I know it happens a lot, but we in the news media perform a public disservice when we run headlines like “The US white majority will soon disappear forever” and “America is becoming a white-minority nation.”
I am not sorry to report that this change, such as it is, is not happening overnight.
But some people for reasons of their own are using that interpretation to inflame racial anxieties in our country, which already has more than enough anxieties about our diversity.
I thought we might be insulated by our history as a diverse nation from the anti-immigrant politics that have roiled European politics in recent decades.
But the tragedy in which a deranged gunman, whom I prefer to leave nameless, killed 10 Black Americans and wounded three others at a supermarket on a quiet Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, offers further evidence, as if we needed any, that we can no longer view racial-ethnic madness as local.
That’s what many of us wanted to think three years ago, when a white supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas.
Large sections of his rambling so-called manifesto were lifted directly from the writings of the perpetrator of another social network-driven racist massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Both promoted the white supremacist notion that violence against nonwhite people is justified to prevent “white genocide” or the “replacement” of white Americans by nonwhite immigrants.
That age-old “replacement” garbage reemerged in a 2011 book, “The Great Replacement” by Frenchman Renaud Camus in which he pushed a theory embraced by white supremacists, publicized internationally via the internet and cited by racial terrorists from New Zealand to Texas.
A repackaging of old-fashioned ethnic xenophobia, the so-called theory has been given new life amid the angers and anxieties stirred up by opportunists seeking political power or excuses to commit mayhem.
As the alleged Buffalo shooter says, he carried out the attack because “all Black people are replacers just by existing in white countries.”
Side note: To those who condemn education about America’s racial history as some sort of dangerous “critical race theory” that makes white children uncomfortable, when you prevent children from learning the truth about history they have more mental space for racist garbage.
So what’s the truth? Are white people not disappearing in America?
Ironically, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who The New York Times identified as having pushed core tenets of the theory in more than 400 episodes, inadvertently poked holes one night in the myth he has been trying to spread about massive white decline.
During a sermon about alleged liberal delight over the “extinction of white people,” he asked, “Where did all these people go?”
Good question. In fact, the millions of missing white Americans did not go anywhere, nor are they being replaced by minorities.
One census statistic in particular that triggered numerous headlines about white decline was a reported 8.6% drop in the number of white Americans since 2010.
That unprecedented white population drop was taken by many as a sign that white America’s long-forecasted minority status was closer than previously thought.
But, as political scientist Morris Levy, sociologist Richard Alba and demographer Dowell Myers explained in The Atlantic in October, the statistic was produced by changes in the way the Census Bureau counts race, particularly white people or, more accurately, people who call themselves “white.”
Among other changes, the 2010 census added the ability to check more than one racial box. In 2020 they added the ability to check ethnic labels, such as German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian and other groups.
The era of the “one-drop” rule, when one drop of African blood in your background made you Black, is over. As growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren — and everyone seems to be subscribing to services that track your family ancestry through DNA — counting only those who checked the “white” box as white leads to a big undercount of folks who otherwise look white.
My optimistic lesson from this big snafu is that we need to invest a little less in race as a source of fears and anxieties. New generations are acting on their own to build healthy forms of identity America’s melting pot or, as I prefer to call it, mulligan stew. Demography is not destiny. At least, not like it used to be.
Still we continue to be plagued by marketers of racial fears and anxieties for their own profit. Be cautious, but don’t be duped. Diversity is our strength. Let’s put race in its proper place.
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Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
