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By now almost everyone has heard the US will be a "minority" majority nation in the coming decades. But this is entirely do to how the Census defines race and not how individuals define race. The Census Bureau however has over the decades changed how it defines race many times. Many people erroneously think racial categories in the US we have today are biological and/or genetic and are immutable. Wrong. Very wrong.
The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation — and when that might happen — is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.
Opinion | Who’s Afraid of a White Minority?
Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.
Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed — or accepted — as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, “people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants” will “not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people.”
But before continuing with this point, let’s turn back to Alba. Following up in the Washington Post in 2017, Alba addressed the interrelated questions of how mixed-race Americans classify themselves, how the census classifies them and how the census classification deals with the offspring of racially and ethnically mixed parents.
Alba writes:
The census defines as Hispanic or Latino “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” In the 2010 census, there were 50.48 million Hispanics, 53 percent of whom self-identified as white.
The Census Bureau explains that it considers race and ethnicity to be two separate and distinct concepts. What is race? An individual can report as White, Black or African-American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, or some other race. Survey respondents may report multiple races. What is ethnicity? Ethnicity determines whether a person is of Hispanic origin or not. For this reason, ethnicity is broken out in two categories, Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics may report as any race.
When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.
This raises a question: If the census dropped the binary non-Hispanic white-minority division and instead stressed the large number of people of mixed ancestry who self-identify as white, would the anxieties of whites fearful of a majority-minority America be lessened?
A second question is how many Americans who are currently inclined to see immigrants as outsiders and as threats to the nation’s culture will perceive those coming from Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and North African nations as part of the American mainstream — even as more of those migrants intermarry. And what about the second-, third- and fourth-generation offspring of increasing numbers of Latino-white and Asian-white unions?
Trump has driven home not only to his base but to many others the message of a threatening majority-minority future.
There’s a big problem with how the census measures race
...census statistics will continue to roil the public discussion of diversity, by exaggerating white decline and the imminence of a majority-minority United States. Political figures and pundits who oppose immigration and diversity could exploit that, peddling an alarmist narrative that doesn’t fit with the long-standing reality of mixing between immigrant and established Americans.
...blurring of differences from whites is especially true for people from mixed Hispanic and white families. Family mixing weakens attachments to the Hispanic group, research finds. According to a recent Pew study, a growing number of such individuals no longer identify as Hispanic — much as Americans from, say, a mix of Slavic and Italian and Irish backgrounds may now mainly think of themselves as whites.
The "One Drop Rule" is alive and well.Opinion | Who’s Afraid of a White Minority?
Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.
Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed — or accepted — as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, “people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants” will “not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people.”
But before continuing with this point, let’s turn back to Alba. Following up in the Washington Post in 2017, Alba addressed the interrelated questions of how mixed-race Americans classify themselves, how the census classifies them and how the census classification deals with the offspring of racially and ethnically mixed parents.
Alba writes:
Currently, 14 to 15 percent of infants born in the United States are multiethnic or multiracial, a number that was just 11 to 12 percent in 2000. But despite the fact that most of those children have a white parent, inadequacies in the census classifications mean that the great majority of them are identified as nonwhites. This is important, because most partly white individuals behave like whites in sociological terms. They grow up in neighborhoods with many whites, have white friends as adults, think of themselves mostly as white or partly white, and marry whites.
In addition, according to Alba, “when individuals report having Hispanic ancestry, the Census Bureau assumes, following the O.M.B. standards, that they are only Hispanic regardless of their answers to the race question.” In other words, Hispanics who describe themselves as white are classified as minorities, not as whites.
The census defines as Hispanic or Latino “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” In the 2010 census, there were 50.48 million Hispanics, 53 percent of whom self-identified as white.
The Census Bureau explains that it considers race and ethnicity to be two separate and distinct concepts. What is race? An individual can report as White, Black or African-American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, or some other race. Survey respondents may report multiple races. What is ethnicity? Ethnicity determines whether a person is of Hispanic origin or not. For this reason, ethnicity is broken out in two categories, Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics may report as any race.
When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.
This raises a question: If the census dropped the binary non-Hispanic white-minority division and instead stressed the large number of people of mixed ancestry who self-identify as white, would the anxieties of whites fearful of a majority-minority America be lessened?
A second question is how many Americans who are currently inclined to see immigrants as outsiders and as threats to the nation’s culture will perceive those coming from Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and North African nations as part of the American mainstream — even as more of those migrants intermarry. And what about the second-, third- and fourth-generation offspring of increasing numbers of Latino-white and Asian-white unions?
Trump has driven home not only to his base but to many others the message of a threatening majority-minority future.
There’s a big problem with how the census measures race
...census statistics will continue to roil the public discussion of diversity, by exaggerating white decline and the imminence of a majority-minority United States. Political figures and pundits who oppose immigration and diversity could exploit that, peddling an alarmist narrative that doesn’t fit with the long-standing reality of mixing between immigrant and established Americans.
...blurring of differences from whites is especially true for people from mixed Hispanic and white families. Family mixing weakens attachments to the Hispanic group, research finds. According to a recent Pew study, a growing number of such individuals no longer identify as Hispanic — much as Americans from, say, a mix of Slavic and Italian and Irish backgrounds may now mainly think of themselves as whites.
Using the “one-drop” rule for Hispanic origin leads to inaccuracies
Distorted census data can result in inaccurate statements of “fact” and misleading projections for the future.
For instance, since 2013, the Census Bureau has declared a majority of babies born in the United States are nonwhite — by counting all infants with any mixed origins as nonwhite. But this is only true under a “one-drop” rule. National Center for Health Statistics data shows that more than 50 percent of U.S. babies have a non-Hispanic white mother.
And classifying those from mixed Hispanic and white families as “nonwhites” results in Census Bureau population projections of a majority-minority society by the mid-2040s. But such projections are grossly misleading because of the binary thinking that undergirds them and the misclassification of individuals who are partly white and partly minority.
Distorted census data can result in inaccurate statements of “fact” and misleading projections for the future.
For instance, since 2013, the Census Bureau has declared a majority of babies born in the United States are nonwhite — by counting all infants with any mixed origins as nonwhite. But this is only true under a “one-drop” rule. National Center for Health Statistics data shows that more than 50 percent of U.S. babies have a non-Hispanic white mother.
And classifying those from mixed Hispanic and white families as “nonwhites” results in Census Bureau population projections of a majority-minority society by the mid-2040s. But such projections are grossly misleading because of the binary thinking that undergirds them and the misclassification of individuals who are partly white and partly minority.
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