The Emerging Confusion

In 2002 John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority, the thesis of which was that the increasing percentage of the population of the U. S. of various minorities, who tended to vote Democratic, would result in a permanent majority of voters for Democrats. The book is well worth reading but I’ve been critical of that thesis on the grounds that I think Mssrs. Judis and Teixeira are mistaken about voter behavior.

Based on Mr. Judis’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, I gather that he agrees with me:

The most common reaction to the release of the 2020 census was summed up in the headline “Census Data show the number of white people fell.” The data show the number of whites declining by 8.6%. This observation was often coupled with a political projection: that while gerrymandering could benefit Republicans in 2022, the political future belongs to the Democratic Party, which commands large majorities among minorities.

But these conclusions about race and politics rely on misleading census results. Contrary to Democratic hopes and right-wing anxieties, America’s white population didn’t shrink much between 2010 and 2020 and might actually have grown.

“Races” are defined not by biology but by cultural convention. As late as the early 20th century, many Anglo-Americans didn’t identify Southern or Eastern Europeans as “white.” In 1918, 33-year-old Harry S. Truman, while visiting New York City, wrote his cousin: “This town has 8,000,000 people. 7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” After World War II, Jews and Italians became identified as “white.”

Something similar seems to be happening to many Americans of Hispanic and Asian origin. About 3 in 10 Hispanics and Asians intermarry, usually to a white spouse. According to a 2016 study by economists Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo, 35% of third-generation Hispanics of mixed parentage no longer identify as Hispanic; and 55% of third-generation Asian-Americans of mixed parentage no longer identify as Asian. A 2017 Pew report found that among Americans of Hispanic origin who don’t identify themselves as Hispanic, 59% said that they were seen by others as white.

The racial identity of Hispanics is especially confusing because the census asks about “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” separately from race. In the 2010 census, 53% of those who said they were of Hispanic origin checked off only “white,” a 58% increase in numbers from 2000. That rise in white Hispanics helped account for the increase in the number of whites from the prior census. But in the 2020 census, a mere 20.3% of Hispanics checked off only “white,” contributing to the 8.6% decline in the total number of people identifying only as white.

That dramatic change probably stemmed not from a shift in social consciousness or demographics, but from a subtle change in the 2020 question about race. In 2010 the census asked respondents to check off whether they were white, black or African-American, American Indian or Alaska Native, various varieties of Asian or Pacific Islander, and “some other race.” They may check off as many race boxes as are applicable.

You should be able to read the whole thing via the link I have provided but it is likely to be short-lived.

I think his conclusion is particularly telling:

That sorry fact is obscured by the census’s diversity indexes and by the use of terms like “people of color” or “nonwhite,” which suggest a commonality between African-Americans living in poverty in Chicago’s South Side and the Indian-American CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet. The census may help with reapportionment and redistricting, but it doesn’t paint an accurate picture of America and its politics.

I have long found the term “people of color” noxious on the grounds that it is reification—making a thing of something that is not in fact a thing. I find it a political statement that does not reflect the reality.

The reality is that the Democratic Party has increasingly become the party of the rich and educated while the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of working people. There are still some affiliational aspects of party membership which explain, for example, why such a large percentage of blacks continue to vote Democratic.

Here in Chicago the percentage of blacks has dropped. I believe the census figures actually overstate the number of blacks in Chicago—COVID-19 and crime have driven an increasing number out of the city just in the last year. The political infighting over redrawing ward boundaries, who will win, and who will lose has already begun. Per the 2020 decennial census the plurality are white, the second largest number Hispanics, while blacks make up the third largest cohort. I don’t believe that Hispanic and Asian voters will make common cause with blacks to reduce the number of wards with white majorities. I think it will be the other way around and that when the dust has settled there will be fewer blacks in the Chicago City Council than there were.

I didn’t want to conclude this post without mentioning that I’m beginning to think that the French are right. In France as long as you speak French and adopt French culture you are French. And they think that France is for the French. The government doesn’t keep statistics on the country’s racial breakdown. It’s actually illegal to do so. That doesn’t mean that France is a parousia—far from it. But it does prevent the government from getting into muddles of the sort the Census Bureau has been fomenting for the last several decades.