{"id":23511,"date":"2012-05-29T20:31:53","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T20:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23511"},"modified":"2012-06-08T18:11:33","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T18:11:33","slug":"the-future-of-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23511","title":{"rendered":"The future of whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/05\/29\/the_future_of_whiteness\/singleton\/\" target=\"_blank\">The future of whiteness<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\" target=\"_blank\">Salon<\/a><br \/>\n2012-05-29<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Lind<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Both Republican and Democratic racial politics are doomed. How culture shifts will reshape American ideas on race<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.census.gov\/newsroom\/releases\/archives\/population\/cb12-90.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Census Bureau has announced<\/a> that a majority of new-born infants in the U.S. now belong to categories other than what the U.S. federal government calls \u201cnon-Hispanic white.\u201d<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nWhile so-called \u201cnon-Hispanic whites\u201d still account for 49.6 percent of American newborns, immigration has expanded the Hispanic and Asian categories, while the African-American or black share of the U.S. population has remained roughly constant. Whether they celebrate or dread it, progressive champions of the \u201crainbow coalition\u201d and white conservative nativists at least agree on a fact:\u00a0 in the future, whites in the U.S. will be a minority.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nBut what if both the multicultural left and the nativist right are wrong? Definitions of racial identity in the U.S. have changed over time. In the twentieth century, Americans with different degrees of African ancestry who in earlier generations would have been described as negroes, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=1144\" target=\"_blank\">quadroons<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=1146\" target=\"_blank\">octoroons<\/a> were all lumped together in a single category as blacks. And in the nineteenth century, eminent American ethnologists debated the question of whether Irish-Americans belonged to the same race as Anglo-Americans.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nIn the 1970s, the federal government came up with the bizarre \u201cnon-Hispanic white\u201d label, lumping together Arab-Americans, Norwegian-Americans and Irish-Americans into a single government-created pseudo-race. To compound the absurdity, at the same time the federal government invented a category of \u201cHispanics\u201d who, as government forms invariably note, \u201cmay be of any race.\u201d The artificial \u201cHispanic\u201d category is even more preposterous than the \u201cnon-Hispanic white\u201d category, including blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of\u00a0 predominantly African descent.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\nThese government racial labels are increasingly out of touch with America\u2019s fluid demographic reality.\u00a0 But for the sake of argument, let us take America\u2019s official racial classifications, all too reminiscent of Soviet nationality labels, at face value.\u00a0 According to polls, a slight majority of Hispanics (or Latinos) identify themselves as \u201cwhite.\u201d Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of government-labeled Hispanics who identified as \u201cother race\u201d dropped in percentage from 42 to 37 while those who identified as white rose from 48 to 53 percent&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire opinion piece <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/05\/29\/the_future_of_whiteness\/singleton\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The future of whiteness Salon 2012-05-29 Michael Lind Both Republican and Democratic racial politics are doomed. How culture shifts will reshape American ideas on race The Census Bureau has announced that a majority of new-born infants in the U.S. now belong to categories other than what the U.S. federal government calls \u201cnon-Hispanic white.\u201d \u00a0 While [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,6,26,394,20],"tags":[10961,10962],"class_list":["post-23511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-new-media","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-michael-lind","tag-salon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}