Donald Trump/Mike Pence and the Republican Party have used racial division and fanning the flames of white fears (especially working class white fears) over whites becoming a demographic minority in America as the number one means to mobilize their base. Study after study has shown that "economic anxiety" was NOT the motivating factor for why working class whites - and, I would argue a number of my Republican "friends" voted for Trump/Pence. It all boils down to racism and an irrational fear of anyone deemed "other." Having lived in Hampton, Virginia, a white minority city for the last nine (9) years, I find the fears ridiculous and irrational. If Hampton has economic problems, most stem from an incompetent white city manager who the City Council refuses to fire and replace with someone with some vision and imagination.
Meanwhile, the Hampton Yacht Club, once the bastion of white Hampton, has minority members and - the horror in the minds of Christofascists - gay members such as myself. The club in fact has record levels of membership and is doing just fine with an expanded membership base. As for "non-whites," both the husband and I have those who the Census Bureau would label as "non-white in our families. Indeed, under the Census Bureau standards I could be considered Hispanic given my mother's "origin" in Central America in a Spanish speaking country, not that anyone in my family has ever classified themselves as Hispanic. A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the inaccuracies of how the Census Bureau defines race and the manner Trump and the GOP have cynically and dangerously whipped irrationally insecure whites into a frenzy: Here are highlights:
The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation — and when that might happen — is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex.
Two articles that appeared in the opinion section of The Times over the past few years made the case that misleading statistical artifacts used by the Census Bureau have increased the fear of a majority-minority America, a fear that played a crucial role in the 2016 election.
Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.
Not so fast, say William Frey of Brookings, Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland and Justin Gest of George Mason University. They argue that mixed-race Americans who identify as white are not always viewed — or accepted — as white by other Americans. As Mason put it to me in an email, “people who are racially motivated to dislike immigrants” will “not be assuaged by the argument that one day immigrants will just be white people.”
[I]n 2017, Alba addressed the interrelated questions of how mixed-race Americans classify themselves, how the census classifies them and how the census classification deals with the offspring of racially and ethnically mixed parents. Alba writes:
Currently, 14 to 15 percent of infants born in the United States are multiethnic or multiracial, a number that was just 11 to 12 percent in 2000. But despite the fact that most of those children have a white parent, inadequacies in the census classifications mean that the great majority of them are identified as nonwhites. This is important, because most partly white individuals behave like whites in sociological terms. They grow up in neighborhoods with many whites, have white friends as adults, think of themselves mostly as white or partly white, and marry whites.
In addition, according to Alba, “when individuals report having Hispanic ancestry, the Census Bureau assumes, following the O.M.B. standards, that they are only Hispanic regardless of their answers to the race question.” In other words, Hispanics who describe themselves as white are classified as minorities, not as whites.
The census defines as Hispanic or Latino “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” In the 2010 census, there were 50.48 million Hispanics, 53 percent of whom self-identified as white.
When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.
This raises a question: If the census dropped the binary non-Hispanic white-minority division and instead stressed the large number of people of mixed ancestry who self-identify as white, would the anxieties of whites fearful of a majority-minority America be lessened?
A second question is how many Americans who are currently inclined to see immigrants as outsiders and as threats to the nation’s culture will perceive those coming from Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and North African nations as part of the American mainstream — even as more of those migrants intermarry. And what about the second-, third- and fourth-generation offspring of increasing numbers of Latino-white and Asian-white unions?
Trump has driven home not only to his base but to many others the message of a threatening majority-minority future.
[A] survey of 2,600 non-Hispanic whites conducted in July 2016, during the campaign, by Dowell Myers and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California.
They asked one half of the respondents to read a story about the “conventional narrative about the decline of non-Hispanic whites” and the other half to read a story detailing “the growth of Hispanic and Asian-American populations” but that “also mentioned the rise of intermarriage and reported the Census Bureau’s alternative projection of a more diverse white majority persisting the rest of the century.”
Of those who read the first version, “46 percent of white Democrats and a whopping 74 percent of Republicans expressed anger or anxiety when reading about the impending white-minority status.” Of those who read the second version, “only 35 percent of white Democrats and 29 percent of white Republicans expressed anger or anxiousness.”
Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and the author of the book “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality,” is far less optimistic. He wrote by email:
The image of these immigrants has been contaminated by Trumpian portrayals of criminals, benefit hunters, and opportunistic job competitors. Further, the vision of a more hybridized whiteness is still a couple decades away, and political minds are notoriously myopic.
It is not, Gest argued, a strategy to reassure white Trump supporters, “Don’t worry. Those immigrants will soon be white too.” There is a pervasive perception that Latinos, Africans and Asians are simply too different, too far removed from what Sam Huntington called the “American creed.”
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, shares Gest’s pessimistic assessment. As a general rule of thumb, Mason argued, “people don’t respond well to being told that they’ll think differently one day. It comes across as patronizing and can cause them to stick to their original idea even more strongly.”
Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that in the contemporary political climate, the fear of cultural disruption has become so pervasive on the right that realistic facts and figures make little difference. As he wrote in an email:
My sense is that actual levels of migration, shifts in immigrants’ ethnic identification, and changing rates of intermarriage are, at best, only loosely coupled with perceptions of cultural threat among white voters, particularly those with moderate levels of education and those living outside of urban centers. Even though actual levels of undocumented migration from Mexico — and net migration from that country in general — have decreased in recent years, this in no way diminished the potency of Donald Trump’s xenophobic discourse in the 2016 presidential election.
Bonikowski elaborated:
The reason for this is that many Trump supporters have long held strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these sentiments have only recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other Republicans before him, have actively stoked fears of demographic and cultural change and channeled them into powerful resentments toward minority groups. For many voters, such resentments are not rooted in everyday experience, not least because they tend to live in ethnically homogeneous, predominantly white communities, but rather, they are shaped by powerful nativist narratives perpetuated by right-wing politicians, partisan organizations, and media outlets.
Could a more multifaceted narrative than the binary white vs. minority projection into the future lessen the anxiety of some whites? Michael Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young, doubts it:
Their research shows, Barber writes, that partisans have extremely biased perceptions of the “other” party, including survey data showing that people “think that 32 percent of Democrats are LGBT (vs. 6 percent in reality) and 38 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year (vs. 2 percent in reality).” With this in mind, Barber argued, “it isn’t a stretch to imagine that people think we’re already a majority-minority country when in fact we aren’t at all.”
“[A]s long as prominent leaders continue to mobilize white fear and anger on the issue, citizens who trust them will follow.”
Robert Jones, the C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, put the problem this way in an email:
Throughout American history in particular, the question of whiteness has been at the center of these debates, fueled by the fact that social privileges and political rights were tied to whiteness.
Historically, this has played out in the practices of the Census Bureau and the Citizenship and Immigration Services that “recorded race and ethnicity categories over time, e.g., ‘Celt’ and ‘Hebrew’ once appeared outside of the ‘Caucasian’ category.”
Sadly, Trump (and Pence who plays the same game) and the GOP have played upon what my late southern belle grandmother called the "white trash mentality" - only their skin color gave them more standing than blacks and other racial minorities. The irony is that most educated whites likely have far more in common with educated and effluent minorities than the do with poor, uneducated religiously extreme whites who, in my view, are the biggest threat to America.
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