The census and right-wing hysteria
Several years ago, the Census Bureau began to predict that the United States would become a majority-minority nation by the 2040s — that African- and Asian-Americans, as well as Latinos, would outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Last year the census underlined its prediction by announcing that non-Hispanic white babies under the age of 1 were already in the minority.
These numbers have become a handy data point for whites fearful that they are being threatened and “overwhelmed” by a growing tide of darker-skinned people. In this way, the census may have unintentionally increased white racism, thereby justifying the longstanding Republican strategy of turning itself into a whites-first party. White fears probably even helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election.
Nonetheless, the “minority-majority” forecast, as it is commonly interpreted, is likely to be proven wrong. Not only could whites remain a majority well past midcentury, but they will retain political, economic and cultural control of the country long after that.
Simply put, the demographers have not taken into account how the perception of race is likely to change in the coming years. For example, whites are already seeing the descendants of some Asian and Latino immigrants as being similar to them. Consequently, whites treat them as white. This “whitening” process will only increase in the future.
The census prediction is based on at least five mistakes, all of them correctable. In an article last year in The American Prospect, the sociologist Richard Alba showed how the first three mistakes underestimated the likely growth of the population that views itself as white.
Mistake No. 1 The Office of Management and Budget requires the census to count people of white-Latino, white-Asian and white-black ancestry as nonwhite and, in its minority-majority prediction, the census counts all of these populations as minorities. In reality, however, a number of these so-called mixed-race people, especially from the first two populations, identify themselves as white.
Mistake No. 2 The census seems to have failed to anticipate the likelihood that the number of mixedrace people who see themselves as white will grow much more in the coming decades, primarily as a result of increasing Latino-white and Asian-white intermarriages. By the 2040s, when the children of these unions have become adults, a significant number will marry whites themselves and become parents — thereby further increasing the population seen as white and thus the white majority.
Mistake No. 3 The census forgot American history — specifically the long history of the whitening of populations previously labeled nonwhite. In the 18th century, when the first Swedish and German immigrants arrived here, Benjamin Franklin and others complained that their skin color was endangering Anglo-Saxon racial purity. A generation or two later, their descendants, now Americanized, looked perfectly Anglo-Saxon.
In the 19th century, the Irish, particularly poor ones, were described as black or swarthy, as were the equally poor Eastern and Southern European immigrants who followed. But by the 1960s, their grandchildren were called white ethnics.
The same whitening is now taking place among the descendants of Asian and light-skinned Latinos, particularly those already in the middle class. But nativeborn African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and African immigrants are still excluded.
Mistake No. 4 This could be called the identity-identification paradox. The census asks people how they identify themselves racially, but a meaningful prediction requires knowing how they are identified by others.
The question is whom whites will still identify as nonwhite by the 2040s. Most likely, ever-larger number of whites will see people of mixed races and the children of intermarriages as white, increasing the white population.
Mistake No. 5 The census has lumped African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans together, projected their numbers to the 2040s and decided that the sum should be labeled a majority.
But the three populations differ in many ways. Moreover, they compete against one another for jobs and other scarce resources, including political power. They may discriminate against one another when they want or need to, and can do so.
Each racial group is diverse in many ways, to begin with by initial national origin. Chinese immigrants are culturally different from Japanese ones, Mexicans are unlike Peruvians and West Indian blacks do not share the same experience as African-Americans, even though both were once enslaved.
Each is also internally stratified. Rich members keep their distance from the rest, and descendants of earlier immigrants sometimes exploit the later arrivals. They may even discriminate against one another by region of origin and shades of skin color.
Because of all this, even beyond the 2040s, the populations are unlikely to act together as a unified group, a cohesive voting bloc or any kind of cultural majority.
In all fairness, the Census Bureau’s majority-minority forecast reports have always been brief and strictly limited to the numbers. They never considered possible changes in the perception of race in the next two decades. Perhaps the demographers never even imagined that their findings could be interpreted to demonstrate that nonwhites would “overwhelm” whites in a couple of decades.
The problem with the minority-majority forecast
Had that idea come up, they might have suggested that non-Hispanic whites’ becoming a minority said nothing about whether they would still control the country socially, economically, politically and almost every other way. After all, states like California and Texas are already majority-minority, and others, including Georgia Maryland and Nevada, will soon join them. Whites remain dominant in all of them.
The census cannot say this, but whites should fear instead that many of them are increasingly suffering some of the same economic and political pains as nonwhites. All are victims of an economy that has computerized many jobs and sent others overseas. All are victims of a political system that is ever more dominated by business and a donor class that funds many election campaigns.
However, most whites do not see their common victimhood and too many blame blacks, Latinos and now Middle Eastern and other recent immigrants for their troubles.
The Census Bureau’s majority-minority prediction could be interpreted as contributing to this blaming practice. The bureau will need to address this in case the forecast becomes a weapon in the country’s political battles, impairing its credibility.
The census could start by pointing out that rising intermarriage, whitening and other cultural changes could affect and even invalidate its prediction for the 2040s.
Or it could go further and abandon that forecast and the entire majority-minority idea. The country will be better off if the Census Bureau does so as soon as possible.
Herbert J. Gans, a professor emeritus of sociology at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sociology and Social Policy.”