I was thinking about doing a post about how silly the fuss is over the percentage of babies born to "minority" parents being greater than those born to "majority" parents for the first time. But Ronald Bailey at reason.com did a much better job that I could:
The first question should be, who cares? The categories of the ethinc groups constituting what counts as minority and majority are arbitrarily defined by Federal law. In my earlier column, The Silly Panic Over a Minority White Nation, I pointed out that for many early 20th Century nativists lots of other ethnic groups did not qualify as "white." I specifically noted:
...the classic 1922 anti-immigration screed by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America. “The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race,” asserted Roberts. “If a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.”
Nativists like Roberts did not think that Italians, Jews, and Slavs, etc. were "white." So I did some rough calculations looking at percentages of Americans who are descended from those earlier "minority" groups, and I found:
...adding up all of the “non-white” groups, one finds that they and their descendants now total 184 million out of 313 million citizens, constituting nearly 60 percent of the country’s current population.
The evolution of our demographics should be reason for celebration. This has always the Mongrel Nation, happily absorbing cultures from everywhere with the result that exactly what it means to be an American is always changing. But we have far too much pluribus and not nearly enough unum these days, focusing too sharply on what makes us different and not enough on what we have in common. We can't even talk about this stuff without perverted mental gymnastics that require us to change "majority" and "minority" from their simple meaning of "the most in number" and "the least in number" to "white" and "ain't white." There is no more twisted phrase in English than "minority majority," yet people write it without pause.
