For some years now it's been a common claim that the US, within a few decades, will become "majority-minority", meaning that whites will be outnumbered by non-whites. The idea persists because it's useful to elements on both sides of the political divide. For many on the left, who view practically all issues through the prism of race and racism, it provides a reassurance that the Republicans are ultimately doomed because non-whites mostly vote Democratic. For the fear-mongers on the right, it helps inflame their voting base with anxiety and hysteria about being reduced to a minority, fueling support both for draconian limits on immigration and for laws to obstruct voting by non-whites.
Well, this shift to a "majority-minority" country is not going to happen, and moreover it's foolish and counterproductive for the left to keep claiming that it
is going to happen. I've been meaning on and off for years to write a post about this, but never got around to it. Now
an article in The Atlantic has appeared which makes makes somewhat the same case, though I believe there are actually two reasons why the majority-minority idea is a fallacy, and the article emphasizes only the one I consider the less significant of the two.
(Yes, I'm fully aware that talking about race at all makes some people uncomfortable, but obviously it's impossible to discuss this issue in any detail without doing so.)
To start with the more important point, which the
Atlantic article does not emphasize: Most people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA*), and a large part of the population of Latin America -- two of our country's major sources of immigrants --
are actually white, and Americans think of them as non-white only due to cultural differences which have nothing to do with race (it is in this sense, and
only in this sense, that the "race is just a social construct" nonsense has some truth to it). Most people in MENA are racially indistinguishable from most southern Europeans, and it was only when the rise of Islam divided the Mediterranean basin into two mutually-hostile
occupation zones that the basin's inhabitants started thinking of themselves as two sharply-distinct groups. Much later, in the time of colonialism, Europeans re-interpreted this distinction as MENA people being "non-white", like most colonized peoples elsewhere in the world; the modern liberal heirs of colonial racial thinking have substituted the term "people of color" for "non-white", but the error is the same. What differences in physical appearance exist between people in MENA and in southern Europe are mostly a matter of different traditions in clothing and facial hair, and as immigrants from MENA in Europe or the US become assimilated and lose these cultural differences, in most cases they register as "white" by all the same visual cues by which people of southern European ancestry do.
The same applies to some of the population of India, though India is far more racially diverse than the Middle East. Nobody would look at, say, Nikki Haley and think "not white" if they were unaware of her ancestry.
(As a further example of this point, modern genetics has recently confirmed what historians always knew -- that most of the population of Turkey
is descended from the original Greek and Greek-related population of ancient Anatolia, who adopted Turkish language and culture and the Islamic religion after the Turkic conquest in medieval times. We think of Greeks as "white" and Turks as "people of color", but the differences are purely cultural -- the actual racial stock is the same.)
As for Latin America, the original colonizers who gave the region its dominant languages and cultures were from Spain and Portugal. Today the region's population is a mix of descendants of immigrants from many areas, plus descendants of the original Indians, in varying proportions in different countries. A large part of it is still of mostly Spanish or Portuguese or other European (or Middle Eastern) ancestry, who are thus "white" by any reasonable definition. Again, it is culture and geographical origin which leads Americans to classify very racially-diverse immigrants from Latin America as an undifferentiated "non-white" or "of color" category, ignoring whether their ancestors were mostly Maya, mostly Spanish, or anything else.
The US Census Bureau, by the way, acknowledges these facts. It
defines "white" as "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" and recognizes that "Latino" or "Hispanic" do not refer to a race and that people who self-identify by those terms may be of any race.
The significance of all this for the "majority-minority" delusion is that Latinos are the largest "minority" in the US, and among the fastest-growing. It's largely the growth of the Latino population that fuels the claims that "people of color" will outnumber whites in the US in two or three decades. But a huge part of the US Latino population, probably the majority, actually
is white, and as Americans of Latino ancestry assimilate generation by generation, they more and more come to
self-identify simply as "white" and also to be perceived as such by other Americans. I've known people who had distant Mexican ancestry but knew no Spanish and registered visually and culturally as entirely "white". The same process applies to descendants of immigrants from MENA over time.
This is just a continuation of what has been happening throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and eastern Europe were widely perceived as racially inferior and as threatening to overwhelm the "superior" Anglo-Saxon dominant population of the US. Today the descendants of those immigrants think of themselves as "white" and are seen as such by everyone else.
One can even see the same pattern in some other countries. In the British Isles, for centuries, many of the English viewed the Irish, Welsh, and Scots as inferior peoples and subjected them to horrific bigotry and brutality.
Modern genetics has shown that all four peoples are actually of the same ancestry.
If you look at the Census Bureau's
2019 estimated racial breakdown of the US population, the category "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino" is 60.1%. This is the number people have in mind when they claim the US is going to become "majority-minority" in two or three decades. But the figure for "white alone" -- the actual racial category -- is 76.3%. A majority that large is not going to become a minority by 2050, and probably not ever, especially since immigration from Latin America actually contributes to it.
This is politically significant for two reasons. First, the "majority-minority" myth is a powerful force
driving white voters toward the Republican party and right-wing views generally. If they realized that it
is just a myth, many of those who now vote right-wing might be less inclined to do so -- which is why liberals' triumphalist embrace of the myth is foolish and self-defeating. Second, the myth fuels a dangerous complacency on the left, because of their perception that minorities overwhelmingly vote Democratic. This is not even universally true, but my point is that as white Americans of Latino or MENA descent merge indistinguishably into the broader white population (as Italian- and Irish-Americans did generations ago), their voting patterns become more similar to those of white Americans generally.
Please read this, and prepare to be a bit shocked if you're on the left. We cannot count on a shift in the country's racial make-up to overwhelm and defeat the Republicans, because that shift is not happening the way liberals believe it is, and even the country's racial make-up itself is not what liberals believe it is.
So that's one of the two main flaws in the majority-minority myth. The other, to which
the Atlantic article devotes the bulk of its attention, is that racial differences -- real or perceived -- are becoming blurred over time due to intermarriage:
In reality, racial diversity is increasing not only at a nationwide level but also within American families -- indeed within individual Americans. Nearly three in 10 Asian, one in four Latino, and one in five Black newlyweds are married to a member of a different ethnic or racial group. More than three-quarters of these unions are with a white partner. For more and more Americans, racial integration is embedded in their closest relationships.
Both right-wing racism and the left-wing obsession with race share the error of thinking of races (and pseudo-racial categories like "Latino") as sharply-bounded, immutably-distinct groups, like separate species. Even mixed-race people are perceived as a new group or lumped in with one side or the other of their ancestry. The reality is that all humans are of the same species, and intermarriage and blurring of racial distinctions
is inevitable as the cultural taboos against it erode away. In fact, the US of 2050 will not be a country with a clearly definable percentage of white vs non-white people at all, but rather one which can no longer be fully described by such categories, however much the racial essentialists of all political stripes will still struggle to do so. And that, as those of us who are
not racial essentialists must surely recognize, will be a good thing.
[*This abbreviation is widely used in academia. Sorry if it looks odd, but repeatedly typing out "Middle East and North Africa" gets a bit cumbersome.]
