CALIFORNIA : Next Year, We Will All Be Minorities

It could not have happened at a more opportune time. Just as California is leading the nation in undoing policies designed to integrate and ensure equality for minorities, the state is entering a “post-minority” era. Early next year, when the percentage of white residents will dip below 50, America’s most populous state will boast no single majority group. For the next quarter century, all Californians will be minorities.

This demographic shift hardly crept up on us. Yet, because the 30-year-old language we used to speak of nonwhites is ill-equipped to tackle the possibility of their preeminence, Californians have been unable to prepare for, even envision, a post-minority future. The mere thought of a predominantly nonwhite society inspires widespread fear of Balkanization, rampant social ills and even racial impurity. Whatever else they may be, last year’s Proposition 187 and this year’s drive to dismantle affirmative-action programs are deluded attempts to roll back the “browning of California.”

Californians cannot begin to plan responsibly for their post-minority future until they rethink their views of race and ethnicity. A good first step would be to stop allowing politics to define ethnic groups. Politics tends to polarize and divide groups. As such, it will be used as a weapon of resistance by a largely aging Anglo and angry electorate for at least another generation. Much as Latino activists are encouraged by rising naturalization rates among immigrants and the potential for increased political power, an appropriate response to the state’s new “majority-minority” society doesn’t appear to be forthcoming from politics.

Beginning with the birth of “minority” politics in the 1960s, ethnic minority groups have been seen as overgrown political-action committees. Success in the world of politics and government has required a minority group to present itself as monolithic and homogeneous. The term minority --originally denoting a proud, dissenting political group requiring protection from the tyranny of the conformist majority--came to refer to the undesirable “other” in American social life: dark-skinned people who live disorganized lives of poverty, crime, welfare dependency, unemployment, gangs and broken homes. Nonwhites were expected to vie with each other for limited “minority dollars” in a game in which the spoils went to the loser. With nearly perverse pride, minority organizations and leaders have competed with each other to present their communities as the most impaired and, hence, most eligible for public attention and resources. Politics has not only put nonwhite groups institutionally at odds, it has defined them by their dysfunctions.

Assimilation, once considered a viable means to lift minorities out of the pathological margins and into the normative mainstream, cannot be counted on to bring America’s component groups together. Political scientist Andrew Hacker has pointed out that, historically, minorities--with the exception of African Americans--have been able to “work their way up the social ladder” and achieve “a valid claim of being ‘white.’ ”

In its time, whiteness has swallowed many a distinct ethnic group. In California, though, not only is the “dominant” group no longer numerically dominant; it, too, has joined the contest for most-aggrieved minority status. Sectors of Anglo America, worried about their loss of preeminence, find it increasingly necessary to compete with other racial and ethnic groups to grab their piece of the pie. The social breakdown is complete. California has lost its ideal of the common good to racial politics. The stated goal is still to include all groups. But now we have no idea into what we are being included.

The major problem facing California is how to make a post-minority society cohere. Multiculturalism is one solution. But even as old-fashioned assimilation sought to downplay differences among groups, the rather vague admonitions of “celebrating diversity” and “honoring difference” don’t provide much indication of how we all fit and hold together. It’s not enough to integrate another color into the rainbow or drop one more group into the melting pot; we have to recognize that the pot is changing. Once we have accepted the reality that California and Californians are no longer what and who they used to be, we can look at the long-term trends for clues as to who we are becoming.

California’s current cultural confusion is the byproduct of an evolutionary global event whose effects will be felt for at least another 500 years. One of the five major migrations in this continent’s history is forging Greater America--the coming together of the Anglo-Protestant North and the Latino-Catholic South. By 2020, a new group will assume majority status: Latinos. Anglo Americans will weigh in at around one-third of the population. Asian- and African Americans combined will make up no more than 15% of the state. Like all major demographic shifts, this one sorely tests the very assumptions of our society. Post-minority Californians are doing no less than synthesizing a new hybrid American culture. The center of this emerging cultural matrix will gradually move from Anglo to Latino.

Of course, this is all happening at the same time many are calling for the salvation of American civilization. While mass migrations often revitalize and reshape civilizations, they have not been known to preserve any. If those clamoring for redemptive change didn’t so often sound like curmudgeons nostalgic for a racially simpler past, they’d perhaps see the population changes as the best hope for American cultural renewal. In fact, our best hope to weather such a massive demographic transition peacefully is to allow society to reinvent and put itself back together again around its new center.

The unrecognized genius of America has always been the essentially unfinished nature of its cultural identity. Despite the many attempts to link “Americanness” to a single racial group, America’s promise still lies in its liberation from Old World notions that political and ethnic identities are one and the same. The advent of the post-minority era forces us to re-explore what it is to be American.

“Americanness” is a belief in a civic ethos and ideal that has its origins in Western Europe, but yet is not racially or culturally exclusive. For centuries, immigrants have come here to enjoy the principles of democracy and the pursuit of happiness. Large influxes of immigrant groups have always contributed to the larger society without destroying “American values.” The fatal flaw of American culture, the Faulknerian family secret that threatens to destroy us, has always been its inability to recognize its own hybrid nature. Rigid racial categories have never allowed us to acknowledge that we are all black, white, yellow, red and brown mixed peoples, that we are indeed a hybrid nation. Ethnic, racial and cultural synthesis is not only inevitable; it is also the greatest hope for post-minority society to cohere.

The new California is being born without much consideration for racial or ethnic purity. The future is being made in daily interactions among neighbors far removed from the fearful rumblings from Sacramento and Washington. If we are to become a truly unified society, we’d best clear away the stifling, zero-sum American dialogue on race and ethnicity and accept that what’s happening in California is bigger than all of us.*