The day White people are no longer the majority in America

There are apparently White people out there who are afraid of this day. This day will eventually come, and you know what will happen when it does?

Absolutely nothing

at least in terms of race.

There are all sorts of reasons nothing will happen, enough that I have to wonder how anyone thinking reached the conclusion that this day would change anything. “Anyone thinking” is of course where the answer lies – those who worry about this day aren’t thinking.  I’ll list some reasons nothing will happen though I probably won’t think of them all.

  • Defining who isn’t White won’t be easy. The racially mixed population has been expanding for a long time and, for whatever asinine reason, we tend to classify biracial people as non-White, but in order for anyone to be biracial (with White as one of the two races) they have to have a White parent. Are we expecting biracial children to turn on their White parents? Why? While we’re at it, what about adopted children of different races? (At least two of us on this site have them. To put things in perspective, if I get any grandchildren they will be half Asian and the Asian half will be from my side of the family.)
  • Voting doesn’t split strictly along racial lines, nor do other varieties of political action.
  • Who has money will not change on that day. Wealthy people have more political power than everyone else and, on that day, most of the wealth will still be in White hands. This is the single most important reason nothing will change. I could actually write this piece based on this reason alone.
  • The electorate does not bifurcate between White and non-White or, put a little differently, the non-White population of the United States is not unified enough to take over anything the day Whites are in theory outnumbered. Whites will still be the largest population, so there will be a White plurality even though there will not strictly speaking be a White majority. Even if races voted strictly as blocs, which they don’t, you’d need every non-White bloc to be unified to change things on that day.
  • When the absolute majority shifts, it won’t shift everywhere. Places that have White local control will continue to have White local control and, as was shown very graphically in the 2016 election, one party can lose by nearly three million votes and still gain or retain the Presidency. In terms of frightened White people, the election of Donald Trump in the face of that unbalanced a vote is proof that a shift in majority doesn’t necessarily lead to a shift in power.
  • The Constitution protects Americans in general. White Americans will not lose Constitutional protections at such point as they lose their absolute majority status. Even if there were significant minorities with that loss of protections for Whites in mind, which there aren’t, it takes way, way more than an absolute majority to change the Constitution. Those who are now frustrated by the inability to enact tyranny of the majority will eventually be protected by that same inability – assuming they need the protection, which is highly unlikely.

So far I’ve spoken about what will happen the day the White absolute majority disappears. But what about after that? What happens when the demographic shift becomes more pronounced over time?

Still nothing.

Assimilation will continue. Being what we currently define as White will just make less of a difference over time, and the specific way it will make less of a difference is that other populations will gravitate more toward what are now White cultural norms. How culturally non-White are second and third generation Americans now? We maintain vestiges of our individual cultures but we absorb a tremendous amount of what might be considered mainstream American culture which, at this point, is more White than anything else, understanding that “White” in this context functions more as an ethnic than as a racial designation. What I mean by that is that immigrant populations intermarry here and so the cultural background of third and fourth generation Americans is so diverse that no single root ethnic culture predominates, and so the mix itself becomes a new norm. The primary name we use for this mix is White, and so in this context “White” can be used in an ethnic/cultural default sense rather than in a racial sense per se. Not everyone who finds themselves in this default culture is racially White, at least not strictly. (More about this in a minute.) I should add here in case it isn’t obvious that the White racial population in America is a lot bigger than the White ethnic population. Using myself as an example, I am White racially but I do not identify as White ethnically, I identify as Jewish in that my root ethnic culture still predominates, but – and this “but” is demographically significant – I have absorbed elements of White ethnicity by virtue of being raised here by people who were raised here. I am not my European grandparents.

People who worry about “White” tend not to differentiate between race and ethnicity. Analytically, that’s a mistake, because there is no culture in race, only in ethnicity. If one is going to make generalizations about a population – not about how they’re treated, which can be based on actual race because race is so easy to identify externally, but about how they actually are – those generalizations only make sense if applied ethnically. In this sense, many of the descendants of Americans who may not be White racially are likely to be White ethnically through intermarriage and assimilation and, even if not completely assimilated, partially assimilated. So, as the White racial majority shrinks, the White ethnic population actually grows. The end result will be a “White” population who may on average be a bit darker but are culturally pretty much the same.

My overall point is that the theoretical shift out of an absolute White majority here will be functionally undetectable. Even down the road as that loss of racial majority becomes more pronounced, it is likely to remain functionally undetectable.

 

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