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.
Ron Powell
08/06/2019 @ 11:37 am
“… a shift in majority doesn’t necessarily lead to a shift in power….,”
Thus, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer’s rush to fastrack as many Trump nominees to the Federal bench as possible….
Jonathan Wolfman
08/06/2019 @ 12:36 pm
Right. And as we know Power is a lot more than numbers. Just ask South Africans.
08/06/2019 @ 3:26 pm
That was exactly what I was thinking. A white, male minority held a strangle hold on South Africa from the date of it’s creation until the 1990s.
Jonathan Wolfman
08/06/2019 @ 3:30 pm
You and I are dangerously thinking more in sync here…. 😉
08/06/2019 @ 3:38 pm
It isn’t ONLY about race, it is about racial power. Of the 607 Americans featured on the Forbes List of American Billionaires, just four were black (and this includes three retired sports jocks/entertainment people like Jay-Z, Oprah and Michael Jordan). That leaves 603 white people; most of whom are afraid of losing their privileges and power.
koshersalaami
08/06/2019 @ 4:16 pm
Part of my point is that they don’t equate. Now, what makes this worry weirder is that the people who are worried about a shift in racial power are not people with that kind of power in the first place. We’re really looking at something more akin to the three guys with cookies meme, with the guy in the middle blaming the poor guy for a theft perpetrated by the rich guy.
Bitey
03/09/2020 @ 4:52 pm
I agree with you that it isn’t restricted to the poor. I recall open discussions of people fearing white people being put into slavery when Obama was elected. It is among the craziest things I have ever heard. I also think we all have some nutty notions rolling around in the dusty corners of our minds. I’ll give you one of mine, which I find more than mildly embarrassing…but makes the point.
I lived in Japan for a year, back in the 1980s. One night, walking on a tiny, dark street, it popped into my conscious mind to watch out for blow darts or ninja figures who might be lurking. The notion is insane, and I don’t think it would have passed my lips if someone were with me, but it did occur to me that bad old movies using stereotypes had informed the dark corners of my mind with these notions…unchallenged. Flashes and impressions leave notions in a part of our brains which go unchallenged…I believe.
Now, when Americans consider the U.S. no longer being majority white…there is no telling what ideas may arise. And, those ideas will not be merely among the poor.
Koshersalaami
03/09/2020 @ 6:11 pm
When Americans no longer consider America majority White? I don’t know how they’re going to reach that conclusion, because at that point the definition of “White” will be more ambiguous. What will they notice? They may hear about it in the news but that’s pretty much it. Look at Congress. That’s where the power is. Does it really resemble the ethnic distribution of America? It doesn’t remotely, and I do mean remotely, represent the gender distribution of America.
Particularly once you add money into the equation, the notion of majority rule in the US becomes comical. A shift in percentage from 51% to 49% will not mean anything.
Koshersalaami
03/09/2020 @ 11:31 pm
Wait, the Obama slavery thing just sank in. Forgetting most of the enormous myriad of reasons such a concept is clinically insane, why exactly did anyone think he’d attempt to enslave his mother’s family? Are there really White people who don’t know who raised him? My God, the depth of hatred you need to believe something like that was until recently beyond my experience. Even on Open. After OurSalon closed, Steel Breeze (who I no longer remember how to contact) brought me to a website where some of the antisemites were that kind of bad.
Alan Milner
08/09/2019 @ 3:00 pm
Most of your arguments ring true but…
My opinion: this is the old divide and conquer strategy updated. Making poor white people afraid of what will happen when poor black people outnumber poor white people obscures the fact that they are both poor because the rich keep them that way. But I think you’re missing part of the story.
Low to moderate income white people are fearful of the increasing percentage of people of color because they fear greater competition from minority group members for housing, jobs, and educational opportunities, and that’s a real fear triggered by school busing and affirmative action programs to name but two of many..
I believe that anyone who has been enjoying the social benefits of being in the privileged majority “caste” would justifiably fear losing that privileged status, whether or not there’s any legitimacy to the fear, and there is reason for these people to fear reprisals from the collective minority once it achieves majority status. I don’t believe that would happen, but I understand why some “white” people would think it might and fear the consequences.
There is a confusion between fears of the loss of political power and fearing the loss of social status. I believe that a large part of the anti-immigrant hysteria stems from the fact that, while the “fearful whites” can’t do anything about the increasing percentage of people of color in the American electorate, they feel they can prevent the inevitable demographic change -or slow it down – by preventing immigration by the groups they are afraid of.
koshersalaami
08/09/2019 @ 5:34 pm
I don’t think this is remotely restricted to poor Whites.