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What will "minority" even mean in 2042?
The projections of the U.S. becoming majority-minority in 2042 may not mean much, given the possibility that who gets counted as a "minority" and what that label means will change.
The news that ethnic/racial “minorities” will become the “majority” before 2050 was front-page news last week. It’s the kind of news that alarms some and relieves others. For people who are already anxious about the so-called “cultural disruption” created by immigration, I’m sure the new 2042 deadline put them in a tizzy and renewed all kinds of anti-immigrant paranoia. And for those people (mostly so-called minorities) who had looked to the year 2050 as the harbinger of some idealized multicultural America – we have less time to wait, I suppose. But before anyone gets too excited (whether from anxiety or anticipation) about a browner America, I’d like to put the racists at ease, and kick the rest of us out of our utopian haze.
As last week’s article in the New York Times noted, the Census’ racial definitions have changed many times in our nation’s past, and the meanings of the racial/ethnic categories that we create are likely to keep shifting. After all, it wasn’t until the 1960s that “Hispanic” became a separate ethnic category and South Asians stopped being counted in the White racial category. And in the lead up to the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau considered (but ultimately decided against) creating an “Arab or Middle Eastern category,” which would have removed the “original peoples” of the Middle East and North Africa from the Census’ current definition of “White.”
Even though the trend during the second half of the 20th Century seems to have been to restrict the definition of whiteness, a number of people have theorized that the “White” racial/ethnic category could be expanded in the 21st Century to maintain the dominance of rich and White elites. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor at Duke University, has suggested that a tri-racial system could emerge in response to demographic changes. Some currently not-quite-White groups could be added to the “White” racial category in the same way that the Irish and Italians became White a century ago – for instance, people who check both the Hispanic ethnicity box and the White race box would boost the total White population to 75% in 2042. Bonilla-Silva also suggests that a new racial group of “Honorary Whites” – including most multiracial people and many Asian Americans – could be created to buffer racial conflict between the expanded White category at the top and what he calls the “Collective Black” – made up of most Blacks, Latinos and new immigrants – at the bottom.
The increase in the numbers of today’s so-called minority groups poses very little threat to the current imbalance of power and is not nearly enough to bring about a more just and inclusive America. The deck could just end up being reshuffled to keep the poor – and most Blacks, Latinos and new immigrants – at the bottom, making America both more diverse and more unequal.
