Recently the news cycle was captivated by the report from the U. S. Census Bureau that, for the first time in U. S. history, whites of European ancestry account for less than half of new-born children, supposedly marking a tipping point for the economy, the workforce, and politics. Commentators marked it as a major turning point for American society, and it might well be, but it shouldn’t.
In fact, this milestone should not be of much significance at all. For if we are the America in which race and ethnicity aren’t decisive in the distribution of public goods; if we are the America in which assimilation into American life, language, citizenship, and founding principles has top priority; and if we are the America that, as Teddy Roosevelt said, has no room for what he called “hyphenated Americanism”, this recent trend in demographics shouldn’t matter.
Unfortunately, in the America that we have become, these statistics do matter. In the multicultural America and the welfare entitlement state America, we count by race and ethnicity to allocate the intervention of government into the various racial and ethnic group grievances advanced by hustlers with vested interests; in the affirmative action America we discriminate in employment, public contracting, and college admissions based on the “compelling state interest” of racial and ethnic diversity; and we continue to disaggregate accountability for student achievement in public education based on racial and ethnic groupings. Moreover, we filter every public decision, such as decennial legislative redistricting and the use of voter ID to protect the sanctity of the rule of “one man, one vote”, and many private ones, such as the allocation of credit by financial institutions, through the judicial scrutiny of the perceived “disparate impact” on racial and ethnic minorities, whether or not there is any malevolent evidence or intent, while ignoring such blatant abuses as the observed intimidation of voters at polling places by leftist thugs.
So we reap what we sow, and race does matter……to racists. As Thomas Sowell has so well noted, demography is not destiny, but unless this fashionable Balkanization of America is stopped soon, along with the growing double standard in the rule of law, demography will become destiny and a tragedy for all.
