It seems clear that American society is undergoing a demographic shift. Birth rates for Americans of predominantly European ancestry continue to decline. Those for Americans of Latino origin are not declining and there is continuing Latino immigration. People are making projections about what the population will be like in 2050 and what the political, social and cultural implications of that will be. There are already several states in which European Americans, i.e. white people have become a minority population. One view of what will be happening 35 years hence is of a society that maintains something like out current racial divisions with a shrinking white population struggling to hold onto historical power and privilege. However there is another view of how it might play out.
The above images are pictures of actual Americans presently living in America. They are not Photoshopped creations. They come from a story in National Geographic about the changing faces of America.
The Changing Face of America
What is it about the faces on these pages that we find so intriguing? Is it simply that their features disrupt our expectations, that we’re not used to seeing those eyes with that hair, that nose above those lips? Our responses can range from the armchair anthropologist’s benign desire to unravel ancestries and find common ground to active revulsion at group boundaries being violated or, in the language of racist days past, “watered down.”
Out in the world, the more curious (or less polite) among us might approach, asking, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” We look and wonder because what we see—and our curiosity—speaks volumes about our country’s past, its present, and the promise and peril of its future.
The notion that homo sapiens can be reliably classified into sub-species or racial groups has no valid scientific biological basis. The 19th C pseudo-science inspired by social Darwinism has been thoroughly discredited. However, in places such as the southern states in the US and Nazi Germany those flawed beliefs were used to pass laws imposing racial classifications and imposing legal and social restrictions based on them. The US laws passed at the beginning of the 20th C employed the one drop rule. If you had any black ancestry what so ever, you were classified as 100% black. Previous notions of mixed race such as colored or mulatto were abolished. The federal census used those mixed classifications up through 1920. In the 1930 it adopted the binary absolute.
Since the 1960s legally imposed racial definitions have been outlawed. However the poisonous legacy is still with us. All of us have absorbed some notions about racial difference growing up in this society. We vary greatly in the importance and values that we attach to such notions, but the concept of race is a cultural creation that we all live with. We also live with the legacy of racial discrimination, prejudice and racism. The decennial census makes an attempt to monitor the effects of that legacy.
One of the things that makes this data collection so confusing is that we have developed a notion that race and ethnicity are two distinct realities. In the 19th C there was extensive hostility directed toward immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe such as Jews, Italians and Poles. They were frequently characterized as distinct races. Some of the 19th C racial theories divided Europeans into three separate racial groups Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. Nordic was generally comparable to the Nazi notion of Aryan.
As "scientific racism" became discredited in the 20th C there was a move to collapse racial classifications into three groups Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid. This was what was in my high school biology textbook in the 1950s. At the same time the term ethnicity was coined to refer to groups with a shared heritage and culture such as Jews and Irish Catholics. We adopted the notion that people whose ancestors were from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa were all white. That is still the working definition of white employed by the census bureau. What the census is asking people to do is classify themselves on the basis of their self identification. It seems plausible that people will be influenced by different considerations in making that choice. I found an interesting article in the NYT about the problems with the data collected by the census and how it might be used in a nation with rapidly shifting demographics.
Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories
It was written by a former Director of the Census Bureau. It is not very long and worth reading the full link.
STARTING in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has sorted the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
The nation’s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico.
Fast-growing population groups — mixed-race Americans, those with “hyphenated” identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 — increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau’s designation, since 1970, of “Hispanic” as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a “race.” In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for “some other race” — a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.
Much attention has been paid to the news that non-Hispanic whites now account for less than half of births in the United States and that deaths now exceed births among non-Hispanic whites. These projections are oversimplified and misleading because they rely on the outdated “five races” concept. The far more significant turning point is the shift from a nation of a few large racial blocs into a hybrid America of numerous nationalities, ethnicities and cultures, unprecedented in human history. It is this hybrid, multivalent, dynamic America that is not reflected in the census. We cannot, however, fix this at the expense of abandoning racial categories, which are still needed for legitimate policy purposes.
One of the major problems with the confusion about what information the census is actually collecting about race is that whenever people write and talk about race in America they very often use census data as a point of reference. If it is trying to describe the population of 2010 in categories that weren't particularly realistic in 1950, it is not really providing useful information. Yet our thinking on the subject is bombarded by this data.
Changing a census form will not suddenly alter the realities of race and racism that exist in 2014. However, we should take account of the fact that that reality is undergoing both cultural and biological change. 2050 is a generation away. The world and the people in it are going to look different than they do now.