicity. Under this definition, whites are indeed in numerical decline.

But this doesn’t reflect the increasingly fluid and inclusive way that many Americans now regard racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mixed-race parentage is growing more common, and a rapidly growing number of people choose more than one racial or ethnic category to describe themselves on the census.

For example, Meghan Markle — American actress and new member of the British royal family — has a white father and black mother, so she identifies as someone from both races. Under the older, exclusive definition of race — resembling the historical “one-drop” rule — Markle and her children can never be classified as white. Same goes for the offspring of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and former Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush.

Under a more expansive definition that counts as white anyone who so identifies (even if they also identify with another race or ethnicity), the white population is not declining; it’s flourishing. The Census Bureau’s inclusive projections show a white population in excess of 70 percent of the total for the foreseeable future.

By the standards of the 1830s the U. S. stopped having a white majority a century ago. I would not have been considered white by virtue of my Irish ancestry; my wife would not have been considered white by virtue of her Irish and Arbëreshë (Albanese) ancestry. And yet, somehow, today our whiteness is only occasionally questioned and that only because we’re Catholics.

My closest blood relatives other than my siblings and their children are my mother’s first cousins, Hispanic by virtue of their Mexican mother. I have never thought of them as anything other than white. Indeed, the number of Hispanics who consider themselves white will probably be alarming to those who favor a “majority minority” America.

There are two groups clinging bitterly to the “one drop” rule: the political far right and the political far left. Their rationales may be different but both seek to divide us rather than unite us.