The long-accepted Census Bureau prediction that whites will be a minority in 2044, ending any dominance by the white-heavy Republican Party, is being sharply challenged by an unusual source: the AFL-CIO.
The union, which has opened a new push for racial unity, is circulating a new report on race that warns the declining white population is about to receive a big boost from Latinos who are increasingly counting themselves as white.
“This is a story about a dynamic social category, not a fixed biological one, and we are likely in the midst of another rapid expansion in who counts as white,” said the report done for the union by Ian Haney Lopez, a University of California Berkeley law professor.
Like Italians, Poles and Jews before them, he found, “those who can now claim a white identity increasingly include light-skinned Latinos, East Asians and South Asians.”
But it’s the growing Hispanic population that matters, Lopez found. “The current expansion of whiteness matters. To take just the case of Latinos, while the census predicts that whites will be a minority in less than 30 years, this is only true if the census excludes the large number of Hispanics who identify as white. If the census counts these white Hispanics, then the white population is expected to grow to 72 percent. Recall, the country is 62 percent white today. Instead of being in a period of contraction, we may be in the midst of a surge in the ‘white’ population,” said his report.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
