Last week, the Census Bureau announced that as of July 1, 2011, for the first time the majority (50.4%) of babies under age 1 in the U.S. were not non-Hispanic Whites. Animal New York posted a video by Jay Smooth discussing the reactions to and implications of this news:
You can see the NYT article Jay Smooth parodies here, but note that the graph is mislabeled. The line labeled “White” actually only represents the data for non-Hispanic Whites, while the line labeled “Non-White” includes births to White Hispanics, so the terminology they used doesn’t accurately reflect what the graph illustrates.
Comments 4
Jerzeyjake — May 21, 2012
The term "non-Hispanic white" is pretty wretched, largely flying under the radar of many who examine race. Imagine if we kept dibs on "non-Jewish whites," "non-Greek whites" or "non-Italian whites." The racial concepts (always socially constructed) in Latin America ARE different, and what is considered "white" there may in fact include those of mixed background (gasp). But having two separate categories (the "white" population and the REAL white "non-Hispanic" population) will be awfully hard to sustain, especially considering Pew data on intermarriage where nearly half of all U.S.-born Hispanics marry outside of their ethnicity.
Some Hispanics are white, descended from Spaniards and very similar to other Mediterranean peoples from Europe (Portuguese, Italian). Many others are indigenous (Aztec, Mayan, Inca, etc) people, others are descended from African slaves, while yet many others are mixed between these groups and with other immigrant groups (Japanese in Peru, German & Italian in Argentina & Chile, etc). I don't know what the best way is to measure these populations. Forcing our very rigid ideas of race on Americans of Hispanic background seems implausible, yet so does parsing out white Hispanics and purging them from the "white" population (which includes North Africans and Middle Easterners: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf page 3).
Perhaps the demographic trends noted above, the completely and totally incommensurate concepts of race between Latin America (read anything on the Mexican Coat of Arms, the Plaza de Tres Culturas, etc.) and traditionally rigid U.S. notions of hard definitive racial lines somehow existing, and the high rates of intermarriage, will all be great assets to helping overcome the largely horrific legacy of race in America.
Forsythia — May 21, 2012
What exactly defines "white" and "non-white". I'm culturally white, but of celtic/English, African, and Native American heritage. My maternal ancestors became "white" after leaving Tennessee at the advent of Jim Crow, but I was taught to straighten my hair, use makeup to make my nose look more defined, and admonished about how I spent too much time in the sun and got too dark.
I have to also wonder if some of the decline in "white" is just people not caring to insist that their children are "white" anymore.
In any case, weren't we all taught about the "great melting pot" that is "America"? Why are people freaking out if that is actually becoming a reality?