Immigration, Intermarriage, and The Myth of a Majority-Minority Nation: The “Mainstreaming” of American Minorities, Part 3

One of the main purposes of these posts, sourced mostly from the three books whose covers are shown on the posts, is to help build a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of race in America today.  I also hope that many readers will find the posts to be less polarizing than so much of what we see on the subject from the media and politicians, which often is intended to rile us up and drive us further into our respective political corners. The goal of these posts, like most Lone Liberal Republican posts, is to work towards more sensible, pragmatic and consensus-oriented discussions about difficult issues that America faces today, like race.

More interesting and thought-provoking material from The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority and the Expanding American Mainstream:

●     “The United States—again like other Western immigration societies—is in need of a new narrative, one that is less threatening to the majority and that, at the same time, allows immigrants and their children to become a part of the mainstream “us” without complete abandonment of their distinctiveness. It is my hope in writing this book that ideas about mainstream assimilation can provide the material for fashioning such a narrative.”

●       “If the reality of a majority-minority nation is somewhere off in the future, that reality has already come to some states and many cities. As of 2018, five states have majority-minority populations: Hawaii, which has never had a white majority; California, by far the largest of the five, where non-Hispanic whites became a numerical minority during the 1990s and have now fallen to less than 40 percent of the population; New Mexico, where Latines are almost half of the population; Nevada, which became majority-minority in 2016; and Texas, another large state, which had transitioned to a majority of minorities by 2005.” [Note: As everyone will be aware, this shift has created no meaningful culture war, and I wouldn't exactly describe California and Texas politics as having become more similar because of their shared majority-minority status.]

●       “In the regions with large immigrant populations, especially those where residential segregation is lower overall, intermarriage rates tend to be between 20 and 30 percent; for example, they are 22 percent in the Los Angeles area and 31 percent in Las Vegas. However, in the Chicago and New York regions, where both diversity and segregation are high, the rates are just below 20 percent. Intermarriage rates are lower still in regions where diversity is low, either largely white or largely white and black, such as Asheville [North Carolina] and Jackson [Mississippi]. This pattern is not limited to the South but is also found in, for example, the Pittsburgh region, where the intermarriage rate is 10 percent.”

●       “Latin Americans appear even later in America’s ethno-racial accounting. Mexicans made a cameo appearance as a distinct category of race in 1930; previously, they had been counted among whites. Their classification as a separate race elicited strenuous objections from the Mexican government and Mexican American groups, which successfully insisted that they be returned to the white category. In 1970, the census form sent to a sample of households a first attempt at a systematic measurement of Americans with Mexican and other Latin American ancestral origins. The question was distinct from race…asking about a person’s “origin or descent.””

●       “The multiple-race option introduced in the 2000 census raised concerns among civil rights groups and in Department of Justice discussions with stakeholders prior to the 2000 Census. The census counts of minority groups are essential for civil rights jurisprudence, such as litigation over employer discrimination and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. With a mixed-race option, civil rights advocates feared that minority counts could be reduced, with the consequence of weakening arguments, say, that employers were discriminating because they had failed to hire an appropriate number of minority workers given the minority presence in geographically proximate labor markets. The OMB issued “guidance” on this issue in March 2000, just prior to the census. [Note: Further guidance was issued in 2024.] The guidance was tailored specifically to civil rights monitoring and enforcement and laid out principles for classifying individuals of mixed race for those purposes. In particular, the OMB said that individuals of mixed minority and white origins should be allocated to the minority category. Just as with the “one-drop” rule, in other words, the minority side was to take precedence over the white side in the federal statistical system, at least for civil rights purposes. [Emphasis mine.] The irony involved was not lost on some critics... The decision to give preference to the minority side in reporting data has had huge consequences.”

●       “When Loving v. Virginia was decided, the interracial marriage rate was quite low—just 3 percent of newlyweds married someone from a different ethno-racial background.‎ (The degree of mixing outside of marriage may have been and may continue to be greater, since some mixed couples who anticipate family resistance may hesitate to marry.) But the percentage has increased almost in a straight line since 1967 and in 2015 stood at 17 percent, with no hint of stopping. Recently, one of every six newlyweds was intermarrying. Today 10 percent of all married persons have a partner of a different race or ethnicity from their own.”

●       “The predominant form of intermarriage unites minority and white partners. Marriages between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites make up more than 40 percent of all recent intermarriages. Marriages between whites and Asians are the next most common combination, at 15 percent.”

●       “The social milieus of Anglo-Hispanics tilt white, but not as much as Anglo-Asians. Individuals who are white and black are located in rather different spaces. Half of them say that all or most of their friends are black. However, just one-third claim to live in mostly black neighborhoods; this group is outnumbered by the more than 40 percent who live in mostly white neighborhoods. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, individuals from mixed minority and white family backgrounds appear mostly to marry whites.”

●       “Qualitative research indicates that Asian-white young adults do not feel a strong distinction from whites.”

●       “[One scholar’s] summary characterization of the identities of her Asian-white interviewees is that they mostly feel “white enough.” The implication is that they do not feel only white, but do feel sufficiently white to be “immersed in White networks.” And feeling “white enough” is quite important in another way: it allows Asian-whites to shrug off occasional micro-aggressions, such as when they receive compliments on how well they speak English or are interrogated about where they are “really” from. In comparison, her black-white subjects see racism as a major part of their lives: “Their stories about racial discrimination did not center on jokes or moments of racist actions; rather their stories were about how life is lived as a Black-White multiracial person who spends significant time and energy managing racial discrimination.”

●       “In some of the most segregated metropolitan regions—counterintuitively, these are politically liberal areas in the Northeast and Midwest, such as Chicago and New York—the level of segregation has not decreased much over several decades and remains close to .80, its national average in 1970. [Where segregation has decreased,] the decline of black-white segregation is at least partly due to the movement of many middle-class blacks out of black-majority neighborhoods and away from areas of concentrated disadvantage. This is a new development in the awful history of racial segregation, for outside the South blacks until recently were largely confined to black-majority areas by white discrimination and hostility. The sociologist who identified this new pattern, Patrick Sharkey, has found that, since 1970, the percentage of middle-and upper-income black households living outside of black-majority neighborhoods has almost doubled, going from 33 percent to nearly 60 percent.” [Emphasis mine]

●       “The contemporary mainstream integration is allowing some individuals with minority origins, especially the descendants of immigrants, to enter social spaces shared with many whites and find acceptance there. Acceptance, I want to emphasize, does not erase all aspects of ethno-racial distinction. It needs to be thought of in relative rather than absolute terms: minority or part-minority individuals in mainstream settings generally are much more accepted by mainstream whites than they would be otherwise, but their ethno-racial differences are still noticed some of the time and may be remarked upon in ways that are offensive. It is useful to remember that, despite the more than half a century that has elapsed since post–World War II mass assimilation, the US populace still includes anti-Semites, and stereotypes about Italian Americans and organized crime have not disappeared.”

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If you find the subject matter in these The Mainstreaming of Minorities posts interesting, check out this link to the late Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Disuniting of America, foreshadowing the difficult place identity politics would lead us. (I used to get scolded for suggesting people read it.) All twelve of the posts can be found in the “For Those With More Academic Interests” section on the Lone Liberal Republican website.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing, and be well.