Will Today\u2019s Hispanics Be Tomorrow\u2019s Whites?<\/a> by Jamelle Bouie in Slate.<\/p>\nThe Text:<\/strong> The Trayvon Martin shooting was hardly in the national consciousness before fault lines emerged around the case. Was Martin as innocent as he seemed? Did Zimmerman fear for his life? Did Martin provoke the incident? Was Zimmerman a racist?<\/p>\nPerhaps most controversial among all of these was the question of identity. Yes, Trayvon Martin was black, but is Zimmerman white? For Martin\u2019s sympathizers, the answer was yes. For Zimmerman\u2019s, the answers ranged from \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter\u201d to he \u201cis actually a Hispanic nonracist person who acted in self-defense.\u201d<\/p>\n
In their early reports on the case, both CNN and the New York Times labeled him \u201cwhite Hispanic,\u201d sparking thunderous condemnation from right-wing critics. At Fox News, contributor Bernard Goldberg accused the Times of race-baiting. \u201cI guarantee you that if George Zimmerman did something good\u2014if he finished first in his high school graduating class when he was younger\u2014they wouldn\u2019t refer to him as a white Hispanic, he\u2019d just be a Hispanic,\u201d he wrote. Likewise, National Review\u2019s Jonah Goldberg blasted several news outlets for \u201cplaying the race card\u201d with the term. And in typical paranoid style, Breitbart\u2019s Ben Shapiro accused CNN of \u201clabeling Zimmerman a \u2018white Hispanic\u2019 in order to maintain the false narrative that the killing was race-based.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For good reason, this debate\u2014whether the half-Peruvian Zimmerman was \u201cHispanic\u201d or \u201cwhite\u201d\u2014was quickly overshadowed by the activism and acrimony around Martin\u2019s killing. But it\u2019s not unimportant, as it reflects the tension and confusion over race in a changing America and offers a 21st-century spin on one of the oldest questions in American life: Who is white? This debate is useful to keep in mind as we sift through the information in the Pew Research Center\u2019s new\u2014and massive\u2014look at America\u2019s shifting demographics.<\/p>\n
According to Pew\u2014and echoing the results in the last census\u2014the United States is just a few decades away from its demographic inflection point. Come 2050, only 47 percent of Americans will call themselves white, while the majority will belong to a minority group. Blacks will remain steady at 13 percent of the population, while Asians will grow to 8 percent. Hispanics, on the other hand, will explode to 28 percent of all U.S. population, up from 19 percent in 2010. Immigration is driving this \u201cdemographic makeover,\u201d specifically the \u201c40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the thing to remember about the Hispanic category, for instance, is that it contains a wide range of colors and ethnicities. In the United States, Hispanics (or more broadly Latinos) include Afro-Brazilians, dark-skinned Puerto Ricans, indigenous Mexicans, Venezuelan mestizos, and European Argentinians, among others.<\/p>\n
To say that America will become a majority-minority country is to erase these distinctions and assume that, for now and forever, Latinos will remain a third race, situated next to \u201cnon-Hispanic blacks\u201d and \u201cnon-Hispanic whites.\u201d But, as the Zimmerman controversy illustrates, it\u2019s not that simple.<\/p>\n
American racial categories are far from fixed, and who counts as white is extremely fluid. \u201cA hundred years ago,\u201d writes Ian Haney L\u00f3pez in Dog Whistle Politics, \u201cfirm racial lines elevated Anglo-Saxons over the supposedly degenerate races from southern and eastern Europe.\u201d For a large chunk of the 19th century\u2014and a good deal of the 20th\u2014America\u2019s intellectual energy was devoted to policing the boundaries of \u201cwhiteness.\u201d Race \u201cscientists\u201d like William Z. Ripley measured human skulls and examined living standards to delineate the \u201craces\u201d of Europe, linking head shape to supposedly racial qualities like beauty and intelligence. Others used these supposedly objective factors to exclude a variety of different groups\u2014Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans\u2014from the American racial category, envisioned as a white person of British or German stock. \u201cWhite race taxonomy,\u201d writes Nell Irvin Painter in The History of White People, \u201cwas evolving into notions of immigration restriction and eugenics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over time, however, as new immigrants entered the country and old ones gained access to levers of power and influence, the boundaries grew to include them. As Painter explains, \u201cIn their penury and apparent strangeness, the new [Southern and Eastern European] immigrants after 1880 made Irish and Germans immigrants and \u2026 their more prosperous, better-educated descendants seem acceptably American.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to say history is repeating itself\u2014the circumstances of the early 21st century are vastly different from those of the late 19th\u2014but the current period does seem to rhyme with the past. Over the last 50 years of large-scale Latino and Asian immigration, we\u2019ve seen waves of anti-immigrant hysteria (Proposition 187 in California and the minutemen along the Mexican border), attempts to keep high-achieving immigrants and their children out of elite institutions, and intermarriage leading to assimilation\u2014one of the most famous comedians in the world, Louis C.K., is half-Mexican, but to most Americans, he\u2019s just a white guy.<\/p>\n
Which is to say that, before we begin to say anything about our majority-minority future, we have to consider the ways in which our existing social dynamics and racial boundaries will change in response to the demographic shift.<\/p>\n
Going forward, will white Hispanics see themselves as part of a different race\u2014light-skinned but distinct from whites\u2014or will they see themselves as another kind of white? Will the government treat them as white in its forms and surveys, and will so-called traditional white Americans understand them as such? What about the children of mixed marriages? As Pew points out, we live in an age of intermarriage. More than 15 percent of new marriages are between partners of different races, and the large majority of them are Hispanic and Asian \u201cout marriage\u201d to whites. Will these children retain a racial identity, or will they join the vast tapestry of American whiteness?<\/p>\n
These are critical questions, since\u2014in a country where white Hispanics are just white, and Asians intermarry at high rates\u2014the white population of the United States could stay steady or actually grow.<\/p>\n
Of course, not all Hispanics and Asians will enter the white mainstream. We don\u2019t see them in popular culture, but there are sharp racial and class divisions in both groups. Low-income, dark-skinned Latinos and Pacific Islanders, for instance, face prejudice, racism, and a huge array of socio-economic challenges. And going forward, that might stay the same, as their fair-skinned, more affluent counterparts \u201cbecome\u201d white. Or, put another way, now might be the last time we have a public debate over the whiteness of a figure like George Zimmerman. To Americans of 2050, the answer would be obvious: \u201cOf course he is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pew ends its description of our changing demographics with a small rhetorical flourish: \u201cWe were once a black and white country. Now, we\u2019re a rainbow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or are we? After all, while we see the 19th century as a world of blacks and whites, that wasn\u2019t true for Americans at the time. They saw their United States as diverse as we see ours\u2014a hodgepodge of races and ethnicities, with blacks as the insoluble element. The difference was their construction of race, which placed various Europeans on a convoluted hierarchy of racial difference.<\/p>\n
Our hierarchies are a little flatter, and\u2014in public life, at least\u2014we aren\u2019t as obsessed with racial boundaries. But both still exist, and they take a familiar form: whites at the top, blacks at the bottom. The future could make a collection of minorities the majority in America, or it could broaden our definition of white, leaving us with a remix of the black-and-white binary. A country where some white people are Asian, some are Hispanic, and the dark-skinned citizens of America\u2014and blacks especially\u2014is still a world apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: Will Today\u2019s Hispanics Be Tomorrow\u2019s Whites? by Jamelle Bouie in Slate. The Text: The Trayvon Martin shooting was hardly in the national consciousness before fault lines emerged around the case. Was Martin as innocent as he seemed? Did Zimmerman fear for his life? Did Martin provoke the incident? Was Zimmerman a racist? Perhaps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n