America is headed toward a mixed-race majority, says Morrison. Dinorah Prevost | The Crow’s Nest
By Dinorah Prevost
In recent years, the U.S. Census Bureau has poked the beehive of race in the United States with statistics.
It poked first in 2008 and more recently in 2014, predicting that by 2044 white Americans will make up less than 50 percent of the population.
Yes, whites will be outnumbered, but not in the way we think, said journalist and magazine editor Donald Morrison.
“At the rate we’re going, this country is not going to be a minority white country,” he said. “We’re going to be a majority country of mixed-race people. It’s the fastest growing single demographic.”
The former TIME magazine editor was on a panel titled “When whites are in the minority, how will they be treated?” at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs. Professor emerita Linda Whiteford, professor and historian Ray Arsenault and former Zambian refugee Felicien Kakure joined Morrison.
“Race and ethnicity will, by force, cease to become a major factor in our lives when our kids are all married to each other,” Morrison said.
Whiteford, a cultural anthropologist who taught at USF Tampa, said race is arbitrary anyway. It’s rooted in social conditioning, not in biology.
“‘White’ is a category that is made up,” she said. “It’s not a biological construct. It’s a made-up construct that’s been used over years to protect the rights of those in power who happen to be … white.”
Race, like class, is a useful divider for the majority, according to Whiteford.
“Different countries use it in different ways. In the United States, we’ve always been interested in race because it underpins much of our social fabric, our economic fabric and our history,” she said. “In Great Britain, they don’t talk about race. It’s not on their census. What are they interested in…traditionally as a category? Class.”
Who is “white,” Morrison said, is ultimately subjective. He pointed to Hispanics as an example of the “weakening of ethnic identification” as immigrant groups assimilate.
As generations of a family grow further away from the original immigrant, there’s a decline in Hispanics identifying as Hispanic, he said.
“What I think distracts us from this trend is that on the census, if you’re considered a minority or any mixed ethnic group,…you also self-identify and Hispanics increasingly self-identify as white.”
Morrison said the fear that people from an immigrant background will one day outnumber “natives” is not a new concern in the U.S.
“Ever since the first big waves of immigration in the mid- and late 19th century began to hit this country, we have heard concern from the non-immigrants that this was not a good thing…that they were somehow going to change the character of the culture of our country.”
And even if in the future race is “no longer an important distinguishing characteristic,” Morrison said, Americans will still divide themselves.
“We will invent others (issues). This is a trait that is innate in humans. We like to have a sense of belonging. We’re still going to look for smaller groups to adhere to,” he said.
