The New White Minority

The census suggests that White Americans will be a minority by 2040, but as several commentators have already noted, that date can easily be hastened or postponed. With each extreme weather event the coming demographic change comes even faster as people opt out of having children in the white community that already sees a mean age of 48 years old! Whiteness isn’t a fixed identity; it’s like taffy – it expands to accommodate new members, if they have the right look. So literally white America can nominate a new immigrant for white status as long as they don't have significant amounts of Eumelanin!

In books like “How The Irish Became White” and “Working Toward Whiteness,” scholars have argued that the definition of Whiteness has expanded to include Irish, Italian, Armenian, Afghan, Some Natives, Arabs, Turkish, and Jewish people – groups that once weren’t considered fully White in the US.“Through a historical lens, being white in America today is like belonging to a once-exclusive social club that had to loosen its membership criteria to stay afloat,” Gest writes.

Why do so many racial groups gravitate toward Whiteness? The answer is both pragmatic and psychological.

It’s due to a racial hierarchy that places Whiter-looking people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. “Sometimes looking White puts money directly into your pockets,” says Tanya K. Hernandez, author of the forthcoming book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality.”

“You get access to jobs, opportunities and being viewed as competent. But there’s also a psychological benefit, that feeling of having enhanced status, of being part of Whiteness. ”This racial hierarchy is the foundation of White supremacy. Europeans created it around 500 years ago to justify slavery and colonialism. This hierarchy is where we get the modern conception of race – how a person’s inherent worth, intelligence or attractiveness can be determined by the pigmentation of their skin.

For those who fret about the “disappearing White majority,” I say look at history:

The numbers and types of people who are defined as White may change, but the status and power that comes with being White has remained the same...Until now! Climate change is making the argument of white supremacy difficult how can one be superior if they cant go outside in the daylight? How can one be superior if they cant procreate in large numbers due to a multitude of physical and socio economic hardships enhanced by climate change?

In the 2010 Census, for example, researchers discovered that some 1.2 million Americans who had identified as “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” a decade earlier had changed their race from “some other race” to “white.” That number, however, plunged in the 2020 census. It revealed a drastic drop in the number of Latinos or Hispanics who identify as White. That drop may be due to President Trump’s well-documented hostility to non-White immigrants and his administration’s unsuccessful attempt to reduce the count of Latinos by manipulating the 2020 Census. Also it could be the realization that by embracing a nonwhite status in the census you can wield much more power than by being lumped in as a proxy white vote. Relegated to doing jobs no white person wants to do!