Opinion | Who’s Afraid of a White Minority? - The New York Times

The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

• Aug 30, 2018

The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation — and when that might happen — is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.

Two articles that appeared in the opinion section of The Times over the past few years made the case that misleading statistical artifacts used by the Census Bureau have increased the fear of a majority-minority America, a fear that played a crucial role in the 2016 election.

Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.

Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed — or accepted — as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, “people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants” will “not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people.”

But before continuing with this point, let’s turn back to Alba. Following up in the Washington Post in 2017, Alba addressed the interrelated questions of how mixed-race Americans classify themselves, how the census classifies them and how the census classification deals with the offspring of racially and ethnically mixed parents.

Alba writes:

Currently, 14 to 15 percent of infants born in the United States are multiethnic or multiracial, a number that was just 11 to 12 percent in 2000. But despite the fact that most of those children have a white parent, inadequacies in the census classifications mean that the great majority of them are identified as nonwhites. This is important, because most partly white individuals behave like whites in sociological terms. They grow up in neighborhoods with many whites, have white friends as adults, think of themselves mostly as white or partly white, and marry whites.

In addition, according to Alba, “when individuals report having Hispanic ancestry, the Census Bureau assumes, following the O.M.B. standards, that they are only Hispanic regardless of their answers to the race question.” In other words, Hispanics who describe themselves as white are classified as minorities, not as whites.

The census provides data illuminating Alba’s argument. From 2000 to 2017, non-Hispanic whites fell from 69.1 percent of the population to 60.7 percent. The declining percentage of non-Hispanic whites is the basis for census predictions that whites will become a minority sometime in the early 2040s.

The census defines as Hispanic or Latino “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” In the 2010 census, there were 50.48 million Hispanics, 53 percent of whom self-identified as white.

The Census Bureau explains that it

considers race and ethnicity to be two separate and distinct concepts. What is race? An individual can report as White, Black or African-American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, or some other race. Survey respondents may report multiple races. What is ethnicity? Ethnicity determines whether a person is of Hispanic origin or not. For this reason, ethnicity is broken out in two categories, Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. Hispanics may report as any race.

When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.

This raises a question: If the census dropped the binary non-Hispanic white-minority division and instead stressed the large number of people of mixed ancestry who self-identify as white, would the anxieties of whites fearful of a majority-minority America be lessened?

A second question is how many Americans who are currently inclined to see immigrants as outsiders and as threats to the nation’s culture will perceive those coming from Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and North African nations as part of the American mainstream — even as more of those migrants intermarry. And what about the second-, third- and fourth-generation offspring of increasing numbers of Latino-white and Asian-white unions?

Trump has driven home not only to his base but to many others the message of a threatening majority-minority future.

Alba himself worries that the majority-minority prediction has become lodged in American thinking. In an email, he wrote that

the notion of the majority-minority society has a powerful hold on the public imagination at the moment. But I continue to believe (or hope) that another view of the evolution of our society can eventually win out, especially given the toxic impact on our politics of the majority-minority idea.

Alba’s hopes received a boost from a survey of 2,600 non-Hispanic whites conducted in July 2016, during the campaign, by Dowell Myers and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California.

They asked one half of the respondents to read a story about the “conventional narrative about the decline of non-Hispanic whites” and the other half to read a story detailing “the growth of Hispanic and Asian-American populations” but that “also mentioned the rise of intermarriage and reported the Census Bureau’s alternative projection of a more diverse white majority persisting the rest of the century.”

Of those who read the first version, “46 percent of white Democrats and a whopping 74 percent of Republicans expressed anger or anxiety when reading about the impending white-minority status.” Of those who read the second version, “only 35 percent of white Democrats and 29 percent of white Republicans expressed anger or anxiousness.”

Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of the book “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality,” is far less optimistic. He wrote by email:

The image of these immigrants has been contaminated by Trumpian portrayals of criminals, benefit hunters, and opportunistic job competitors. Further, the vision of a more hybridized whiteness is still a couple decades away, and political minds are notoriously myopic.

It is not, Gest argued,

a strategy to reassure white Trump supporters, “Don’t worry. Those immigrants will soon be white too.” There is a pervasive perception that Latinos, Africans and Asians are simply too different, too far removed from what Sam Huntington called the “American creed.”

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, shares Gest’s pessimistic assessment. As a general rule of thumb, Mason argued, “people don’t respond well to being told that they’ll think differently one day. It comes across as patronizing and can cause them to stick to their original idea even more strongly.”

Mason believes that even though growing numbers of those with mixed parentage think of themselves as white, many other whites are not currently prepared to accept that claim:

It doesn’t matter if someone identifies as white as long as other people consider them to be nonwhite. In fact, I’d argue that the Dubois concept of the “wages of whiteness” requires that some groups NOT be white.

Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that in the contemporary political climate, the fear of cultural disruption has become so pervasive on the right that realistic facts and figures make little difference. As he wrote in an email:

My sense is that actual levels of migration, shifts in immigrants’ ethnic identification, and changing rates of intermarriage are, at best, only loosely coupled with perceptions of cultural threat among white voters, particularly those with moderate levels of education and those living outside of urban centers. Even though actual levels of undocumented migration from Mexico — and net migration from that country in general — have decreased in recent years, this in no way diminished the potency of Donald Trump’s xenophobic discourse in the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, this was true despite the fact that aggregate favorability toward immigrants has been steadily increasing in the United States over the past decade.

Bonikowski elaborated:

The reason for this is that many Trump supporters have long held strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these sentiments have only recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other Republicans before him, have actively stoked fears of demographic and cultural change and channeled them into powerful resentments toward minority groups. For many voters, such resentments are not rooted in everyday experience, not least because they tend to live in ethnically homogeneous, predominantly white communities, but rather, they are shaped by powerful nativist narratives perpetuated by right-wing politicians, partisan organizations, and media outlets.

From another vantage point altogether, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, defended census majority-minority calculations in an email, arguing that it is important for the country to face what he has called the “diversity explosion”:

Given the slow and in fact, last year, negative growth of the white population along with its rapid aging — it is important for older whites to understand that the only way we will have a growing labor force will be to embrace the younger racial minority populations.

Frey described projections that many young people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds will self-identify as white as “quite speculative.” He questioned putting forth such projections

for the sole purpose of potentially appealing to Trump supporters — many of whom do not seem to be interested in other demographic facts such as last decade’s decline of undocumented immigration to the U.S., or the greater number of migrants coming from Asia than from Latin America.

Howard Lavine, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota, staked out a middle ground, pessimistic in the short term, less so in the long term:

Intermarriage — especially among whites and Hispanics — may produce a substantial percentage of children (and grandchildren) who identify as white, but I doubt that such predictions will go far in currently assuaging the race-based status threat that many working class-whites feel today, and that Donald Trump exploited so successfully.

Over time, however, Lavine argued, as

races and cultures become less distinct (more assimilated), Republican voters who are dispositionally intolerant of difference (e.g., authoritarians) will find the political climate less threatening and the category of race per se less politically relevant.

Could a more multifaceted narrative than the binary white vs. minority projection into the future lessen the anxiety of some whites? Michael Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young, doubts it:

The actual date at which the U.S. becomes majority-minority is probably irrelevant to the typical Trump voter or Republican in general. My guess is that perceptions matter much more than reality.

In support of his view, Barber cited an intriguing research paper. “The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences,” by Douglas J. Ahler, a political scientist at Florida State University, and Gaurav Sood, then a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown.

Their research shows, Barber writes, that partisans have extremely biased perceptions of the “other” party, including survey data showing that people “think that 32 percent of Democrats are LGBT (vs. 6 percent in reality) and 38 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year (vs. 2 percent in reality).” With this in mind, Barber argued, “it isn’t a stretch to imagine that people think we’re already a majority-minority country when in fact we aren’t at all.”

Some of those I contacted suggested that only Trump and his fellow Republicans have the power to change the anti-immigrant, anti-minority tone of the political conversation. Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, argued, for example, that

Politicians and other opinion leaders play an important role in helping citizens make sense of the threats and opportunities they face. I expect the views of many white Americans would shift if President Trump and other leaders who deploy ethnonationalist messages collectively changed their tune, at least in terms of attitude intensity and priority.

In the highly unlikely event that that happened, “prejudices wouldn’t vanish, but they would be less politically potent for most people.” More realistically, Kalmoe wrote, “as long as prominent leaders continue to mobilize white fear and anger on the issue, citizens who trust them will follow.”

From a broader perspective, the current majority-minority controversy is a continuation of the never-ending, never-resolved struggle in this country over how to deal with a rapidly transforming multiracial, multiethnic society.

Robert Jones, the C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, put the problem this way in an email:

Throughout American history in particular, the question of whiteness has been at the center of these debates, fueled by the fact that social privileges and political rights were tied to whiteness.

Historically, this has played out in the practices of the Census Bureau and the Citizenship and Immigration Services that “recorded race and ethnicity categories over time, e.g., ‘Celt’ and ‘Hebrew’ once appeared outside of the ‘Caucasian’ category.”

Jones argues that

at the current moment in U.S. history, we actually need the admittedly fictional concept of “whiteness” to understand recent events that are driven by a motivation to defend a perceived threat to white demographic and cultural dominance: the mass murder of nine worshipers in Charleston by the Confederate flag wielding Dylann Roof, the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting “you/Jews will not replace us,” and even the unlikely but unflagging support for Donald Trump among white evangelical Protestants nostalgic to resurrect the cultural world of the 1950s.

Jones captures the strength of the racial and ethnic divisions that have characterized the nation since its founding:

The troubling truth of American history is that it’s precisely the binary understanding of white vs. nonwhite that has been at the center of our bloodiest battles, harshest laws, and fiercest debates. The U.S. social and political landscape would be unrecognizable but for the power of the concept of whiteness.

It’s certainly a problem we keep coming up against.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.  @ edsall