[Vision2020] The Meaning of Minority

[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 12, 2012
The Meaning of Minority By CHARLES M. BLOW

America’s white majority just bought itself another year.

According to census figures released Wednesday, 2043 is now the year that
whites will no longer make up the majority of Americans. That’s one year
later than previous projections.

But one year is nothing in the grand sweep of things. We as a society must
begin to consider now what this change will mean for a nation mired in a
majority/minority swamp of privilege, expectations, historical benefits and
systematic discrimination.

The browning of America is very real and unrelenting. Our task is to find a
way to move into this new Ecru Era with as much ease and grace as we can
muster.

An April 2011 report from the Metropolitan Policy Program (M.P.P.) at the
Brookings Institution found that all but two of the 10 largest metro areas
in the country have child populations in which white children are a
minority. (Boston and Philadelphia were the exceptions.) Of the remaining
eight metro areas, Hispanic children are the largest demographic in six,
and blacks are the largest in the other two.

As Hua Hsu <http://english.vassar.edu/bios/huhsu.html>, a professor at
Vassar College, posited in The Atlantic in 2009: “What will the new
mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally
around? What will it mean to be white after ‘whiteness’ no longer defines
the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try
to preserve it?”

These are epic questions about a seismic shift in American demography.* How
should we consider a waning majority when their privilege of numbers gives
way to what many other Americans have experienced as the minority plight? *

On election night, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly said
that<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZZt3jPDvNQ>“the white
establishment is now the minority.” The question is whether this
should be a reason for lamentation or celebration. Or neither.

In September, a white student named Matthew Heimbach at Towson University
caused a bit of an uproar when The Baltimore Sun reported that he was
“gathering support” to start a white student union on campus. The newspaper
pointed out: “His former group, Youth for Western Civilization, had sparked
controversy with its public displays against Islam, same-sex marriage and
multicultural education. That group disbanded after it lost the support of
its faculty sponsor, but Heimbach said he hopes his new organization will
promote white identity without disparaging other people.”

(It should be noted that Towson’s campus is in Maryland, one of the states
in which the M.P.P. found the white child population to be less than 50
percent, and is on the outskirts Baltimore, where whites are only 31.5
percent of the population, according to the Census Bureau.)

Now, putting Youth for Western Civilization’s intolerance aside for a
moment (if that’s possible), we must ask: when will public displays of
white pride become culturally acceptable? Will they forever be freighted
with the weight of history — tantamount to gloating about privilege? Or
should all racial and cultural pride be viewed more or less the same?

The Sun quoted Heimbach as saying, “It comes a point where we’re not
directly involved in what happened centuries ago and our culture just
perpetuates the guilt cycle.” He continued, “We want to provide a positive
view of white identity.”

Is that offensive? Or fair play in light of where the country is heading?

And what of O’Reilly’s “white establishment”? Power is a precious
commodity. It is rarely voluntarily surrendered, particularly by those who
believe they have earned it. The task is to expand the franchise without
casting some people as givers and others as takers. That is harder than it
sounds.

There will most likely be a growing rub between traditional power
structures and emerging ones, much of which will be visible along racial
lines but also along gender and sexual identity lines. A great deal of that
friction boils down to simple economics. As a July 2011 Pew Research Center
report<http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/>pointed
out: “The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of
black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.”
Women<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/women-earn-91-cents-for-every-dollar-men-earn--if-you-control-for-life-choices/2012/06/04/gJQAqrHkEV_blog.html>and
gays<http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2012/04/16/11494/the-gay-and-transgender-wage-gap/>also
earn less than their male and heterosexual counterparts.

This wealth disparity plays into the national debate about the role of
government, appropriate spending levels and rates of taxation.

And on a worrisome note, a recent Associated Press poll showed that since
Barack Obama was elected in 2008, prejudice toward blacks has increased.
According to the report: “In all, 51 percent of Americans now express
explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008
survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of
Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49
percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of
Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.”

Furthermore, The A.P. found: “Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic
sentiments, too. In an A.P. survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic
whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in
the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for
comparison.”

The last thing we need is a racial and ethnic backlash in this country. Now
is the time to move forward with sensitivity and respect and with a
watchful eye on how we behave and what we expect as the traditional
American majority becomes just another minority.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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