“Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous” is the NYT title, in a piece about the year 2044, when white Americans are projected to fall below half the population and lose their majority status.
They’re not nervous about the actual ramifications of racial displacement, mind you, but rather how some (aka: whites & gloating Dems) might *perceive* such racial displacement. Towards the former’s realities, there is no real concern. Towards the latter, well, something must be done.
“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”
The piece posits a false dichotomy between ‘white nationalists’ (who else would see the Great Displacement being a ‘bad’ thing?) and gloating Dems:
For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.
The piece then goes into the serious strategizing various (mainly Jewish) scholars are scrambling to put together to shape perceptions on The Great Displacement.
Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.
But she did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.
Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she saw the research.
“It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said…
“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”
The concern, it would seem, is how the irrational ‘demographics is destiny’ beliefs about displacement (aka the dastardly white supremacists) might spread to a wider slice of whites. This is in no small measure due to liberal Dems’ gloating about how… demographics is destiny:
It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.
“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”
Good news, though:
Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.
Yes, the good doctor and his ilk will be sure to present (enframe) the data in such a way as to minimize the chances of this information being perceived as what it is: demographic displacement. My prediction is they will lobby for, and successfully obtain, significantly widened definitions of ‘white’, so that ‘white Hispanics’ like George Zimmerman will be classified as ‘white’, etc., thereby deflecting the realities of the radical demographic change taking place in the U.S.
The piece contains this gem, the NYT making a discovery 50+ years after the fact:
It is unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
And, lastly, there’s this great quote from a neo-Boasian relativist:
[R]ace is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.
“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.
Yes, black would be seen as white… if it weren’t for that dang slavery.
Just like night would be seen as day… if it weren’t for the danged sun.
