Majority-Minority Myths

Abstract

Majority-Minority Myths Jake Rosenfeld (bio) The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream by Richard Alba Princeton University Press, 2020, 336 pp. Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics by Zoltan L. Hajnal Cambridge University Press, 2020, 362 pp. The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals by Christopher T. Stout University of Virginia Press, 2020, 268 pp. In a commencement address at the University of California, San Diego in 1997, President Bill Clinton spoke of a time when white people would no longer constitute a majority in the United States. In the decades since, the idea that growing diversity will bring about a “majority-minority” America in the near future has become a widespread belief across the ideological spectrum, propelled by periodic Census updates, like a report that 2013 marked the first year that more non-white babies had been born in the United States than white ones. There are three major problems with this now-clichéd belief. First, it scares many white people, pushing their political stances toward the right. Numerous studies confirm that merely mentioning the demographic shift is enough to change their political views. As Ezra Klein has written, “The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it.” Many white people interpret stories about the imminent reordering of the country’s racial and ethnic hierarchy as a threat. Second, it leads Democrats astray. Divvying up the nation between whites and nonwhites implies a neat, fixed, and immutable ordering of a complex set of shifting racial and ethnic identities. The corollary— that a shared political identity should bind minorities to a leftist, emancipatory project against white oppression—induces complacency in Democratic Party organizing and policymaking realms, and ignores the varied ethnic and class backgrounds of those who comprise this broad,diverse population. The 2020 election shook the premise that nonwhite voters shared a liberal political identity, with growing evidence of an across-the-board shift toward the GOP among Latinos and, to a smaller degree, African Americans. But evidence that the “browning of America” may not lead to progressive nirvana predated the election. Bush’s 2004 re-election bid was buoyed by his record performance among Latinos. Since then, between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted for Republican presidential candidates despite the restrictionist turn in the party’s immigration policies. Which brings us to the third problem with the majority-minority claim: it’s empirically wrong. ________ Understanding why it’s wrong requires [End Page 137] a look at a couple of momentous demographic developments of the past few decades, along with how the Census makes sense of them. These are the topics sociologist Richard Alba explores in his important new book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream. During a period when xenophobic political campaigns, anti-immigrant policies, and the resurgence of white supremacy have generated so many headlines, millions of white Americans have befriended, married, and had children with minorities. One in ten children recently born in the United States has parents with different ethic identities. That percentage will inevitably grow; one in six marriages today pair individuals with distinct ethnicities. More than 40 percent of all these intermarriages involve whites marrying Latinos. The children of many of these mixed partnerships have helped propel another underappreciated dynamic of the past few decades: the mass incorporation of millions of minorities into the American mainstream. This trend extends beyond traditionally high-achieving Asian-American subpopulations. Among high school graduates, students with at least some Hispanic heritage now continue on to college at the same rate as white students. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of Hispanic-background individuals who finished college with a BA doubled. They now comprise 13 percent of all entrants into our most selective colleges and universities. Click for larger view View full resolution Outside a Latinos for Trump campaign rally in Orlando, Florida, in October 2020 (Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images) These children of minority-white partnerships are the fulcrum upon which the majority-minority hypothesis pivots. The Census’s demographic projections rest on a racial and ethnic...