In 2015, the Census Bureau published a report projecting that by 2044, the United States’ white majority would become merely a white plurality: immigration and fertility trends would lead to America’s ethnic and racial minorities outnumbering its white population.
Since then, for a certain subset of Americans, each annual release by the bureau — neutral, nonpartisan researchers who produce deliberately staid reports — has become a sort of countdown to the white apocalypse. Worse, we now talk about cross-racial fertility rates Darwinistically, as if the census were monitoring a population of elephant seals in competition for a rookery.
In a country whose history has been shaped by the boundaries among racial groups, this projected demographic shift is undoubtedly important. Given the racialized nature of our political parties, it also has electoral consequences. However, if we are to overcome the division that defined our past, we must stop reinforcing the salience of those boundaries in the future.
I am not arguing that the Census Bureau should stop collecting this valuable data, à […]
The real issue here is assimilation. While the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants have been able to assimilate into this country, the African and Middle Eastern cultures have struggled to assimilate. In part, this is due to the emphasis on education in the Oriental and Eastern cultures, while the Black and African cultures have not embraced education to the same extent. Islamic immigrants tend to maintain their separateness through their female dressing customs, again limiting their assimilation. So what will hold this mishmash of peoples together? Not national identity and not religion, but what? There has to be something, or else it will fall apart, which it may be in the process of doing. And don’t say the Constitution, because that has come to mean nothing more than gun ownership and violence.