Invitation Only

(Apologies in advance. This one is long. Perhaps I should learn how to subdivide these sorts of posts.)

The central premise of The Myth of a Majority-Minority America is that the definition of "White," and thus the group of people who Whites in America will feel comfortable sharing resources, with will expand. This renders projecting forward with the current understanding of "White" as inaccurate, and undesirable, as it provokes anxiety in a certain subset of the White population. It's an interesting piece, but I'm not on board with it.

First off, I'm unconvinced that the perceived divisiveness of "the narrative that nonwhite people will soon outnumber white people" has anything to do with the "narrative" itself. The things that readers are informed drive conservative White Americans' anxieties and resentments, are, in fact, external to it.

The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers.

I take the point here, but doesn't American society already have pretty clear groups of winners and losers that break down along racial lines? I don't see where this division into large groups, based on overall levels of prosperity relative to one another, needs to be implied. There's no shortage of hard data to back it up. The general statistic that "net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family" is well-known. And Brookings goes on to note that neither differences in educational attainment, indebtedness nor even income explain the gap. Meanwhile "inadequate investments in the public goods that facilitate economic mobility" help to perpetuate it. Yet we're told by Professors Alba, Levy and Myers that it's a change in what has long been seen as a zero-sum game that's divisive, despite the current highly unequal state.

It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment.

Again, fair enough. But isn't the idea of "illegitimate minority empowerment" itself a serious problem? I know someone who might be considered an anxious and resentful conservative White American, and he has no qualms about telling me that the greater empowerment of minorities (and women, for that matter) is a problem. But here's the thing, he doesn't start from the premise that all people are currently equally empowered. As he sees it, minorities and women are less empowered than White men, and not only should it stay that way, but gains that have been made over the past several decades should be rolled back. Whether Professors Alba, Levy and Myers currently believe that conservative White Americans understand the nation to be equal as of this point (and therefore the disadvantages of minority groups stem from their failings) is unknown, and the resulting leaving open of what "illegitimate minority empowerment" means becomes a problem. There are plenty of people who would make the case that many conservatives consider equality to be illegitimate. And in such a case, why should they back down from the idea that growing numbers of people not considered White will lead to a change that they consider positive? Why repeat what many would consider the nasty compromises of the past, compromises that openly traded away the rights of non-Whites to assuage the anxieties of those who believed that their national origin entitled them to the better share of the nation's resources.

At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”

There is a part of me that would term this as "history repeating itself." The article mentions, specifically, three non-White demographic groups: Hispanics, Asians and Blacks. Missing from this list are Native Americans. And one can make the case that a significant portion of American history is comprised of the replacement of the native people with European immigrants in an America where oftentimes, "stolen" doesn't belong in scare quotes. There's a reason why the closest community of Leni Lenape to their ancestral lands live in Ontario Canada; the Delaware Nation is in Oklahoma. (While most Americans are not experts on Constitutional law, I suspect there's little chance that a new Indian Removal Act would be seen as passing muster by anyone lacking a direct material interest in native lands.) And there is nothing about the Census Bureau's population projections that requires that Americans see Whites becoming a minority (if still a plurality) of the overall population as betokening political, cultural, and social upheaval. The fear of having done unto one as has been done unto others is a thing in itself.

And this, to me, is the driver of the fears and resentments. And the divisiveness. There is a case to me made for the existence of a narrative of American History that basically says that White America has historically used its numerical advantage, if not dominance, to shift the costs of its prosperity onto others, and that at any given point in that history it was people whose ancestry came from Africa, Asia, Latin America and pre-colonial North America (and sometimes, all of the above) who paid those costs. From here, things can go a couple of different ways. If the White people who engineered and/or benefited from this cost-shifting did so out of deliberate malice, one would expect that when the demographic shoe is on the other foot, it's going to be payback time. I've used this quote from New Yorker Leah Moreland a few times before, but I think that it's especially relevant here:

I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time. And I made the statement, I said, "You know, at one time the black man had to step off the sidewalk when a white person came down the sidewalk." And I feel it's going to be somewhat reversed. I really feel it's going to get somewhat nasty.

It's President Jefferson's understanding of the "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained," carried forward into the twenty-first century. Ms. Moreland's prediction failed to come to pass, but White fears of Black anger and resentment have neither subsided, nor driven a broad making of amends.

By the same token, if racial competition is simply par for the course, and one should expect dominant groups in a democracy to use their power at the ballot box to vote themselves a better place in society than others, one is still in the same boat. Minorities are going to use the advantage that was handed to them, in the same way that Whites did. Of course, this presumes that Whites and non-Whites alike are monolithic groups and subject to a high degree of groupthink, but I don't believe that fear, resentment and careful thinking are known for their coexistence.

As for the other primary point of the article, the idea that intermarriage will result softening and blurring racial lines, and thus, an expansive understanding of Whiteness, I'm not really a fan of it, either. For all that it's intended to be a message of inclusion and tolerance, it runs into trouble from the jump. The piece notes that the practice of classifying people as either entirely White or non-White is misleading. Granted. That doesn't mean that this isn't what happens, especially given that race in America is more a visual marker than anything else. The piece explicitly notes that mixed-race children of Hispanic and White or Asian and White couples, "tend to start life in more economically favorable situations than most minority groups, are typically raised in largely white communities, have above-average educational outcomes and adulthood incomes, and frequently marry white people." Meanwhile, "children with Black and white parents face greater social exclusion and more formidable obstacles to upward mobility." The piece goes on to note "But their social experiences are more integrated than those of Black Americans who identify as monoracial." The link there goes to the Amazon page for Lauren Davenport's Politics Beyond Black and White, carrying a description that concludes "Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others." The description of Professor Alba's own book on the topic notes: "Nevertheless, there are also major limitations to mainstream expansion today, especially in its more modest magnitude and selective nature, which hinder the participation of black Americans and some other people of color." Yet the authors say that the public deserves the narrative of racial diversity expanding definitions of Whiteness to the point that "Journalists, subject-matter experts, and political leaders have an obligation to tell Americans the full story about rising diversity and racial blending." (Emphasis in original.)

The support for this rosy picture comes from the idea that "White" has come to include Europeans more broadly, rather than simply Nordic peoples and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Again, it's a point well taken. But it's also worth noting that this expansion of the mainstream didn't include everyone. And Professor Alba notes that the current expansion, due to mixed-race families, is unlikely to include Black people and those with clear sub-Saharan African ancestry in their features. Changing demography may well have united European Americans, but it stopped well short of uniting all Americans.

In the abstract for Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity, by Professors Myers and Levy, we find the following:

We conducted an experiment that randomly assigned whites to read alternative news stories based on 2014 Census Bureau projections. One story emphasized growing diversity, a second emphasized the decline of the white population to minority status, and a third described an enduring white majority based on intermarriage and inclusive white identity. Much higher levels of anxiety or anger, especially among Republicans, were recorded after reading the white minority story than the alternative stories of diversity or an enduring white majority.

I don't understand the distinction that's being made between "growing diversity" and "inclusive White identity." The piece in The Atlantic spends very little time on it. Expanding the definition of "White" to include Hispanics and Asians (while presumably leaving Black Americans behind) seems to fall into the category of "an enduring White majority." I presume it's in the paper itself, but I don't intend to pay $37.50 to find out.

But there's a subtext in this outlook that Professors Alba, Levy and Myers seem to shy away from. Namely that a driver of While anxiety, anger and resentment might well be the perception that they wouldn't be in control of the doling out of benefits. The story of the integration of formerly excluded European nationalities into American "Whiteness" was something of a devil's bargain. Sure, Germans, Italians and Slavs are now considered "White" in the United States, but the main result of that was to create "an enduring white majority" that helped to ensure that cost-shifting continued to fall upon the shoulders of Asians, Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. If this new trend of treating the children of Hispanic and White or Asian and White couples as "White enough" is in the service primarily of ensuring that those too dark to be seen as White remain the bearers of shifted costs, is that really "bringing Americans together?" Is this simply going to be another implicit compromise, with multiracialism simply being a reason to let dismantle the racial boundaries for some, in return for them helping to reinforce them against those left behind?

The authors note that "discussions of demographic change must not fuel complacency about the unequal opportunities that minority groups, especially Black Americans, continue to face." I'd say that's exactly what happened in the past, but the "melting pot" of European peoples allowed for indifference to unequal opportunities, rather than simply complacency. And I don't think that there's anything about "the full story about rising diversity and racial blending" that's going to change the perception of a zero-sum game. There's nothing in the story about equal opportunities for everyone. Rather, it's just another reshuffling. The number of chairs still leaves significant numbers of people out. It's only being increased enough to encourage defections in the constituency for broader change, and even that is effectively being done under duress.