The Likely

Persistence of
a White
Majority
How Census Bureau statistics have misled
thinking about the American future.

Richard Alba

This article appears in the Winter 2016 issue of The American

Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

H
Has the notion of demography as destiny ever enjoyed so much
credence? The disappearance of a white majority in the United
States by the middle of this century is now widely accepted as
if it were an established fact. Projections by the Census Bureau
have encouraged those expectations, and people on both the
right and left have seized on them in support of their views. On
the right, the anxieties about the end of white majority status
have fueled a conservative backlash against the growing
diversity of the country. On the left, many progressives
anticipate an inexorable change in the ethno-racial power
hierarchy. Numerous sites on the web offer advice and counsel
on how whites can handle their imminent minority status.
But what if these different reactions are based on a false
premise—actually two false premises? The first stems from the
Census Bureau’s way of classifying people by ethnicity and
race, which produces the smallest possible estimate of the size
of the non-Hispanic white population. Whenever there is
ambiguity about ethno-racial identity, the statistics publicized
by the bureau count an individual as minority. This statistical
choice is particularly important for population projections
because of the growing number of children from mixed
families, most of whom have one white parent and one from a
minority group. In the Census Bureau’s projections, children
with one Hispanic, Asian, or black parent are counted as
minority (that is, as Hispanic or nonwhite). The United States
has historically followed a “one-drop” rule in classifying people
with any black ancestry as black. The census projections, in
effect, extend the one-drop rule to the descendants of other
mixed families. A great deal of evidence shows, however, that
many children growing up today in mixed families are
integrating into a still largely white mainstream society and
likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather
than as minorities excluded from it.

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