{"id":61954,"date":"2021-10-27T16:09:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-27T16:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61954"},"modified":"2021-11-11T16:45:15","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T16:45:15","slug":"the-truth-about-white-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61954","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About White America"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Truth About White America<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\n2021-10-25<\/p>\n

Morris Levy<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations
\nUniversity of Southern California<\/em><\/p>\n

Richard Alba<\/strong><\/a>, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
\nGraduate Center, City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

Dowell Myers<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Policy, Planning, and Demography
\nUniversity of Southern California<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nThe Atlantic<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n

The Census Bureau<\/a> wanted to gather data about a changing nation, but ended up reinforcing old racial categories.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you paid attention to the news this summer about the release of 2020 census data<\/a>, you probably heard that America\u2019s<\/a> white population is in free fall. Big, if true.<\/p>\n

The statistic that launched a thousand hot takes and breathless voice-overs about racial change was a supposed 8.6 percent, or 19 million, drop in the number of white Americans since 2010. Headlines cast this decline as unprecedented in census history and signaled that the nation\u2019s majority-minority future loomed even closer than previously forecast. Pundits spun it as a harbinger of policy change and partisan realignment, for better or worse. Some wisely cautioned against demography-as-destiny assumptions in a country where the definition and public understanding of race can change rapidly. But few observers questioned whether the reported differences between the 2010 and 2020 censuses reflected real demographic change or simply statistical noise.<\/p>\n

Commentators should have read the fine print before rushing to trot out their favorite narratives. If they had, they would have discovered that the eye-popping figure at the center of this summer\u2019s hoopla is an illusion. The apparent decline in the white population is a result of changes to the Census Bureau\u2019s<\/a> protocol for measuring and classifying racial identity. The changes aimed to more accurately gauge the expansion of the country\u2019s mixed-race population through new and more sophisticated data collection and classification techniques that capture the nuances of Americans\u2019 multifaceted racial and ethnic identities. But a combination of bureaucratic constraints and messaging failures paved the way to public confusion…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Census Bureau wanted to gather data about a changing nation, but ended up reinforcing old racial categories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,26,20],"tags":[18945,3199,17745,9186,6001,2546,5367],"class_list":["post-61954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-american-community-survey","tag-dowell-myers","tag-morris-levy","tag-richard-alba","tag-the-atlantic","tag-u-s-census-bureau","tag-united-states-census-bureau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61954","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=61954"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62175,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61954\/revisions\/62175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}