The Majority/Minority Myth

The following post was written in the wake of the 2020 election, but everything in it is just as true, or more true, today as it was then. I did change the date in the fourth paragraph from 2020 to 2024 to highlight the post's relevance for today.

It's often been claimed that whites will find themselves in the minority in the U.S. by sometime around 2045 having been demographically eclipsed by members of black, brown and yellow races. A corollary to the claim is that being thrust into the minority will spell political doom for a GOP dominated by whites.

An essay at The Federalist, however, written by Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution challenges this conventional wisdom.

The belief that the "browning of America" entails permanent political exile for white Republican voters and office-holders is based on two questionable assumptions: First, that rising minorities would continue to favor the Democrats in their voting, and, second, that increased Democratic support from rising minorities would not be offset by falling support among the declining white population.

The 2024 election should give pause to those who hold the first assumption. Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump in record numbers and, although it's true that a more traditional Republican may not have generated as much enthusiasm among this demographic as did the president, the fact remains that many more members of these groups are willing to abandon their traditional fealty to the Democratic party to vote for Republican candidates than ever before. This is especially true among Hispanics.

The second assumption is rendered dubious by the gains Republicans have made in recent years among traditional Democrat loyalists like blue-collar union workers.

But Fiorina's main point is that the projections of a majority of minorities by mid-century are themselves questionable. They're predicated on misleading data culled from the 2010 census.

Question 8 on that census form (and on the 2020 census) asks about Hispanic ancestry. Those who report any Hispanic ancestry on this question are placed into the minority category, regardless of their responses to question 9 which asks the respondent to state their own race.

Fiorina explains:

Non-Hispanics who check the “white” box on question 9 go into the white category, of course — unless they write in anything else. Should they wish to claim, say, an American Indian ancestor (a fairly common impulse), they again fall into the minority category despite their white self-categorization. In both cases, descendants stay in the same category — minority — as the parent, if they acknowledge the parent’s ancestry.

So, someone as white as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and all of her subsequent descendents, would be considered minorities as long as they continue to maintain that they have a single Native American ancestor three or four generations, or more, ago. As Fiorina puts it:

The census projections reflect a “one-drop” rule akin to that used in the Jim Crow South. The white category consists only of people who are 100 percent “non-Hispanic white.” If one adopts a more expansive definition of "white," the projection of a majority-minority nation disappears.

If everyone who checked the white box on question 9 were actually to be classified as white the nation would still be three-quarters white in 2060, according to Fiorina. He goes on to say that,

On first hearing about the projected nonwhite majority, many people probably form a mental image that looks roughly like this: 4 whites, 2 Hispanics, 2 blacks, 1 Asian, and perhaps one “other.”

As the preceding discussion explains, however, the picture is much more complex. The majority of minorities will not consist of people who are 100 percent Latino, 100 percent Asian, 100 percent black, 100 percent Native American, or 100 percent Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (the official census categories).

Rather, the majority of minorities will include people of numerous shadings of color.

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, not only because of the changing relative sizes of the five large groups but also because of the growing internal diversity within each group as the sizes of their [racially] mixed portions swell. Diversity is increasing within individuals as well as among groups.

In other words, what will happen as we approach mid-century is that categories like white, Hispanic, African-American and Asian will be increasingly blurred as inter-racial marriages continue to increase and more citizens are able to claim mixed-race status.

One of the positive benefits of all this is that identity-based politics, at least as it's practiced by the left today, will become increasingly irrelevant as a greater percentage of future generations' racial identity is "all of the above."