The Great Demographic Illusion

Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream

Richard Alba

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691202112
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Demografía

Why the number of young Americans from mixed families is surging and what this means for the country's future Americans are under the spell of a distorted and polarizing story about their country's future—the majority-minority narrative—which contends that inevitable demographic changes will create a society with a majority made up of minorities for the first time in the United States's history. The Great Demographic Illusion reveals that this narrative obscures a more transformative development: the rising numbers of young Americans from ethno-racially mixed families, consisting of one white and one nonwhite parent. Examining the unprecedented significance of mixed parentage in the twenty-first-century United States, Richard Alba looks at how young Americans with this background will play pivotal roles in the country's demographic future.Assembling a vast body of evidence, Alba explores where individuals of mixed parentage fit in American society. Most participate in and reshape the mainstream, as seen in their high levels of integration into social milieus that were previously white dominated. Yet, racism is evident in the very different experiences of individuals with black-white heritage. Alba's portrait squares in key ways with the history of immigrant-group assimilation, and indicates that, once again, mainstream American society is expanding and becoming more inclusive.Nevertheless, there are also major limitations to mainstream expansion today, especially in its more modest magnitude and selective nature, which hinder the participation of black Americans and some other people of color. Alba calls for social policies to further open up the mainstream by correcting the restrictions imposed by intensifying economic inequality, shape-shifting racism, and the impaired legal status of many immigrant families.Countering rigid demographic beliefs and predictions, The Great Demographic Illusion offers a new way of understanding American society and its coming transformation.

1

Introduction

THE NARRATIVE OF THE MAJORITY-MINORITY SOCIETY

Many Americans believe that their society is on the precipice of a momentous transformation, brought about by the inevitable demographic slide of the white population into numerical minority status and the consequent ascent of a new majority made up of nonwhites. The large-scale immigration of the last half-century is a major driver of current demographic change, as is the aging of the white population. Should it occur, the transformation to what is often called a “majority-minority” society—one in which today’s ethno-racial minorities (African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans)* together will constitute a majority of the population—is presumed to entail profound and wide-ranging effects. These could range from its impact on the distribution of political power to a rising prominence of minority experiences in cultural domains like the movies.

For many whites, the current narrative about ineluctable demographic shift, ending in their minority status, congeals into a threatening vision about their place in America. At the extreme, their uneasiness about the future takes the form of what the New York Times columnist Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety” and propels them into the embrace of white nationalism.¹ Political scientists who have analyzed the forces behind the startling and unanticipated 2016 election of Donald Trump as president argue that white “racial resentment,” stoked in part by the anxiety over massive demographic change and its implications for whites, was the most consequential among them. For many minority Americans, the same perception engenders optimism about the future and a hope that they will see the mainstream better reflect their group and its experiences.

Demographic data are playing a remarkable role in these developments. It is in fact rare for demographic data to receive so much public attention. Announcements by the Census Bureau, such as the 2015 press release reporting that the majority of children under the age of five are no longer white (according, I have to add, to the narrow definition of “white” employed by the census), receive wide publicity and are greeted with headlines such as “It’s Official: The US Is Becoming a Minority-Majority Nation” (this one in US News & World Report).² When the Public Religion Research Institute conducted its annual American Values Survey in 2018, it asked a representative sample of Americans:

As you may know, US Census projections show that by 2045, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other mixed racial and ethnic groups will together be a majority of the population. Do you think the likely impact of this coming demographic change will be mostly positive or mostly negative?

Only a small percentage of respondents (4 percent) were unable to respond. The vast majority, in other words, were familiar enough with the idea to have an opinion, which incidentally was positive in the majority (except among whites, who were evenly divided).³

Yet there are powerful reasons to be skeptical about this demographic imagining of the present and the near future: it assumes a rigidity to racial and ethnic boundaries that has not been characteristic of the American experience with immigration. As a nation, we have been here before. A century ago, when immigration from southern and eastern Europe was at its zenith, bringing masses of southern Italian and Polish Catholics and eastern European Jews to Ellis Island, there was a spasm of near-hysteria in the white Protestant elite about the superior racial characteristics of native white Americans being submerged by the numbers and fertility of these inferiors. Reflecting ideas about eugenics widely discussed at the time, the patrician New Yorker Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race (1916), decrying the pernicious racial impact of the new immigrants on what he viewed as America’s native Nordic stock. The introduction of IQ testing shortly before World War I seemed to confirm the inferiority of the new immigrants, many of whom appeared to be intellectually deficient.⁴ Yet the national decline anticipated from the immigration of newcomers, who were held to be racially unlike established white Americans, failed to materialize.

The rigidity of ethno-racial lines is already being challenged by a robust development that is largely unheralded: a surge in the number of young Americans who come from mixed majority-minority families and have one white parent and one nonwhite or Hispanic parent. Today more than 10 percent of all babies born in the United States are of such mixed parentage; this proportion is well above the number of Asian-only children and not far below the number of black-only infants. This surge is a by-product of a rapid rise in the extent of ethno-racial mixing in families. What makes this phenomenon new is the social recognition now accorded to mixed ethno-racial origins as an independent status, rather than one that must be amalgamated to one group or another.

The book uses the rise of mixed backgrounds that span the minority-white divide as a lens through which to scrutinize and challenge the idea of an inevitable majority-minority society, envisioned by many Americans as one cleaved into two distinct parts with opposing interests, experiences, and viewpoints. As a first step, I show the crucial significance of the mixed group for census data that appear to herald a minority status for whites. Census ethno-racial classifications do not deal appropriately with mixed minority-white backgrounds. There is an interesting story behind this failure, which the book will tell. But the bottom line is this: for the critical public presentations of data, the Census Bureau classifies individuals who are reported as having both white and nonwhite ancestries as not white; my analyses for the book show that the great majority of all mixed Americans are therefore added to the minority side of the ledger. This classification decision has a profound effect on public perceptions of demographic change, but it does not correspond with the social realities of the lives of most mixed individuals, who are integrated with whites at least as much as with minorities. The census data thus distort contemporary ethno-racial changes by accelerating the decline of the white population and presenting as certain something that is no more than speculative—a future situation when the summed counts of the American Indian, Asian, black, and Latine categories exceed the count of whites.

The reasons to be concerned about the widespread belief in a majority-minority future go far beyond demographic accuracy. The political impact has already been cited. Of broader significance is the role of the “majority-minority society” as a narrative: an account—often abbreviated in common understanding—about the ethno-racial changes taking place now and in the near future that shapes our perceptions of them and determines our fundamental understanding of American society and of its evolution in an era of large-scale immigration. The narrative most widely believed about the immigration past, overwhelmingly European in origin, is that the descendants of the immigrants were absorbed into the mainstream society, despite initial experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and denigration for alleged inferiority. This is an assimilation story. That narrative now collides with the perception, nourished by the majority-minority concept, of a stark and deep-seated cleavage between the currently dominant white majority and nonwhite minorities. That perception feeds a different narrative: that a contest along ethno-racial lines for social power (taking that term in its broadest sense) is intensifying. This collision of narratives in the public sphere is mirrored in academic debate—between the adherents of race theory (or critical race theory), currently the dominant perspective at American universities, and those who view ethnicity and race as more malleable and potentially reshaped by assimilatory processes.

The book addresses the conflict between these narratives. And by combining key ideas from apparently conflicting social-science theories, it seeks a more nuanced understanding of American society in the early twenty-first century. (The time span I have in mind extends to midcentury; past that point, too many unanticipated changes are likely to have taken place, clouding anyone’s ability to envision their cumulative impact.) Race theory, which has been mostly tested on the African American experience and is most relevant to groups that have been incorporated into American society by conquest, colonization, or enslavement, is in fact applicable to the new forms of ethno-racial mixing: I show evidence that individuals with black and white parentage have a very different experience from other mixed persons and identify more strongly with the minority side of their backgrounds. However, many other mixed majority-minority Americans have everyday experiences, socioeconomic locations, social affiliations, and identities that do not resemble those of minorities. On the whole, these individuals occupy a liminal “in between,” but their social mobility and social integration with whites are indicative of an assimilation trajectory into the societal mainstream. In arriving at this conclusion, the book synthesizes new data analyses, based on such data sources as the American Community Survey and public use files of birth certificates, with the research record, both qualitative and quantitative, concerning individuals with mixed ethno-racial origins.

To understand better the larger significance of the growing subpopulation with mixed minority-white backgrounds, the book revisits assimilation theory. Important for my argument is the twenty-first-century version of the theory, which envisions assimilation as a process of integrating into the mainstream society instead of joining the white group. This new version does not require erasure of all signs of ethno-racial origin.⁵ The mainstream—which is constituted by institutions, social milieus, and cultural spheres where the dominant group, whites at this moment in history, feels “at home”—is not closed off against others. Just as the white Protestant mainstream that prevailed from colonial times until the middle of the twentieth century evolved through the mass assimilation of Catholic and Jewish ethnics after World War II, the racially defined mainstream of today is changing, at least in some parts of the country, as a result of the inclusion of many nonwhite and mixed Americans.

As this discussion suggests, the theoretical exposition of mainstream assimilation must be coupled with a close examination of the assimilation past, especially the period of mass assimilation following the end of World War II. The justification for this examination is not the mistaken belief that assimilation today will replicate the patterns of the past, but rather the need to correct ideas about assimilation that have become distorted by one-dimensional understandings of that period as well as by the rhetorical tropes of anti-assimilation theorizing. A deeper understanding reveals clues about what to look for in the present and what to expect in the near future.

The currently widespread understanding of white ethnic assimilation is racial in nature: the ethnics were assimilated when they were accepted as full-fledged whites.⁶ This understanding depicts assimilation into the mainstream as a homogenizing process. However, it is more accurate, I argue, to view the white ethnics’ assimilation as diversifying the mainstream because, before the middle of the last century, religion had been a basis for the exclusion of Catholic and Jewish ethnics from a white Protestant mainstream; mass assimilation was accompanied by the acceptance of Judaism (in its non-ultra-Orthodox forms) and Catholicism as mainstream religions alongside Protestantism. The post-1945 mainstream society redefined itself as Judeo-Christian. We should understand the assimilation of today therefore as neither inherently excluding the descendants of the newest immigrants because they cannot become white nor requiring them to present themselves as if they were white. Instead, the mainstream can expand to accept a visible degree of racial diversity, as long as the shared understandings between individuals with different ethno-racial backgrounds are sufficient to allow them to interact comfortably. In this way, increasing participation in the mainstream society is associated with “decategorization,” in the sense that the relationships among individuals in the mainstream are not primarily determined by categorical differences in ethno-racial membership. In colloquial terms, they treat each other by and large as individuals rather than as members of distinct ethno-racial groups.

My argument is that, for the most part, the new, or twenty-first-century, phenomenon of mixed minority-majority backgrounds is a sign of growing integration into the mainstream by substantial portions of the new immigrant groups, especially individuals with Asian and Hispanic origins. The mainstream integration of mixed individuals is signaled by such indicators as their high rates of marriage to whites. But of course, it is not simply the children from mixed families who are integrating; many of the nonwhite parents are doing so as well, and as will be shown, they are often settling with their families in integrated neighborhoods, where many whites are also present. The mainstream does appear to be expanding and becoming more diverse, and the implications are potentially quite consequential. However, the impact of racism on Americans who are visibly of African descent is also consequential, and racism presumably also affects some portions of other groups, such as dark-skinned Hispanics. In addition, the expanding role of legal exclusions condemns unauthorized immigrants to the margins of the society and hinders their children.⁷

What will the growing diversity in the mainstream mean for its definitional character? In the recent past and even today, the mainstream has been equated with whiteness. One scenario, compatible with race theory, sees the mainstream expansion as essentially a whitening process that will ultimately leave the mainstream defined as it is now. More plausible in my view is that the mainstream in the more diverse regions of the country will come to be—or maybe already has been—perceived in multiracial and multicultural terms, especially as prominent individuals in these regions are increasingly drawn from a visibly wide set of origins; in other regions, the mainstream will remain heavily white, at least in the near future. A multiracial character for the mainstream could further expand access, including additional space for African Americans. However, mainstream expansion today is also consistent with high levels of average inequality among groups and with the exclusion of many nonwhites. The growing assimilation of some nonwhites is no reason to settle into complacency about the need to promote greater equality and inclusion.

The relatively modest magnitude of mainstream assimilation today compared to the sweeping assimilation of the descendants of European immigrants in the decades following the end of World War II highlights the dependence of assimilation processes on large-scale features of the societal context, economic and demographic. I discuss these within the framework “non-zero-sum assimilation,” a theory I develop concerning the mechanisms driving assimilation: social mobility, which produces parity with many individuals in the mainstream; the growth of amicable personal relationships with such individuals; and mainstream cultural change that elevates the moral worth of minority individuals. It is the first mechanism that is most constrained today. In the post–World War II period, when the United States was briefly the preeminent global economic power, higher education and the occupational sectors it fed were expanded enormously. This expansion engendered non-zero-sum mobility on a mass scale for the second and third generations descended from the immigrants with previously stigmatized origins, such as those from Ireland, southern Italy, Poland, and Russia. (A claim made throughout the book is that assimilation is more extensive under conditions of large-scale non-zero-sum mobility, when upward mobility by minority-group members does not require downward mobility by some in the majority.) In the early twenty-first century, when economic inequality is much greater than it was in the middle of the twentieth century, the basis for significant non-zero-sum mobility that favors minorities is demographic rather than economic: with the aging and retirement of a large number of older, well-placed white workers, there are not enough younger whites to replace them. This process will play out most intensely during the coming two decades as the last of the large, heavily white baby-boom cohorts age out of work and civic leadership and many individuals with minority family backgrounds, including mixed ones, replace them. But contemporary assimilation is more selective: its magnitude—the extent to which it involves all parts of minority groups—will not match that of the earlier period.

In the last part of the book, then, I examine social policies that could enhance mainstream expansion today and also extend the option to more African Americans and others affected by severe racism. Prominent among these policies are those addressing high and growing economic inequality in the United...