I'm reading TCW's Self Portrait in Black and White right now and I find it beautiful and calming, though it's on this very fraught subject. I can't help but feel like all this is so dumb. I'm a very pale person but didn't know it until my first winter in Chicago after a childhood in Southern California.
After a week at the beach, my skin is several shades browner than it was in late July. Skin color culture, country of origin: all interesting, but only have the value we invest them with.
Great, thoughtful book. Good exercise in reading with an open mind and not having to agree with all of it for me, too.
You might like another Substack I came across recently, especially this post: https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/race-talk-doesnt-work This Baldwin quote struck me in particular: “ Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”
A social justice educator I follow recently posted a Baldwin quote about castration of the Black man being the point of America, and she simply asked for thoughts. My first thought was this is Baldwin when angry, not when hopeful, so what was the context?
So I looked it up. He said it in an interview in 1963, literally immediately after a failed meeting with RFK. Like, he and the other guests were almost late for the interview kind of immediate. My thoughts were the particular quote was powerful and emotional and above all *timely.* At that moment there had been no Civil Rights Act, no voting rights and housing rights acts, no Loving, no marriage equality. And he’d just come from a meeting that seemed to dash any hope of any of it.
Baldwin to me is a prophet; sometimes the prophet is speaking to humanity in general, sometimes to his specific community in his specific time. It’s important to be discerning.
I'm having some trouble reconciling the graph of 1990-2020 and the text assertion that nothing much is really changed demographically between 2010 and 2020.
As best I understand your point, the changes from 1990-2000, and from 2000-2010 are real demographic changes, but the change from 2010 to 2020 is almost totally an illusion created by changes in the questions between those latter years.
And it's purely random coincidence that every line on the chart is pretty linear through all 4 data points, even though the changes between the first three points is due to real demographic differences, and the remarkably similar changes in the final points are due to methodological not demographic differences.
And that there was some unexplained factor occurring around 2010 which caused long term historical trends to stop and be replaced by essentially flat lines of relatively constant demographics since then (masked by methodological changes which falsely appeared to continue the long term trends).
Does this not raise any questions that need further exploration for you as an analyst, before taking it as established fact to build arguments upon? Like do birth and death rates and family sizes or immigration rates, show a striking knee around 2010 which could explain the asserted flattening of the long term trends since then?
I am not expressing alarm nor excitement at demographic changes (or the omission thereof), just finding that the assertions made seem to need more serious explanation than just textual expressions of subjective "confidence", an interpretation or speculation which could potentially be affected by socio-political bias. Where is the evidence of *data* changes in the underlying drivers mentioned above, which could explain the (allegedly obscured) 2010ish flattening of longer term trends (going back even before 1990)?
It’s a good question, I’d have to do some digging. I imagine the trend has always been a combination of real demographic change, shifting perceptions of race, and the impact of the changes to the survey format, but I was taking the Census Bureau’s word for it that for 2020 it was mostly the survey format. Interracial marriage rates have been steadily climbing (last number I found was 17% from Pew in 2017) so I imagine multiracial babies would follow. But it’s worth noting that the census didn’t even allow people to identify as more than one race until 2000, so I think including 1990 in the WaPo chart is misleading- note the numbers add up to 99% on the left and 94% on the right. Seems to me yes, there are more multi-racial people in the US, and probably more people of Hispanic origins, than 20 years ago. But there are also likely a fair number of people with complex stories that would have just checked the “white” box 30 years ago and can add more nuance now. (There was another story I came across that highlighted how the prevalence of home DNA testing has led more people to see themselves as multi-racial, for example). But it’s hard to tell from this data. To answer your question, no, I don’t think anything super weird happened in 2010 to halt previous demographic trends. I just think the data has a lot of conflating factors baked in.
Also seems disingenuous to me that WaPo did not make the “alone”/“in combination” distinction on their chart. They are showing “alone” data, or an inferred version as “Hispanic Alone” was not an option.
Yes, I think there was some attempt to spin involved. Is it remotely possible that there are people in the world who have an interest in "debunking" the demographic data trends?
(Sadly, I used to generally just trust my liberal/progressive sources but check (or pre-emptively discount) anything from a more conservative source. I've since found that both sources sometimes carry accurate information and sometimes not, and both need to be checked. If I mention this to people, they often dismiss it with the smug assumption that the right distorts so dramatically more often than the left that the latter can be ignored; but I'm not as much concerned about tribally scoring of who does more distortion, as with actually getting accurate information.)
Yes, there are conflating factors. But the underlying drivers like birth rates and family size have shifted greatly over the last half century, and do not seem to be shifting back, so the seemingly fairly linear trends are likely real in my best estimate. Until somebody shows how that can be explained away, it does look like the trend is towards a nation with no majority. I'm not decrying that; in fact, I live in such a state already, and in fact one where whites are the second largest of the typical racial/ethnic population groups. But even if demographic change not framed as a problem, I still want to stay in touch with the true data, not a spun narrative.
Good article. I often wonder how much of this theory’s popularity is because you can use it as an excuse to keep on branding as “the party for nonwhite people to vote” without the hard work of actually talking to the many nonwhite people who are swing voters (it also must be tempting to ignore the major reality that many nonwhite people are swing voters)
Freddie DeBoer wrote that it seemed to him that it was no longer fashionable among people on the left side of the political spectrum to talk about demographic destiny due to a growing realization that it is probably all bunk for precisely the reasons you have elucidated.
A recent example from the media debunking the idea:
Plus the obvious, exhaustive and very recent coverage of Trump's rise in popularity in minority support (off the top of my head the stuff from Michael Lind, David Shor and the NY Times was very good). What interests me is how the narrative is increasingly being questioned and yet some (like Rubin) seem determined to cling to it. Are they ignorant of the questions being raised?
There are two issues which seem to be conflated here.
One is whether the proportions of white identifying residents are changing over time. There is long term data which strongly so suggests. For a subset of that data, see the chart in the article (discounting changes in questions between 2010 and 2020 as any explanation for the preceding 50 years).
The other is whether that implies strongly segregated subpopulations with clear boundaries and (allegedly) serious political or social implications.
The articles you cite address mainly the second issue. Inter-racial and inter-ethnic families will blur the genetic boundaries over time, and culture will diffuse in all directions, to some degree. And as you note, the political boundaries are also shifting.
The latter is my own hope as well; I would like to see a country where the boundaries and distinctions between subpopulations are fuzzier and less salient. But that perspective on imagined implications of the data, should not be mistaken as debunking the relatively objective underlying data trends themselves, about demographics.
The issue isn't long term decline in the percentage of white citizens, which is not up for debate. The issue is whether that decline eventually reaches the point where whites actually make up less than 50% of the country. That is actually what the articles are debunking.
Ok, look at the graphs of the data above and tell me when and why the long term objective changes in the data will cease.
What the articles are debunking is more about whether it will matter, and I may agree with that. I am NOT trying to argue that there is a problem. But it looks to me as if the portion of the US population identifying as white will continue to decline. White families are below the zero population growth level, some other groups are above the zero population growth level, immigration (authorized and unauthorized) is biased towards non-white identifying, and the number of interractial or inter-ethnic children is still a smallish minority of all births, not enough to change the above trends. Again, I am NOT saying that it's a bad thing, but I do not see any changes in the above factors which we should expect to turn that around (like more white immigration, or larger family size among whites, etc).
If a portion is decreasing towards 50%, it will get there unless something driving that change happens. I do not see how that math is "debunked" by the articles in question, even if I agree with them about the import.
It feels like some people are so much in need of disputing the negative narratives woven around this by some on the right, that they need to dispute the pretty well established demographic trends (ie: reality), rather than the much more questionable implications that some on the right try to spin from it (which are most generously characterized as speculations rather than reality).
But perhaps I misread, and I'm open to correction. I've been wrong before and I will be wrong again. Quote some relevant math from the articles which says that the measurable decline will stop before reaching 50% and why, and I will reconsider.
The issue is that what happens when those minority immigrant groups actually get into the United States? They don't rigidly silo themselves off into ethnic ghettos, they integrate into society--and in the US that means intermarriage. A lot of it. When you have a large base of white people to start with intermarriage means a lot of half white couples, far more than for example half-black and half-Asian couples or half-black and half-Hispanic couples.
What those articles make clear is that the "white" proportion of the country is only declining if you use some kind of Apartheid era "one drop" rule that classifies all these mixed race children as "minorities". But is that how they really think of themselves? In fact the majority self-identify as white and, when they marry other mixed race children, the effect is even further dilution of any ethnic or immigrant identity.
There is a comedian in San Francisco that I was listening to the other day named Al Madrigal who is half Mexican. He often jokes about the cultural dislocation he feels because he speaks zero Spanish and has no familiarity with Mexican culture.
But he also has a wife who is half Korean. His baby, he jokes, is therefore one quarter Mexican, one quarter Greek, one quarter Sicilian and one quarter Korean. Add all that up and you know what you get? White. When he's talking down the street with his child Hispanics will stop him and ask where he got one of those white babies.
In addition I would point out that the guys responsible for the "demographic destiny" argument are Ruy Texeira and John Judis. And over the last few years they have been very busy loudly protesting that everybody missed the nuance in their argument. Texeira, has a Substack where he goes into this in detail.
Three cheers for your last paragraph.
I'm reading TCW's Self Portrait in Black and White right now and I find it beautiful and calming, though it's on this very fraught subject. I can't help but feel like all this is so dumb. I'm a very pale person but didn't know it until my first winter in Chicago after a childhood in Southern California.
After a week at the beach, my skin is several shades browner than it was in late July. Skin color culture, country of origin: all interesting, but only have the value we invest them with.
Great, thoughtful book. Good exercise in reading with an open mind and not having to agree with all of it for me, too.
You might like another Substack I came across recently, especially this post: https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/race-talk-doesnt-work This Baldwin quote struck me in particular: “ Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”
That’s incredibly powerful and moving.
A social justice educator I follow recently posted a Baldwin quote about castration of the Black man being the point of America, and she simply asked for thoughts. My first thought was this is Baldwin when angry, not when hopeful, so what was the context?
So I looked it up. He said it in an interview in 1963, literally immediately after a failed meeting with RFK. Like, he and the other guests were almost late for the interview kind of immediate. My thoughts were the particular quote was powerful and emotional and above all *timely.* At that moment there had been no Civil Rights Act, no voting rights and housing rights acts, no Loving, no marriage equality. And he’d just come from a meeting that seemed to dash any hope of any of it.
Baldwin to me is a prophet; sometimes the prophet is speaking to humanity in general, sometimes to his specific community in his specific time. It’s important to be discerning.
I'm having some trouble reconciling the graph of 1990-2020 and the text assertion that nothing much is really changed demographically between 2010 and 2020.
As best I understand your point, the changes from 1990-2000, and from 2000-2010 are real demographic changes, but the change from 2010 to 2020 is almost totally an illusion created by changes in the questions between those latter years.
And it's purely random coincidence that every line on the chart is pretty linear through all 4 data points, even though the changes between the first three points is due to real demographic differences, and the remarkably similar changes in the final points are due to methodological not demographic differences.
And that there was some unexplained factor occurring around 2010 which caused long term historical trends to stop and be replaced by essentially flat lines of relatively constant demographics since then (masked by methodological changes which falsely appeared to continue the long term trends).
Does this not raise any questions that need further exploration for you as an analyst, before taking it as established fact to build arguments upon? Like do birth and death rates and family sizes or immigration rates, show a striking knee around 2010 which could explain the asserted flattening of the long term trends since then?
I am not expressing alarm nor excitement at demographic changes (or the omission thereof), just finding that the assertions made seem to need more serious explanation than just textual expressions of subjective "confidence", an interpretation or speculation which could potentially be affected by socio-political bias. Where is the evidence of *data* changes in the underlying drivers mentioned above, which could explain the (allegedly obscured) 2010ish flattening of longer term trends (going back even before 1990)?
It’s a good question, I’d have to do some digging. I imagine the trend has always been a combination of real demographic change, shifting perceptions of race, and the impact of the changes to the survey format, but I was taking the Census Bureau’s word for it that for 2020 it was mostly the survey format. Interracial marriage rates have been steadily climbing (last number I found was 17% from Pew in 2017) so I imagine multiracial babies would follow. But it’s worth noting that the census didn’t even allow people to identify as more than one race until 2000, so I think including 1990 in the WaPo chart is misleading- note the numbers add up to 99% on the left and 94% on the right. Seems to me yes, there are more multi-racial people in the US, and probably more people of Hispanic origins, than 20 years ago. But there are also likely a fair number of people with complex stories that would have just checked the “white” box 30 years ago and can add more nuance now. (There was another story I came across that highlighted how the prevalence of home DNA testing has led more people to see themselves as multi-racial, for example). But it’s hard to tell from this data. To answer your question, no, I don’t think anything super weird happened in 2010 to halt previous demographic trends. I just think the data has a lot of conflating factors baked in.
Also seems disingenuous to me that WaPo did not make the “alone”/“in combination” distinction on their chart. They are showing “alone” data, or an inferred version as “Hispanic Alone” was not an option.
Yes, I think there was some attempt to spin involved. Is it remotely possible that there are people in the world who have an interest in "debunking" the demographic data trends?
(Sadly, I used to generally just trust my liberal/progressive sources but check (or pre-emptively discount) anything from a more conservative source. I've since found that both sources sometimes carry accurate information and sometimes not, and both need to be checked. If I mention this to people, they often dismiss it with the smug assumption that the right distorts so dramatically more often than the left that the latter can be ignored; but I'm not as much concerned about tribally scoring of who does more distortion, as with actually getting accurate information.)
Yes, there are conflating factors. But the underlying drivers like birth rates and family size have shifted greatly over the last half century, and do not seem to be shifting back, so the seemingly fairly linear trends are likely real in my best estimate. Until somebody shows how that can be explained away, it does look like the trend is towards a nation with no majority. I'm not decrying that; in fact, I live in such a state already, and in fact one where whites are the second largest of the typical racial/ethnic population groups. But even if demographic change not framed as a problem, I still want to stay in touch with the true data, not a spun narrative.
Good article. I often wonder how much of this theory’s popularity is because you can use it as an excuse to keep on branding as “the party for nonwhite people to vote” without the hard work of actually talking to the many nonwhite people who are swing voters (it also must be tempting to ignore the major reality that many nonwhite people are swing voters)
Freddie DeBoer wrote that it seemed to him that it was no longer fashionable among people on the left side of the political spectrum to talk about demographic destiny due to a growing realization that it is probably all bunk for precisely the reasons you have elucidated.
A recent example from the media debunking the idea:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/myth-majority-minority-america/619190/
A not so recent example (from 2016!):
https://prospect.org/civil-rights/likely-persistence-white-majority/
Plus the obvious, exhaustive and very recent coverage of Trump's rise in popularity in minority support (off the top of my head the stuff from Michael Lind, David Shor and the NY Times was very good). What interests me is how the narrative is increasingly being questioned and yet some (like Rubin) seem determined to cling to it. Are they ignorant of the questions being raised?
There are two issues which seem to be conflated here.
One is whether the proportions of white identifying residents are changing over time. There is long term data which strongly so suggests. For a subset of that data, see the chart in the article (discounting changes in questions between 2010 and 2020 as any explanation for the preceding 50 years).
The other is whether that implies strongly segregated subpopulations with clear boundaries and (allegedly) serious political or social implications.
The articles you cite address mainly the second issue. Inter-racial and inter-ethnic families will blur the genetic boundaries over time, and culture will diffuse in all directions, to some degree. And as you note, the political boundaries are also shifting.
The latter is my own hope as well; I would like to see a country where the boundaries and distinctions between subpopulations are fuzzier and less salient. But that perspective on imagined implications of the data, should not be mistaken as debunking the relatively objective underlying data trends themselves, about demographics.
The issue isn't long term decline in the percentage of white citizens, which is not up for debate. The issue is whether that decline eventually reaches the point where whites actually make up less than 50% of the country. That is actually what the articles are debunking.
Ok, look at the graphs of the data above and tell me when and why the long term objective changes in the data will cease.
What the articles are debunking is more about whether it will matter, and I may agree with that. I am NOT trying to argue that there is a problem. But it looks to me as if the portion of the US population identifying as white will continue to decline. White families are below the zero population growth level, some other groups are above the zero population growth level, immigration (authorized and unauthorized) is biased towards non-white identifying, and the number of interractial or inter-ethnic children is still a smallish minority of all births, not enough to change the above trends. Again, I am NOT saying that it's a bad thing, but I do not see any changes in the above factors which we should expect to turn that around (like more white immigration, or larger family size among whites, etc).
If a portion is decreasing towards 50%, it will get there unless something driving that change happens. I do not see how that math is "debunked" by the articles in question, even if I agree with them about the import.
It feels like some people are so much in need of disputing the negative narratives woven around this by some on the right, that they need to dispute the pretty well established demographic trends (ie: reality), rather than the much more questionable implications that some on the right try to spin from it (which are most generously characterized as speculations rather than reality).
But perhaps I misread, and I'm open to correction. I've been wrong before and I will be wrong again. Quote some relevant math from the articles which says that the measurable decline will stop before reaching 50% and why, and I will reconsider.
The issue is that what happens when those minority immigrant groups actually get into the United States? They don't rigidly silo themselves off into ethnic ghettos, they integrate into society--and in the US that means intermarriage. A lot of it. When you have a large base of white people to start with intermarriage means a lot of half white couples, far more than for example half-black and half-Asian couples or half-black and half-Hispanic couples.
What those articles make clear is that the "white" proportion of the country is only declining if you use some kind of Apartheid era "one drop" rule that classifies all these mixed race children as "minorities". But is that how they really think of themselves? In fact the majority self-identify as white and, when they marry other mixed race children, the effect is even further dilution of any ethnic or immigrant identity.
There is a comedian in San Francisco that I was listening to the other day named Al Madrigal who is half Mexican. He often jokes about the cultural dislocation he feels because he speaks zero Spanish and has no familiarity with Mexican culture.
But he also has a wife who is half Korean. His baby, he jokes, is therefore one quarter Mexican, one quarter Greek, one quarter Sicilian and one quarter Korean. Add all that up and you know what you get? White. When he's talking down the street with his child Hispanics will stop him and ask where he got one of those white babies.
In addition I would point out that the guys responsible for the "demographic destiny" argument are Ruy Texeira and John Judis. And over the last few years they have been very busy loudly protesting that everybody missed the nuance in their argument. Texeira, has a Substack where he goes into this in detail.