I’ve read quite a bit in many places about the demographic changes sweeping the USA. The percentage of Americans who are white is rapidly declining. The percentage of Americans who are racial minorities is rapidly rising. Most children under a certain age are actually minorities. Before too long, whites will no longer be a majority.
What if this is entirely wrong?
This article in The American Prospect argues that it is. Looking at the census data widely cited by the media, they find it highly flawed.
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.
Under alternative ways of counting, the potential range of variation in the size of the white population is quite large. In unpublicized tables, the Census Bureau itself provides a measure of how wide that variation is. If we were to go to the opposite extreme from the bureau’s official projections and adopt a white one-drop rule—that is, to classify anyone with some white ancestry as white—the data show that whites would make up three-quarters of the population at mid-century, when the Census publicly claims that whites will be in the minority.
…
A second reason to be skeptical about the excited talk about the end of a white majority is that it ignores the potential for blurring the boundary between mainstream and minority. The United States has previously seen excluded minorities such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews assimilate into the mainstream. Although the channels of assimilation are narrower today because of heightened inequality, many recent immigrant families seem to be on the same path as their predecessors. The likely result will be to enlarge the mainstream and alter the circumstances under which individuals are seen as belonging to marginalized minorities.
It seems strange that many prominent publications would write so much about demographic changes and projections based on such a simple mistake, but unless the data in this argument are wrong it would appear that they did.
The political implications of this would be obvious. The widely read book The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that the Democrats were on their way to a permanent majority based on the growth of certain demographic groups, racial minorities chief among them. A few months ago, one of the authors was still citing the downward trend in white voter as showing that Trump couldn’t win. But if that trend isn’t as strong as most people believe, that might help explain why Trump did win.