“Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous,” Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times.” NYT’s article makes this announcement of White America becoming a minority in the 2040’s like it is new news?. It is not. In 2006, I exchanged emails with Joel Garreau about the same topic in his article “300 Million and Counting.” Joel concentrated on the arrival of immigrants to the country being good news as it keeps our labor force younger than other countries such as Germany, Russia, etc. One AB commenter asked whether it makes sense to have an educated populace if they can not pay back the cost of an education. It does makes sense to educate the population as they are better equipped. Equipped to take on the requirements of
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“Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous,” Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times.”
NYT’s article makes this announcement of White America becoming a minority in the 2040’s like it is new news?.
It is not. In 2006, I exchanged emails with Joel Garreau about the same topic in his article “300 Million and Counting.” Joel concentrated on the arrival of immigrants to the country being good news as it keeps our labor force younger than other countries such as Germany, Russia, etc.
One AB commenter asked whether it makes sense to have an educated populace if they can not pay back the cost of an education. It does makes sense to educate the population as they are better equipped. Equipped to take on the requirements of the economy whether it is manufacturing or service based.
Burdensome student debt in which excessive interest payment resulting from economic hardship being a precursor to paying loan principal only aggravates the problem of debt shackling the borrower to a longer period of time of debt servitude before becoming productive and contributing to society. It behooves the nation to minimize the costs associated with getting an education with low loan interest rates, forgiveness over time, and complete eradication.
A younger work force coupled with educational skills pays off in productivity gains at many different levels.
Joel Garreau also talked of immigration in 2006 in a positive sense:
“One fortuitous result of the enormous wave of immigrants coming to the United States is that the median age here is only a little over 35, one of the lowest among the world’s more developed countries. This country also has the most productive population per person of any country on the planet—no matter how you measure it, and especially compared with Japan and the members of the European Union.”
It has changed somewhat with the 2008 recession and the slack in the Labor Force amongst the prime age.
NYT approaches the issue in a nervous manner.
“The presentation of the data disturbed Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw it while looking through a government report. The graphic made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing, he thought, and could provoke a political backlash.”
Expectations?
White nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Progressives envisioned greater political power from greater diversity and a white minority. Others look to the immigration of new people as a way to fill the gap left by retiring baby-boomers.
With each arrival of a new class of immigrant, there has always been a backlash as to how to categorize them. In this instance, the change coming is already here, has been for a couple of decades, and will come to pass in the 2040s well after baby-boomers have passed. Whether politicians or white America resists it, it will not matter as this change will occur. What will matter is whether we give them the proper tools now to be productive later.
As Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University states;
“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness.”
Charles King wrote about Franz Boas work. Boas was an early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference.
Boas is at the center of Charles King’s ‘Gods of the Upper Air,’ a group portrait of the anthropologist and his circle, who collectively attempted to chip away at entrenched notions of ‘us and them.’
The book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time,
King writes, ‘the struggle to prove that — despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom — humanity is one undivided thing.’”
In other words as stated by Boas;
“The adaptability of the immigrant seems to be very much greater than we had a right to suppose before our investigations were instituted.”
Children born in the United States had more in common with other US-born children than with the national group — or race, as Grant would have termed it — represented by their parents. Round-headed Jews became long-headed ones. The long heads of Sicilians compressed into shorter heads. The wide faces of Neapolitans narrowing to match those of the immigrants. Immigrants whom they were surrounded, not those of their racial brethren in the old country. There was, in other words, no such thing — in purely physical terms — as a “Jew,” a “Pole,” or a “Slovak,” if one judged by the bodies of the children of first-generation immigrants. The conditions of life, from diet to environment, were having a quick and measurable effect on head forms. Head forms thought to be fixed, inheritable, and indicative of one’s essential type.
The one group never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans and the long-term legacy of slavery.
Just an opinion, when Mexicans, African Americans, and other groups were and are in the minority, white America didn’t care. Now the status of white America is changing, they are waking up to it, and they care.
“Upon Becoming an American” – Angry Bear