The N.Y. Times has a front-page article on a long-expected announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that non-Hispanic white births are no longer a majority in the United States. This is the kind of threshold data point that will certainly receive a lot of discussion on cable news networks and talk-radio shows. But it is worth unpacking what that figure means in both a contemporary and historical context.
First, the U.S. census has, since 1970, made the decision to define ethnicity as either Hispanic or non-Hispanic (with variations over the years in the breadth of the Hispanic category, including additional labels like Latino). The decision to partition census data into two categories, ethnicity and race, was in part a decision that Hispanic/Latino did not constitute a race in the cultural-political context considered by the census (the census has recorded some form of racial data since its inception). Interestingly, U.S. census data supports the notion that people who identify as Hispanic/Latino with regards to ethnicity, disproportionately view this as a racialized category. The 2000 census data make this clear, where 42.2% of the Hispanic/Latino respondents identify themselves as belonging to one race (the 2000 census was the first to allow people to choose multiple racial identifiers), but one race distinguishable from the U.S. census racial categories; White, Black/African-America, Asian, Native Hawaiian, American Indian. This oddity of classification is reflected in the headline story as well–the census bureau is not reporting a majority of non-white births, it is reporting a minority of non-Hispanic white births.
The reason this is a story is in large part due to anxiety about the changing makeup of the U.S. population. Pat Buchanan has been at the forefront of conversations warning about the changing demographics of the U.S. for many years, regularly making comments like the following (from an August 2006 interview promoting his book):
What I would like is — I’d like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country.
We didn’t vote to change it. In 1965, in the Immigration Act, Teddy Kennedy said we’re going to maintain immigration at about present levels and numbers, and we will not consciously alter the character…
What makes Buchanan’s views striking is not that they are radical, it is that they are the identical arguments that have been made throughout the history of the country. The makeup of the U.S. population has been in a constant state of flux and there have always been people who felt that deviations from their own generation were deviations in the wrong direction. Buchanan’s statement that U.S. was about 89-90% white when he was growing up is correct. According to historical census data, the proportion of the U.S. population identified as white was at its peak in the decades around World Wars I and II, peaking at 89-90%. The current U.S. white population, around 80%, is actually much closer to the values from the first 50 years of the countries history, from the first census in 1790 up until 1830 (80-81%).
But more importantly, the racialized idea of “whiteness” itself has changed considerably over the years, meaning those historical values actually represent a dramatic over-representation of American whites in the context of how that term is being used by the N.Y. Times article. This can be seen both in the awkwardness of the white/Hispanic/non-Hispanic categorizations in play today, but it is also evident throughout the census’s history. This distinction took on its most dramatic historical manifestation in the first several decades of the 20th century, a time period which saw a dramatic influx of immigrants to the U.S. from Eastern and Southern Europe, populations that we think of as “white” today, but which were not the same “white” populations that had previously settled in the U.S. in large numbers. Like the current changing demographics prompt Buchanan’s anxieties, the changing demographics 100 years prompted Congressional action in the form of repeated Immigration laws intended to limit the proportion of “new” immigrants, white or other. The AAA’s Understanding Race exhibition provides a nice summary of this time period:
Discriminatory immigration policies aimed at southern and eastern Europeans figured into the quota-based policies of the 1920s. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act or Johnson-Reed Act, the U.S. used restrictive immigration policies in the 1920s based on the 1890 proportions of foreign-born European nationalities. Since the 1890 census reflected higher numbers of northern Europeans, immigrants from those countries had greater opportunities to emigrate. The arguments, outlined in Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of a Great Race, held that older immigrants were skilled, thrifty, hardworking like native born Americans and recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were unskilled, ignorant, predominantly Catholic or Jewish and not easily assimilated into American culture. Madison Grant and Charles Davenport, among other eugenicists, were called in as expert advisers on the threat of “inferior stock” from eastern and southern Europe, playing a critical role as Congress debated the Immigration Act of 1924. The act attempted to control the number of “unfit” individuals entering the country by lowering the number of immigrants allowed in to fifteen percent of what it had been previously. Existing laws prohibiting race mixing were strengthened as well. The adoption of incest laws and many anti-miscegenation laws were also influenced by the premises of eugenics.
Gradually, southern Europeans were included in the white category over the next census decades. Those denied equal status were marked and measured as racially different—Hispanics, Asians, African Americans and Native peoples. The 1920 census racial categories included Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mulatto, Negro and White.
My undergraduate advisor is a Greek-American, born near Detroit in the late 1930s. His birth certificate has a label for “race” and he is not listed as White, he is listed as Greek.
My point in all this is that the current announcement reflects not only the most recent in a long series of demographic trends within the U.S. population, but also a politicized understanding of the historical history of racial politics and the abstraction of that reality through quantitative historical data.
