Whites no Longer a Majority in Texas

Great Debates
1

I’m quite surprised this hasn’t come up here yet.

There’s a nice graphic here.

Here’s a little snippet about it per the Dallas Morning News(i believe it’s under the amount allowed under fair use):

I’m not positive it’s a GD issue, but could very well see it becoming one, so I’ll start it here.

After all, when Whites are actually a minority in the state-will they qualify under affirmative action? Will crime against whites be considered hate crime?

Beyond the political ramifications (we all know an increasingly black/hispanic is the wet dream of the Democrats if they can appeal to them) what could this mean for the US when as a whole whites do become a minority?

2

No clue about affirmative action; I just don’t know enough about the program.

Hate crimes are crimes in which the motivating factor is race, religion, ethnicity or color, so whites can already be the victims of hate crimes.
[HIJACK]Does it have to be the motivating factor, or can it be a motivating factor?[/HIJACK]

When whites become a minority as a whole… heck, it won’t bother me a bit. I’ve answered all “Race?” questions on official documents as “Human” for most of my life. If it turns out whites begin to experience adverse discrimination, I hope people go with “cracker” instead of “honky”, tho.

3

Hispanic people are considered to be non-white? :confused: :confused:
Are they trying to say non-Anglo?

4

I think they’re trying to say “Brown.”

Probably nothing drastic, so long as the change comes gradually enough. I’m strongly pro-immigration, but half of South America moving to the U.S. overnight would probably do serious harm to our commonly held civic values (respect for free speech, e.g.).

Also, I doubt that the Republicans will be unable to win over their share of our new Hispanic overlords.

5

Funny. A hundred years ago, people were saying the same thing about the effect large numbers of immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe. I wonder who’ll they’ll be saying it about 100 years from now.

I qualify as white. I’m mostly English, 1/8th Irish (see – I told you they’d take over!:wink: ) with traces of French and German. I’m also an immigrant to the United States from England. That’s officially. However, my grandmother was born in India and I have some distant cousins who are definitely more Indian in appearance than English. It seems I may not be as white as I think I am.

I also had the pleasure of living in Hawaii for seven years. While I can understand that it would be disconcerting for some who are used to thinking of themselves as being in the majority to find themselves in the minority, Hawaii is as good as an example of a working society as any I’ve seen. If anything, it may be a bit better since I saw less prejudice there, although even there it existed.

I’ve never known what it’s like to be in the majority. As a young girl with a funny accent growing up in a small town, it was made quite clear to me that I was different and unacceptable. If whites ever do become the minority in America, I don’t see that as a bad thing. If anything, perhaps it will allow America to fulfill the ideals she embraces and which are written on the plaque the Statue of Liberty holds.

CJ

6

Siege raises a good point. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see, in the next couple of decades, the category of “Hispanic” disappear, as we reformulate whiteness to include Hispanic folk. I remember reading about the first wave of Cuban refugees that came to the US after Castro, and how astonished they were to find out that they were no longer white.

As for affirmative action: AA is a set of programs that seeks to correct past injustices, not a program that seeks to benefit minorities. At the point where white people are not proportionately represented in colleges, boardrooms, etc., that’s the point where white people should benefit from AA.

(Incidentally, there’s plenty of white people who currently benefit from some affirmative action programs. They’re called “women.”)

As has already been pointed out, racially motivated crimes against white people are already covered under hate crime laws. I read many years ago that in some jurisdictions, prosecution of hate crimes against whites was more common than prosecution of hate crimes against blacks. Certainly such prosecutions have already occurred.

Daniel

7

Or even “Black.”

8

Do you have a specific problem with caucasians being in the minority? Do you believe that people of other ethnic backgrounds who are currently in the minority should do something about increasing their population? If you want to start a debate, the least you could do is start by giving your honest opinion on the matter.

9

This is news, but not big news.
‘Whites’ are still the majority.

It’s just that now “Everybody EXCEPT ‘whites’” has more members than ‘whites.’

It will be a while before whites are a minority, and even longer, given socioeconomic conditions, before ‘non-whites’ enjoy the same advantages.

And it is safe to bet that the establishment political party will find a way to draw distinction away from race and onto class in an effort to win/keep the votes of the better-advantaged ‘non-whites.’
Racial makeup is not as important as community of interest, and while they tend to run along the same lines, this is not as big a step toward change as people want it to be.

10

[nitpick]Well, they’re not the majority anymore, that’s the whole point of the term “Minority Majority”, that the majority of the people in question are minorities. Since there still seem to be a lot more white folks around than any other category, but not more than half of them, they’d have a plurality, I think.[/nitpick]

But then, I’m not sure how arbitrary the definitions of “Majority” and “Plurality” are, so I could just be talking out of my ass (wouldn’t be the first time, no the last :cool: )

11

Right, hence they’re not a majority, which is at least 50%+1. Whites in Texas are now a plurality.

I agree that it’s not a big deal, though.

12

Yes, because a racially motivated crime against whites is already a hate crime.

13

Whites are still a PLURALITY, just not the flat-out MAJORITY. So I don’t see why they would get or need affirmative action. AA is also (rightly or wrongly) supposed to help del with some social problems that white people in general were not harmed by.

It already is, as far as I know, if race is the motivation.

Unless “everybody who isn’t white” becomes a political bloc, arguably not very much in the short term. Republicans and Democrats are both scrambling to appeal to Latinos, as they are the largest minority group in America and growing fast, I think. White are a majority in all but four states (Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii), and fairly soon they may not be a majority in a few more.

Here’s the CNN article on this topic. It notes that whites are projected to be the majority in America until 2050 or so. The terms “majority” and “minority” may be technically inaccurate, but I expect they’ll stick around.

14

White women were harmed by some of these social problems, and benefit from some of the compensatory programs. Dunno if that qualifies for “in general,” but it demonstrates that you don’t have to be a numerical minority to qualify for AA programs.

Daniel

15

That’s a good point and I meant to include it.

I think the OP may have confused “whites are no longer a majority” with “whites are a minority group.” It would take a very long time for any one group of people to outnumber white people. It’s a little hard to state these as flat numbers, since there can be overlap between “white” and “Hispanic,” but in the 2000 Census 211.5 million people (77% of the population) identified as white, and 35.3 million (12.5%) a Hispanic. So that’s roughly six times as many white people as the next largest group.

16

Even if people of color outnumber whites five-to-one someday, whites will probably still be the “elite.” Numbers have nothing to do with power. Whites will likely still control the government, and also be the ones who own the businesses.

Prejudice may actually increase when the numbers of “minorities” increase. Racist whites will become more insular and exclusive of other groups in order to maintain their status.

17

You’d certainly expect them to get more and more frantic as the minority populations continue to grow relative to Whitey.

18

Which is indeed indicative of the folly of the “racial” classifications we’re working with.

Under the census bureau definition, a “Hispanic” can be anyone who claims lineage from Latin American roots. Even if neither he nor his parents ever spoke a word of Spanish, and his only link to the “home culture” is an enjoyment of chile verde.

If we were to use the most-of-the-world sense of the word “white” in racial terms, to mean looking “caucasian”, then a whole buncha “Hispanics” qualify easily (self included). So would most people of Middle Eastern roots. In much of Latin America, it would seem preposterous to claim that Bill Richardson is “nonwhite”.

If we were to use the designator “Anglo” to mean Anglophone, i.e. whose native language is English, and whose primary cultural referents are mostly developed within USA society as it evolved since foundation – then “Anglos” are still an overwhelming majority since that would include virtually all African Americans as well.

And that ties in with one thing that we often miss: if there ever was one single monolithic “White Anglo” American culture, it was doomed from the start. There are and have always been Rural/Urban, Eastern/Western, Northern/Southern, “Old Arrival”/“Recent Arrival” upclass/downclass divides within the “Establishment” culture.

Rather than risk increasing friction, I too think that by 2050 TPTB will find a way to ditch the “minority/majority” component in this social taxonomy and, for instance, refocus AffAct on whether the person’s situation is associated with a disadvantage in opportunity (e.g.: the daughter of a poor rural white-anglo from Appalachia probably needs much more help than my son)

19

Who knew that George W. Bush would be our first minority president?

20

People from Latin American countries, are either predominantly Black, White, Native American, or various mixtures thereof. Somewhere along the line, ethnicity and culture got mixed up, and when people hear Hispanic or Latino (a cultural denominator), they automatically think non white, even though Hispanic and Latino have nothing to do with ethnicity.