We're No. 1!

And I'm not talking about the Olympics (though I've been mesmerized, despite my anti-nationalist leanings).

I'm talking about this news: The U.S. is projected to be a majority-minority country in 2042, not 2050 as previously predicted. Eight years might not seem like much of a difference, but that's about half a generation sooner. Already non-whites rule the toddler set (with one full quarter of under-5s being Latino).

Of course this assumes that immigration laws remain the same as now, which I doubt will be the case much longer. I'm sure the alarmist subtext of this simple statistical projection (The white man is losing control! We're sieged by dirty fer'ners!) will push the border-closers even more over the edge. And I'm not very hopeful about the leanings of those in the federal government, even under an Obama presidency.

And here's another factoid, buried in today's NYT story, that shows that white supremacy and privilege is far from dead:

The share of Americans who identify themselves as white, regardless of their ethnicity, will remain largely unchanged, declining from less than 80 percent in 2010 to about 76 percent when the majority-minority benchmark is reached in 2042.

We already saw hints of this aspiration to racial privilege (or avoidance of stigmatized racial categories) in the 2000 Census, where 48% of Hispanics checked off "white" as their race.

Teaching a class on the histories of racialized groups in the U.S. (including the creation of "whiteness"), over the last few years, I concluded, as Lady Zora does here thinking about a post-Civil Rights Black politics, that we have lost historical consciousness of moments and possibilities of inter-group solidarity. Instead, we end up bunkered in the immediate (and pressing) needs of our own group.

Sorry to be so serious in my one post so far this week. Trying to get a lot of work done while the wolf circles my door. Posting will be sparse for the next couple of weeks.

[image of U.S. racial composite from Time magazine 1993]

Comments

[Kiko Jones]

So, how much of that 48% was in Miami? Ha!