Clarifying the Census Bureau's Accounting of "White" Identity Puts Demographic Change in Perspective
- Source: The Atlantic, Oct. 25, 2021. -Ed. History News Network/HNN, The George Washington Univ. By Morris Levy, Richard Alba & Dowell Myers.
(Morris Levy, assoc. professor of political science & international relations at the Univ. of Southern Calif. Richard Alba, distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York; most recent book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, & the Expanding American Mainstream. Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning, & demography at the Univ. of Southern Calif.).
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If you paid attention to the news this summer about the release of 2020 census data, you probably heard that America’s white population is in free fall. Big, if true.
The statistic that launched a thousand hot takes and breathless voice-overs about racial change was a supposed 8.6 %, 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’s 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.
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’s hoopla is an illusion. The apparent decline in the white population is a result of changes to the Census Bureau’s protocol for measuring and classifying racial identity. The changes aimed to more accurately gauge the expansion of the country’s mixed-race population through new and more sophisticated data collection and classification techniques that capture the nuances of Americans’ multifaceted racial and ethnic identities.
But a combination of bureaucratic constraints and messaging failures paved the way to public confusion.
Ironically, a segment by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson inadvertently exposed the myth of massive white decline. During a rant about what he perceived as left-wing giddiness over the “extinction of white people,” he asked, “Where did all these people go?” The millions of missing white Americans did not, in fact, go anywhere. And they are not being replaced by minorities. Growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren. Others were recategorized in 2020 as multiracial themselves, instead of single-race white...
More, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/181662
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- Americans are more positive about the long-term rise in U.S. racial and ethnic diversity than in 2016, Pew Research, Oct. 1, 2020. By Abby Budiman.
The United States is more racially and ethnically diverse today than it ever has been, and it is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades. In 2019, Americans who identify as a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic White made up 40% of the country’s population, and their combined share is predicted to increase to over 50% by 2044, according to the U.S. Census Bureau...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/01/americans-are-more-positive-about-the-long-term-rise-in-u-s-racial-and-ethnic-diversity-than-in-2016/
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