A Nation of None and All of the Above

[Harold Schiffman]

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 17, 2008
The Nation

A Nation of None and All of the Above

By SAM ROBERTS

Deep inside a data dump by the Census Bureau last week was a startling
racial projection: By midcentury, the United States will be home to 80
million more white people. Never mind, for a moment, that the bureau
also predicts that Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic,
black, Asian, American-Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander
will constitute a majority of the population by 2042. The number of
people who say they are white is projected to rise by about two
million every year.  At that rate, even while the Hispanic and Asian
populations expand enormously, the proportion of Americans who
identify themselves as white will barely shrink, from a little more
than 79 percent, to 74 percent.

It's not some new math metric that's responsible. It's the way the
government defines race: most people who describe their origin or
heritage as Hispanic or Latino also identify themselves as white.
Which raises an impertinent question: Why all the fuss about the
nation's impending racial and ethnic transformation? Not only is the
census all about self-identification, anyway, but all those
projections, today and historically, have been subject to fungible
cultural definitions. Mexicans were counted in a separate racial
category in the 1930 census, but 10 years later that classification
was dropped and the results were revised to count Mexicans as white.
(As recently as the 1960s, there was no Hispanic category in the
census at all; Asian Indians were classified as white.)

A century or so ago, the Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans
and even some Germans who arrived in droves in the United States were
not universally considered white. (Much earlier, Benjamin Franklin
feared that his fellow white Pennsylvanians would be overwhelmed by
swarthy Germans, who "will soon so out number us, that all the
advantages we have will not in my opinion be able to preserve our
language, and even our government will become precarious").

"In the minds of many Americans of influence and position at the time,
the post-1890 immigrants — Jews, Italians, various Slavic groups,
Greeks — were probably as foreign as 'Hispanics' are today, and
considered, as Hispanics are today, as in some degree 'nonwhite,' "
said Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, who
wrote "Beyond the Melting Pot" with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "I wonder
whether, in the course of the fierce debates on immigration in the
first quarter of the 20th century, anyone ever tried to calculate when
'new immigrants' and their children would be a majority of the U.S. I
am sure someone among the immigration restrictionists must have raised
that alarm."

Professor Glazer predicted that in the decades to come, racial and
ethnic distinctions would be further blurred by intermarriage (about
one in three grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants marry non-Hispanic
spouses; by 2050, nearly 1 in 20 Americans are expected to classify
themselves as multiracial).

Also, since 2000, the number of babies born to Hispanic mothers in the
United States has surpassed the number of new Hispanic immigrants,
which means a growing proportion of Hispanic people are being raised
as Americans from birth.

"The process of assimilation is such that our views of the degree of
difference of newer non-white groups changes rapidly," Professor
Glazer said. "So the Jews and Italians, considered very foreign at the
time of immigration by Henry Adams and others, were much less foreign
by the 30s, hardly foreign at all by the 60s — they were then as white
as other whites (for a time, called 'white ethnics')."

Race and ethnicity, says Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at
Rockefeller University, are really about culture, not biology.
Categories contrived by bureaucrats and politically correct committees
can be confusing and skew the results. "Even the notion of Hispanics
ranges in people of European origin in Chile to those of
native-America origin in the lowlands of Mexico," Professor Cohen
said.

Those categories might be driven by political constituencies with a
stake in stressing their distinctiveness or by overwhelming increases
in immigrants classified as a single group. Between 1970 and 2050,
according to the latest census projections, the Hispanic population
will increase 14-fold.

For any number of reasons — including the way the Census Bureau
configures and words its questionnaires — most people who report their
origin as Hispanic also list their race as white. The government
defines whites as descendants of "the original peoples of Europe,
North Africa or the Middle East" and Hispanic or Latino people as
those "who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba,
Spanish-speaking Central and South America countries and other Spanish
cultures." Origin is defined as "the heritage, nationality group,
lineage or country of the person or the person's parents or ancestors
before their arrival in the United States."

While the share of Americans who can trace their roots to immigrants
who came directly from Europe has been shrinking, "the edges are
getting blurrier," says Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer of the
Pew Hispanic Center.

Professor Glazer agrees. "I don't think a change such that the census
category of 'non-Hispanic white' becomes a minority in 30 years is so
momentous," he said. "By then we may not even be using that census
category and long before then people will be asking why Asians are
still considered a 'minority' of any kind."


  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17roberts.html?tntemail1=y&_r=1&oref=slogin&emc=tnt&pagewanted=print

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