In October 2010, the Washington Post reported that from July 1, 2009, to July 1, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs while U.S.-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white construction workers lost 511,000 jobs that same year. In the second quarter of 2010, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs. Native-born workers lost 1.2 million jobs.27
Economist Mark Perry called it “The Great Man-Cession,” a wiping out of construction and manufacturing jobs, which have a high concentration of blue-collar workers, mostly white men.28 Politico’s David Paul Kuhn wrote, “Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they’ll take the election in November with them.”29 Kuhn noted that blue-collar men had suffered 57 percent of all job losses in the recession. “And blue-collar white men, who make up only 11 percent of the workforce, constitute 36 percent of those who have lost jobs.”30
Sensing their country slipping away and their abandonment by their own elites, middle- and working-class whites have turned to talk-show hosts and television commentators Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, as well as Sarah Palin. But the demoralization is deep. Just nine months into Obama’s presidency, a survey by the National Journal found that a plurality of white Americans over thirty not only had lost confidence in Wall Street and corporate America but in the U.S. Government.
In November 2010, the Democratic Party sustained its worst off-year defeat since before World War II, losing sixty-three seats and control of the House. Whites made up more than three-fourths of the electorate and voted 62–38 for the Republicans.31 In the South, the white vote went Republican 73–27. There is now only one white Democratic Congressman left in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. White Democrats from the Deep South are close to extinct.
In 2011, the Washington Post reported on the alienation and despair of the white worker in America. If there is “an epicenter of financial stress and frustration it is among whites without college degrees,” said the Post. Only 14 percent of these Americans thought that Obama’s policies were helping the economy; 56 percent said America’s best days were behind her; 61 percent said it would be a long time before recovery came, and 64 percent blamed the government in Washington.32
NEW TRIBE RISING?
“Is white the new black?”
So asked Kelefa Sanneh in his New Yorker review of Searching for Whitopia and other works on white America. Sanneh concluded we may be witnessing “the slow birth of a people.”33
It has happened before. In 1754, American colonists were South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king. But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act, the Quebec Act, and the battles at Lexington and Concord, a new people had been born: the Americans. Virginia Cavaliers, Boston Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, and Appalachian Scots-Irish, who had all cordially detested one another, had begun to meld into a nation.
Adversity and abuse have historically created an awareness of a separate identity and accelerated the secession of peoples. And as Sanneh writes, the trashing of Tea Party America has taken on a racial cast.
Why is it that, from Christian Lander to Jon Stewart, a diagnosis of whiteness is often delivered, and received, as a kind of accusation? The answer is that the diagnosis is often accompanied by an implicit or explicit charge of racism. It is becoming customary to suppose that a measure of discrimination is built into whiteness itself, a racial category that has often functioned as a purely negative designation.…34
The most common media label used to describe Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally that drew hundreds of thousands to the Lincoln Memorial and National Mall on the forty-seventh anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech was that it was “overwhelmingly white.”35
Beck’s speakers included Dr. King’s niece Alveda King. Yet the AP, Politico, Newsweek, CBS, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, CNN, NPR, and USA Today all zeroed in on the racial composition of the crowd as “predominantly,” “overwhelmingly,” or “almost all white.”36 The media’s unsubtle message: the Tea Party is a protest movement of, by, and for white people.
In 2004, when presidential candidate Howard Dean reached out to “guys with Confederate flags in their pick-up trucks,” Shelby Steele wrote that this was “absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America”—because of their history and white guilt.37
Sanneh suggests this may be changing. While the Tea Partiers have been stung by accusations of racism—a popular sign at rallies reads, “It doesn’t matter what this sign says/You’ll call it racism anyway”—most have not been intimidated.38 Why not? First, even the president does not believe the charge. As Robert Gibbs said after the 9/12 Tea Party rally in 2009, “I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin.”39
Second, few harbor the guilt of country-club Republicans and all regard the accusation of racism as an unsupportable slander. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they were also anti-Pelosi, anti–Harry Reid, anti–Martha Coakley, and anti–Charlie Crist, all of them white. In 2010, the Tea Party supported two Southern black GOP candidates, both of whom were elected to the House.
Yet in the summer of 2010, some two thousand delegates to the NAACP national convention unanimously passed a resolution demanding that the Tea Party renounce the racist leaders in its ranks. Said NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, “What we take issue with is the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear that there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”40 The NAACP suddenly found itself under attack and on the defensive.
White America is a house divided, and within its womb a new people is gestating and fighting to be born.
THE EMERGING WHITE MINORITY
A close look at the numbers from the Census Bureau fleshes out the picture. In 2004, the bureau said the crossover year when minorities that identified themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander would outnumber whites would come in 2050.
In 2008, the New York Times reported that the bureau was now projecting that whites would become a minority in 2042 and would fall to 46 percent of the population by 2050, comprising only 38 percent of U.S. population under 18.41
The 2010 census confirmed it: the end of white America comes in thirty years. “The Census Bureau has estimated that the non-Hispanic white population [will] drop to 50.8% by 2040—then drop to 46.3% by 2050. The demographic transformation—Latinos now account for one in four people under age 18—holds the potential to shift the political dynamics of the country.”42
So it does. And what is coming appears inexorable.
In 2000, 15 percent of kids entering kindergarten were Hispanic. By 2010 it had risen to 25 percent. In that same decade the white share of the kindergarten population fell from 59 to 53 percent. “Nearly 92 percent of the nation’s population growth over the past decade—25.1 million people—came from minorities.”43
“It’s basically over for Anglos” in Texas, says Steve Murdock, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, noting that two of three Texas children today are non-Anglo and by 2040 only one in five will be white.44
As the education and income levels of Hispanics lag far behind, says Murdock, the future is bleak. Unless the trend line changes, 30 percent of the Texas labor force by 2040 will not have a high school diploma and average household income will be dramatically lower than in 2000. “It’s a terrible situation that you are in,” Murdock told the Texas legislature.45
What caused this historic decline of white America to minority status?
First, a white birth rate that has been bel
ow replacement level for decades. Second, a forty-year tidal wave of immigrants that was predicted (before the recession) to surge from 1.3 million a year to 2 million by 2050, almost all of it from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In 2008, over one million immigrants became citizens. Of these, 461,000 were Hispanics; more than half the Hispanics came from Mexico.46 Third, birth rates among Hispanics, especially those who have come illegally, that far exceed the birth rate of native-born Americans.
Yet, no matter how many immigrants come or from where they come, white America is an endangered species. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of white children fell by 4.3 million, or 10 percent, a rate of disappearance of 430,000 a year.47 By 2020, whites over age sixty-five will outnumber those aged seventeen and under. Deaths will exceed births.48 The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty. Citing a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, Michael Gerson noted in 2010, “Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K–12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico.”49 By 2011, the Texas Education Agency was reporting that Hispanics already constitute a majority, 50.2 percent, of all public school students.50
Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?
DOES IT MATTER?
In 1997 President Clinton said of the demographic transformation of our country, that it “will arguably be the third great revolution of America.… which will prove we literally can live … without having a dominant European culture.”51 A year later, he painted a picture for the graduating class at Portland State University of the America their children and grandchildren would inhabit:
In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.… [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.52
This episode is astonishing. Here was a president of the United States telling a largely white student body the day is coming when their own kind will cease to be the majority in a country where the majority rules. Most peoples would sit in stunned silence at such a revelation, or rise in rage at the prospect. The Portland State students cheered the news of the coming minority status to which they and their children have been consigned by their government. Among our best and brightest, many anticipate with delight the day that white Americans become just another minority in the country their forefathers created “for ourselves and our posterity.”
Ethnomasochism, the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group, is a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower. It comes out of what James Burnham called an “ideology of Western suicide,” a belief system that provides a morphine drip for people who have come to accept the inevitability of their departure from history. The archetype of the ethnomasochist was Susan Sontag, who wrote, in Partisan Review, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”53
Most peoples would greet the news that their own kind were becoming a minority with stunned silence, apprehension, or even dread. As Euripides wrote, what greater grief is there than the loss of one’s native land? What explains our nonchalance? Whence comes the calm confidence that all will be well? Observing the world and his own nation, twenty years ago, Arthur Schlesinger wrote:
Nationalism remains after two centuries the most vital political emotion in the world—far more vital than social ideologies such as communism or fascism or even democracy.… Within nation states nationalism takes the form of ethnicity or tribalism.… The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever.54
That global fever has not broken. It is, if anything, more severe. In a review of historian Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People, Anthony Pagden takes pains to disassociate himself from what appears to him and to most intellectuals to be an odious idea: that race and ethnicity are matters of importance.
Modern genetics has demonstrated conclusively that no such thing as race exists. Thanks to the mapping of the human genome, we now know that each person shares 99.99 percent of his or her genetic material with everyone else. Similarly, skin color and physiognomy are now no longer regarded as the most obvious ways of classifying people by the scientific community.…
Yet a concept of race lingers: America remains obsessed.55
This may be the conventional academic wisdom. Yet, conceding the truth of what the professor writes about genetics and what the “scientific community” holds, anyone who acts as though race is an irrelevancy would himself appear to be irrelevant. For this force tore down the Western empires in Africa and Asia and has torn apart nations. Ethnic nationalism, as Schlesinger writes, is the “most vital political emotion” in our world.
“Likeness … is a cause of love,” wrote Aquinas, and “two white men are one thing in whiteness. Hence the affections of one tend to the other, as being one with him; and he wishes good to him as to himself.”56
Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, is saying that the affinity of peoples of a race for each other is natural and normal. And if this is true for black Americans who rejoiced in the triumph of Obama, it is true also of white Americans. And white racial consciousness is rising and has begun to manifest itself in politics because, for tens of millions of Americans, this is no longer the country they grew up in.
Apprehension about America’s future is rooted in the ethnic conflicts of our recent past and our present day. Anyone who believes America is a more unified nation today than she was fifty years ago, when our oldest president watched the youngest elected president take the oath, was not alive in 1960, or was not aware, or he deceives himself.
“MYTH OF THE REDEMPTIVE HISPANIC”
Beyond the dramatic change in racial demographics, the census statistics offer new details about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. In 2007, the illegitimacy rate began to rise again. For black America, it went from 69.9 percent to 71.6 percent of all births. For Hispanics, it rose above 50 percent for the first time, and Hispanics now account for one in four U.S. births. For whites, the illegitimacy rate rose to 28 percent. While births to married women fell, births among the unmarried surged 12 percent.57 Forty-one percent of all U.S. births are out of wedlock.
How alarmed should Americans be?
When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his explosive 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the illegitimacy rate among black Americans was 23.6 percent.58 That is less than the white rate today, less than half the Hispanic rate today, and less than one-third of the black rate of illegitimacy today.
Why are these dramatic increases significant? Because the correlation between illegitimacy rates, dropout rates, crime rates, and incarceration rates is absolute. The more children born out of wedlock, the more who will never graduate from high school and will get into trouble before they are adults. The social scientist Charles Murray calls illegitimacy “the single most important social problem of our time—more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.”59 As the conservative columnist Ann Coulter writes:
A study cited in the far-left Village Voice found that children brought up in single-mother homes “are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely
to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”60
Many had hoped that immigrants from the Catholic countries of Latin America might reinforce traditional values. That hope appears forlorn.
Traditional values have been dying in Latin America as they have in the United States. Though Mexico is nominally Catholic and restrictive on abortion, Mexican women now have more abortions than American women.61 The myth of the “redemptive Hispanic,” writes Heather Mac Donald, of the Manhattan Institute, has been demolished. She cites an Economist report on the “bad news from California. The vaunted Latino family is coming to resemble the black family.”62 Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe affirms this:
Hispanics seem to have assimilated into the American culture of secular individualism more than the reverse. For example, the unwed birth percentage among Hispanics has jumped from 19 percent in 1980 to 48 percent in 2005 [to 51 percent today].… These trends contradict earlier expectations that Hispanics might bring this nation a new wave of family traditionalism.63
U.S.-born Hispanics are far more likely to smoke, drink, abuse drugs, and become obese than foreign-born Hispanics, and their life expectancy declines as they become Americanized. “As people become acculturated, they adopt American ways, become more sedentary and eat fast foods,” says Dr. J. Mario Molina of Long Beach, whose patients are in the Hispanic community.64
Our corrosive culture seems to overwhelm any traditional values that Hispanics bring to America. “Hispanics overall are not nearly as socially conservative as many believe,” says Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress. A 2009 survey, he noted, “showed that Hispanics actually had the highest average score of all racial groups on a 10-point progressive cultural index.… And young Hispanics are typically more progressive than their older conterparts on social issues.”65 Yet, according to the 2010 census figures, there will be 130 million Hispanics here by 2050.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 14
