Will Hispanics Be Tomorrow's Whites?

In right wing circles and throughout much of the GOP base, the thought that Hispanics - except those perhaps from Spain - are whites is tantamount to heresy.  One need only listen to the spittle flecked rants against immigrants to get a feel for the animus held toward those less than 100% Caucasian.  But with America's rapidly changing demographics, the issue of who is white may again come to the fore.  A piece in Slate looks at the issue and some of the ramifications that may be seen in the short and the long term.  Here are highlights:

Who is white? This debate is useful to keep in mind as we sift through the information in the Pew Research Center’s new—and massive—look at America’s shifting demographics.

According to Pew—and echoing the results in the last census—the United States is just a few decades away from its demographic inflection point. Come 2050, only 47 percent of Americans will call themselves white, while the majority will belong to a minority group. Blacks will remain steady at 13 percent of the population, while Asians will grow to 8 percent. Hispanics, on the other hand, will explode to 28 percent of all U.S. population, up from 19 percent in 2010. Immigration is driving this “demographic makeover,” specifically the “40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.”

But the thing to remember about the Hispanic category, for instance, is that it contains a wide range of colors and ethnicities. In the United States, Hispanics (or more broadly Latinos) include Afro-Brazilians, dark-skinned Puerto Ricans, indigenous Mexicans, Venezuelan mestizos, and European Argentinians, among others.

To say that America will become a majority-minority country is to erase these distinctions and assume that, for now and forever, Latinos will remain a third race, situated next to “non-Hispanic blacks” and “non-Hispanic whites.”  . . . .  it’s not that simple.

American racial categories are far from fixed, and who counts as white is extremely fluid. “A hundred years ago,” writes Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics, “firm racial lines elevated Anglo-Saxons over the supposedly degenerate races from southern and eastern Europe.” For a large chunk of the 19^th century—and a good deal of the 20^th—America’s intellectual energy was devoted to policing the boundaries of “whiteness.”

Over time, however, as new immigrants entered the country and old ones gained access to levers of power and influence, the boundaries grew to include them.

It’s hard to say history is repeating itself—the circumstances of the early 21^st century are vastly different from those of the late 19^th—but the current period does seem to rhyme with the past. Over the last 50 years of large-scale Latino and Asian immigration, we’ve seen waves of anti-immigrant hysteria (Proposition 187 in California and the minutemen along the Mexican border), attempts to keep high-achieving immigrants and their children out of elite institutions, and intermarriage leading to assimilation—one of the most famous comedians in the world, Louis C.K., is half-Mexican, but to most Americans, he’s just a white guy.

Going forward, will white Hispanics see themselves as part of a different race—light-skinned but distinct from whites—or will they see themselves as another kind of white? Will the government treat them as white in its forms and surveys, and will so-called traditional white Americans understand them as such? What about the children of mixed marriages? As Pew points out, we live in an age of intermarriage. More than 15 percent of new marriages are between partners of different races, and the large majority of them are Hispanic and Asian “out marriage” to whites. Will these children retain a racial identity, or will they join the vast tapestry of American whiteness?

These are critical questions, since—in a country where white Hispanics are just white, and Asians intermarry at high rates—the white population of the United States could stay steady or actually grow.

The future could make a collection of minorities the majority in America, or it could broaden our definition of white, leaving us with a remix of the black-and-white binary. A country where some white people are Asian, some are Hispanic, and the dark-skinned citizens of America—and blacks especially—is still a world apart.

For now at least, "white" to the GOP means white of European descent, conservative Protestant (preferably evangelical), and heterosexual.  As the demographics continue to change that GOP base and definition of white will shrink in numbers and yet again causes me to ask why the GOP is busy committing long term political suicide?   When will the GOP come to the point of just seeing people as people regardless of skin tone?  Meanwhile, Tony Perkins, Victoria Cobb and others of their ilk will continue to preach hate while wrapping themselves in false piety and religiosity.