Census to show first decline of white population

Tell that to Benjamin Franklin…

Ben has the excuse of living in the 18th century and not knowing a thing about genetics or biology.

Historically, in many times and places, the mingling of ethnicities has resulted in a vast, even exponential, increase in the diversity of things like cuisine, not a decrease. Like, I’ll be the first to admit that the American south has the best cuisine on the continent, especially in areas like Louisiana. Why? Because of the mingling of so many cultures there.

Isn’t your wife from the Philippines? Why are you trying to destroy Filipino cuisine!?

I think the cuisine issue is interesting because deep assimilation doesn’t tend to lead to a cuisine disappearing, but at the same time I think the more assimilated an immigrant population gets the more “localized” and less “authentic” (to the home country) the cuisine gets. You can definitely see this with Italian cuisine, which was considered a novelty to Anglo Americans in the early 20th century, and was considered “an American joke” to native Italians by the 21st century.

Right now, some of our most popular immigrant cuisines are fueled by first and second generation immigrant families, and I think it’s hard to predict how they will develop in the future. At the same time not every ethnic group has tracked the “Irish, German and Italian” model precisely. I think some of it is tied into cohesive and distinct communities. The early eras of, for example, German immigration saw Germans (who oft were a little more middle class) settling in farming communities with exclusively other German settler families. These communities remained cohesive and apart in many cases until around the early 20th century. As those communities broke up and mixed in with the majority population, the number of German language speakers (and newspapers) plummeted, and by the 21st century there is virtually no authentic German culture in the United States. Instead there are kitschy things like Columbus, OH German Village that attempt to capitalize on the historic presence of a bona fide German American community that has long since ceased to exist.

There are some counter examples though, there Mexican population in the Southwest is quite old, with some families having lived there since before those areas were incorporated into the United States, and they have generally been able to maintain a distinct cultural presence longer than some other groups. Even in that group assimilation to the majority culture tends to be increasing.

Consider one portion of north-east continental Europe where a Celtic population was conquered by the Romans, leading to introduction of a Latin-based language, and then infiltrated by various Germanic tribes, who picked up the Latinate language, interbred with the Celts (the whole nation of Celto-Germans speaking a Romance language is named after one of the Germanic tribes). And yet, France is not a blandly uniform place (Charles de Gaulle complained “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”). Today’s mixture of ethnicities is tomorrow’s new ethnicity - and even then, there is internal variety.

Are you referring to France as “north-east continental Europe”? That would be a strange position.

Sorry - North-west (still not a great description - but better than completely wrong)

If dissimilarity increases, that means more diversity.

Nonsense. People can still scavenge out of separate-but-equal ethnic dumpsters.

And all creeds and kinds
And colors of us are blending
Till I suppose ten million years from now
We’ll all be just alike

Same color, same size
Working together
And maybe we’ll have all of the fascists
Out of the way by then, maybe so

Woody Guthrie , set to tune by Billy Bragg and Wilco:

Look. You have 20 people, ten black and ten white, That is diversity. Stir well and fast forward a few generations and you have 18 brown, one white, one black. That’s NOT diversity. Which do you want?

Diversity isn’t skin color. Is northern US culture and cuisine and lots of things like southern US culture and cuisine etc? No. It’s diverse, no need to invoke shades of human.

Look. You’ll have 20 people who still don’t look alike, even in skin color. You’ll also still have a mix of genders, cultures, faiths, political beliefs, sexual orientations, socio-economic classes, abilities and personal experiences. That’s diversity.

As arguments for racial segregation go, saying we need it to maintain diversity is a pretty silly one.

Sorry, I mis-read the OP. I thought it referred to white population, not about “genders, cultures, faiths, political beliefs, sexual orientations, socio-economic classes, abilities and personal experiences.” My apologies for side-tracking the thread.

You sidetracked it by insisting that racial diversity would be lost, and by the implication that this somehow justifies racial segregation in reproduction.

But on the plus side you’ve gone some way toward supporting the statement in the OP.

So who does this “stirring”? Mating and reproduction are individual choices and have nothing to do with majorities and minorities. Just because the white population is declining, doesn’t mean every reproducing couple is instantaneously multiracial. There will always be people who are, to various degrees, white, black, brown, etc., and all combinations thereof. There will always be diversity. So what exactly are you worried about?

  1. My post was strictly on topic, then projected an outcome I apologize if that is against forum rules.

  2. What did I say that implied any opinion that any outcome would be favorable or not?

  3. The statement in the OP was an undisputed statistical fact, which is not up far “support”.

  4. It is other posters here who clearly believes a public policy is justified by desired outcome,

No one is claiming that your posts are “against forum rules”, and I’m not sure why you would think anyone was. Your projected outcome, however, is overly simplistic and not remotely in line with how genetics work.

“Diversity will then be zero, with no-one of visibly different ancestry to mate with. The miracle of diversity will be lost forever.”

If you say so.

Is it?

To elaborate with a horribly oversimplified example

20 people: 10 with pale skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, 10 with darker skin, dark hair, brown eyes. Diversity - fairly low: everybody falls into two classes

Later: 20 people. Some with (perhaps not quite as pale as in the original population) skin, dark hair and blue eyes, some with brown skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, some with black (perhaps not quite as dark as in the earlier population) skin, blue eyes, and dark hair, etc. Much more diversity.