Minorities in America

What if Latinos and blacks do become the American majority? According to the Census Bureau that is exactly where we are heading. But how much power does the projection hold? In fact it has no power at all. And nothing they have projected is likely to come to fruitation. The census is no measure at all of what the future holds.

 The first U. S. naturalization act made whiteness a given to become a citizen. So people began appearing in court to prove they were white. One Japanese man tried to persuade the court that Japanese hailed from white Caucasian stock. Needless to say, he didn’t get very far. This was when Europeans were divided into less and better grades of white, Eastern Europeans, Italians and Jews were thought to be from altogether different stock. Such ridiculous ideas defined and shaped immigration laws in the U.S.

Karan Brodkin Sacks wrote an essay titled: How did Jews become White Folks? She asks, ” Did Jews and other Europeans ethnics become white because they became middle class? Or did an expanded version of white open doors to the middle class status?” Her point was that nothing about race is static.

That explanation is even truer today. A few years ago black and white mixing was a no no in America. It was against the law for an interracial couple to marry. But when Gallup polls surveyed American attitudes about interracial relationships in 2005, ninety five percent of Americans approved. Most young people today say they have dated a person of a different race and many interracial couples have married.

The Census Bureau is good at what it does but there is no way it can predict the future attitudes of Americans. To their credit in the 1990 census people were allowed to claim more than one racial identity. By the same rule there is no way to know how quickly groups will go the way of Italians and Jews and become more white than not. What is known is that younger folks will not build rigid racial walls as their forefathers did. Also, DNA testing shows whites they are much more racially mixed than they ever knew.

What is likely is that our racial walls will fall away as the term white expands to encompass those we now consider minorities. Race just will not be a big deal. We will intermarry, our children will intermarry, and we will have no majorities or minorities. We are learning that people are more alike than different. Maybe we will finally be able to breath a sigh of relief and look forward to a great future.

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