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But there was another problem with all this coverage of how white America is rapidly becoming a minority: The Census Bureau never actually said it.
So what explains the persistent drumbeat about the impending white minority? A statistical distortion: the exclusion of Hispanic whites. If only non-Hispanic whites are counted, the white population today amounts to 66 percent of the total, and will fall to around 46 percent by 2050.
But excluding whites of Hispanic origin from the overall white population makes no more sense than excluding whites of Slavic or Scandinavian origin. "Hispanic" is not a race. It is an ethnic category. As the Census Bureau repeatedly points out, Hispanics can be of any race. In the 2000 census, 48 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as white; Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has characterized them as "white in every social sense of this term." Bottom line: Of the 46.6 million Hispanics in the United States today, at least 22 million are white -- even if it suits some people's racial or political agenda to pretend otherwise.
....
One of the lessons of US history is that racial categories are anything but meaningful scientific classifications. For generations, "whites" have been hearing that they are about to be engulfed by unassimilable foreign races, and for generations those "races" have gone on to become -- white! Benjamin Franklin worried mightily about the threat posed to white American culture by the influx of German immigrants. "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens," he demanded in a pamphlet published in 1751, "who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them? Those "swarthy" Germans, Franklin was quite sure, "will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can adopt our Complexion."
...
And so in time, we may hope, will Hispanics, who give every indication of being just as assimilable as earlier groups. Most third-generation Hispanic Americans, for example, marry non-Hispanics. The overwhelming majority speak English -- in many cases, only English. With a little luck, common sense, and goodwill, it will seem as odd in 2050 to focus on "non-Hispanic whites" as it would today to insist that only "non-German whites" are really white.
Originally posted by cry93
reply to post by Section31
I'm black and I love you all, too.
Where and when do we stop looking at this from a microscopic view? This is a human experience, not a racial experiment.
That's all I have to say about this.
Originally posted by Open2Truth
Fear mongering - chalk it up to trying to whip up one group to see another as an eminent threat. Historically, all the way to present day, it plays out in religious and political arenas. We've got to start seeing beyond this illusion if any of us are to prosper and enjoy peace.
Originally posted by kristobal
By the year 2060, we will be entering the posthuman era anyway, and merging with machine intelligence. Instead of lame questions like "what race are you", our civilization will be concerned with newer worries such as "how augmented are you?" and "what proportion of you is biological?"
Here is a graph showing where computer power is headed in the next few decades:
A Computer with the power of a human brain
Originally posted by Sunsetspawn
Originally posted by kristobal
By the year 2060, we will be entering the posthuman era anyway, and merging with machine intelligence. Instead of lame questions like "what race are you", our civilization will be concerned with newer worries such as "how augmented are you?" and "what proportion of you is biological?"
The haves will begin to outpace the have-nots at an even more accelerated pace. Hopefully there will be a savior that can distribute self-replicating nano-augmentations to everyone on the planet to even the playing field.
Here is a graph showing where computer power is headed in the next few decades:
A Computer with the power of a human brain
And it never became "aware?" Well, that actually has metaphysical implications now, doesn't it?