 |
Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Why the Announcement of a by Sabrina Tavernise New York Times 22 Nov. 2018 |
 thanks to https://www.tolerance.org/magazine |
WASHINGTON — The graphic was splashy by the Census
Bureau’s standards and it showed an unmistakable moment in America’s future: the
year 2044, when white Americans were projected to fall below half the population
and lose their majority status.
The presentation of the data disturbed Kenneth
Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw it while looking through a
government report. The graphic made demographic change look like a zero-sum game
that white Americans were losing, he thought, and could provoke a political
backlash.
So after the report’s release three years ago, he
organized a meeting with Katherine Wallman, at the time the chief statistician
for the United States.
“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr.
Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added,
“Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If
you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”
In a nation preoccupied by race, the moment when white
Americans will make up less than half the country’s population has become an
object of fascination.
For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of
doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For
progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable
political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand
victories to the Democratic Party.
But many academics have grown increasingly
uneasy with the public fixation. They point to recent research demonstrating the
data’s power to shape perceptions. Some are questioning the assumptions the
Census Bureau is making about race, and whether projecting the American
population even makes sense at a time of rapid demographic change when the
categories themselves seem to be shifting.
Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale
University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she
knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller
could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white
majority was too obvious to study.
But she did, together with a colleague,
Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been
talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014,
showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial
shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than
those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive
immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face
discrimination in the future.
Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University,
remembered being stunned when she saw the research.
“It was like, ‘Oh wow,
these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said.
Beyond
concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning
whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they
say, is whom the government counts as white.
In the Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed
race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This
has had the effect of understating the size of the white population, they say,
because many Americans with one white parent may identify as white or partly
white. On their census forms, Americans can choose more than one race and
whether they are of Hispanic origin.
Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry
outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born
Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be
a small group now — around 7 percent of the population, according to Pew — but
will steadily grow. Are those children white? Are they minority? Are they both?
What about the grandchildren?
“The question really for us as a society is there are
all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what
does white even mean anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting
time, an indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very
strongly.”
The Census Bureau has long produced projections of the
American population, but they were rarely the topic of talk shows or newspaper
headlines.
Then, in August 2008 at the height of Barack Obama’s
campaign for president, the bureau projected that non-Hispanic whites would drop
below half the population by 2042, far earlier than expected. (The projections,
which change with birth, death and migration rates, have also placed the shift
in 2050 and in 2044.)
“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers,
a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008
projection. “People went crazy.”
It was not just white nationalists worried about
losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning
political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He
said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem
less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the
good that could come from immigration.
“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their
reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic
destiny.”
Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data
differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this
spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a
white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white
category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people
through intermarriage.
It is unclear exactly when the idea of a
majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have
surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Ms. Wallman, the chief statistician for the United
States from 1992 to 2017, who helped develop the first governmentwide standard
for data on race and ethnicity that came into use in the late 1970s, said she
did not like having to categorize by race, but that the government had to for
oversight.
“I wish we didn’t have to ask,” she said. “But to me,
that’s the rock and the hard place.”
Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or
employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture,
immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over
time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share
of the American population, there were furious arguments over how to categorize
newcomers from Europe.
But eventually, the immigrants from eastern and
southern Europe came to be considered white.
That is because race is about power, not biology, said
Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.
“The closer you get to social power, the closer you
get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the
early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial
difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into
whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.
To Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University
of New York, the Census Bureau’s projections seemed stuck in an outdated
classification system. The bureau assigns a nonwhite label to most people who
are reported as having both white and minority ancestry, he said. He likened
this to the one-drop rule, a 19th-century system of racial classification in
which having even one African ancestor meant you were black.
“The census data is distorting the on-the-ground
realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba said. “There might never be a
majority-minority society; it’s unclear.”
Asked for a response to Dr. Alba’s critique, a Census
Bureau spokesman said in an email that “we constantly consult with stakeholders,
and scholars, including Richard Alba and other federal agencies to improve our
techniques, methodologies, and testing of population projections.”
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings
Institution, argued that the Census Bureau was doing the best that it could at a
time when society was changing quickly. He was skeptical that today’s Asians and
Hispanics were analogous to the white ethnic Americans of the 20th century, and
believed that a less conservative count would not do much to change the bigger
picture. Besides, it is not the job of academics to protect people from
demographic change, he said.
“Irrespective of the year, or the turning point, the
message needs to come out about what the actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We
are becoming a much more racially diverse society among our young generation.”
Others say they are not sugarcoating statistics, but
showing that the numbers have many interpretations, and that
white-versus-everyone-else is only one. It not only reduces the American
patchwork to a crude, divisive political formula, they say, but perhaps more
important — with the categories in flux — it might not even be true.
The Census Bureau released new projections this year
in March filled with data about the country’s future. In the coming decades,
adults 65 and older will outnumber children for the first time in the country’s
history. The share of mixed-race children is set to double.
But there was no mention of a year when white
Americans would fall below half the population.
When asked about the change, a spokesman for the Bureau said: “It was just us getting back to sticking to data.”
