The Mainstreaming of American Minorities

This series of posts has been planned for a long time, awaiting last November’s election results. As I wrote in the Spring of 2024, “it seems to me that, until the upcoming elections are over, it is difficult to know how to frame posts.”

I am glad I waited, because I certainly didn’t anticipate that a Trump victory would be coupled with such a significant breakdown of voters aligning based on their identities. Ditto New York’s recent mayoral primary. Recent elections have caused many more Americans to question some of the identity-related assumptions that have divided us. The data and stories set forth below are intended to make readers further question these increasingly stale assumptions (such as the importance of racial identity to politics), and happily reflect on an America less divided by identity than many have assumed.

One of the main purposes of these particular 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.

These posts are mostly sourced from three books: The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream, by Richard Alba; Immigration and The Remaking of Black America, by Tod Hamilton; and Beyond Expectations: Second Generation Nigerians in The United States and Britain, by Onoso Imoagene. These authors refuse to accept the framework through which too many politicians and media still see things, and document well why that is the case.

I have written these posts in bullet point format quoting directly from the three books, with my comments included, rather than as a more traditional narrative. It’s the style of a post I wrote about the book The Age of Anarchy, which was one of our most popular posts, reaching more than eighty thousand people on the Lone Liberal Republican Facebook page. So I am going to replicate the style of that post below to see if it is again attractive to readers. It also has the benefit of communicating through the words of established scholars on the subjects discussed, rather than someone (me) with no formally-acquired expertise on the subject matter.