America Getting Less White

The long demographic trend continues.

diversity legos
“Diversity” by Jens Hoffman is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

The latest Census dump has generated a new round of discussion about the changing racial demographics of America. We’ve known for a couple of decades now that the percentage of Americans who are “white” has been in steady decline and that we will soon reach the point where whites are a mere plurality rather than a majority of the country. But, for the first time ever, the number of whites has actually declined.

WaPo (“Census data shows the number of White people in the U.S. fell for first time since 1790“): [Which is a bad headline, by the way. The number of whites didn’t decline in 1790; it was simply the first Census]

The first race and ethnicity breakdowns from the 2020 Census, released Thursday, show a more diverse population than ever in the nation’s history.

The report marks the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790. The number of people identifying as non-Hispanic White and no other race dropped by 5.1 million people, to 191.7 million, a decrease of 2.6 percent.

The country also passed two more milestones on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in the coming decades: For the first time, the portion of White people dipped below 60 percent, slipping from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020. And the under-18 population is now majority people of color, at 52.7 percent.

The new data shows how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods shifted over the past decade, based on the national house-to-house canvass last year. It is the data most state legislatures and local governments use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.

It indicates that the country is “much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than what we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, director and senior adviser of race and ethnic research and outreach at the Census Bureau’s population division.

The opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession accelerated the White population’s decline, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said of the White decline. “The country is changing dramatically.”

I’m not sure that it’s true that nobody would have believed this in 2001. I’ve found several posts at OTB on this phenomenon that are more than a decade old and the story’s own graphic shows this trend to be linear:

Certainly, a twenty-point decline in three decades is noteworthy. But it’s mostly a function of intentional changes to immigration policy decades ago that stopped prioritizing European ancestry, an increase in illegal immigration from Latin America, and differential birth rates. All of these have been known for more than twenty years. Hell, John Judis and Ruy Texeira pointed to it as the basis for The Emerging Democratic Majority way back in 2004.

Of course, the diversification is not happening equally across the country:

Six states and the District of Columbia now have majorities of people of color, including Nevada and Maryland, which passed that milestone in the past decade. Maryland is now 47.2 percent White, and Nevada is 45.9 percent White. White population fell in three-quarters of counties, and in 35 states.

The diversification of the nation is projected to continue, with Whites falling below 50 percent nationally around 2045, Frey said, adding that, at that point, there will be no racial majority in the country. Between 2015 and 2060, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to approximately double in size, and the multiracial population could triple due to immigration and births.

This, too, is worth highlighting:

The number of people who identify as multiracial has changed considerably since 2010. It was measured at 9 million people in 2010 and was 33.8 million in 2020, a 276 percent increase.

So, in addition to actual demographic changes, we’re seeing measurement/identity changes. Indeed, WaPo also has an op-ed from Austin-based writer Dalia Azim titled “I am Middle Eastern. Not White.”

Filling out the 2020 Census launched me into a bit of an identity crisis. Under the “race or origin” question, I saw myself, a person of Egyptian descent, defined as “White” for the first time. The Census Bureau just released detailed reports on its race and ethnicity data. While this census showed a drop in the White population, those numbers might have been lower still if the census had been conducted more fairly.

I’ve never considered myself White or been viewed as White by anyone else, to my knowledge, so it felt misleading and dishonest to check that box. When it comes to surveys such as these, it’s rare to find an option for “Middle Eastern or North African,” or MENA, though it kind of delights me whenever I do. At least on most forms I have the option to choose “other.”

The United States conducted the first census of its population in 1790. Since the start, the government has used the data to allocate congressional seats and funds for federal programs. Historical census forms reflect the country’s troubling and ever-evolving relationship with race and how to define, and count, people of color.

The question of a person’s “color” first appeared on the 1850 Census, with three options given: white, black or mulatto. Other minority groups were added through the decades. Between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses, the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama convened a working group to improve the quality of federal data on race and ethnicity. One of the group’s key recommendations resulting from their research was to add MENA to the standards for collecting data.

Not only was this advice discarded in the creation of the 2020 Census in the Trump administration, but Middle Easterners also were explicitly absorbed into the White category. “White” had never been defined in any previous census, but this time the form read, “White — Print [origin(s)], for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.”

A NYT report (“Where the Racial Makeup of the U.S. Shifted in the Last Decade“) highlights the disparity of the redistribution.

Nearly every county in the United States became more diverse in the last decade as the nation recorded its first drop in the white population in 2020, according to detailed data on race and ethnicity released by the Census Bureau on Thursday. More than a third of the nation now lives in counties where people of color are a majority.

[…]

The white population decreased by more than five million from 2010 to 2020. Still, the share of white residents has gone up in some parts of the country.

City center neighborhoods historically populated by people of color have become increasingly white as residents are priced out by wealthier white newcomers seeking convenient and less expensive housing. About a third of all census tracts in which people of color were a majority in 2010 became more white by 2020. About 2 percent of those tracts turned majority white.

White residents became a minority in six major metro areas in 2020: Dallas-Fort Worth, Orlando, Atlanta, Sacramento, New Orleans and Austin.

The piece breaks down the changes in each of these metro areas. Aside from gentrification of downtown areas, there’s no obvious common thread.

WaPo highlights this in “Census data shows Maryland is now the East Coast’s most diverse state, while D.C. is Whiter.”

Maryland, one of the two states in the country to flip from majority White to majority non-White over the last decade, is now the most diverse state on the East Coast,according to new data from the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, the District continued to lose Black residents — an exodus that has accelerated over the last 10 years.

[…]

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s diversity index — which measures the likelihood that two people chosen at random would be from different racial and ethnic groups — Maryland is now one of the most diverse states in the nation, surpassed only by Nevada, California and Hawaii.

Nevada also was the only other state in the country to become majority non-White over the last decade.

We’re seeing this diversification quite obviously where I live:

In Northern Virginia, which helped drive population growth for the state overall, Alexandria grew 14 percent to 160,000 and Arlington grew 14.9 percent to 239,000. Fairfax grew 6.3 percent to 1.2 million and Prince William grew 20 percent to 482,000.

Amid this decade of growth,Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun saw significant declines in their White population over the last 10 years. Loudoun, in particular, went from 62.4 percent White in 2010 to 51.5 percent in 2020.

Fairfax is the latest D.C. suburb to become majority non-White, joining Prince William in Virginia and Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s in Maryland.

I have lived in Fairfax County since 2005, lived in neighboring Loudoun County from 2002-2004, and have worked in Prince William County since 2013. It’s rather interesting that DC (where I worked from 2006-2013) is the only jurisdiction in the metro area that has become whiter. It is “Chocolate City” no more.

Indeed, a Hill report notes, “DC [is the] only place where share of white population increased last year.”

Washington, D.C., was the only location in the U.S. where the white share of the population increased in the last decade, according to newly released data from the Census Bureau.

Thirty-eight percent of the D.C. population was white in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, up from the 34.8 percent recorded in 2010. That change represents a 3.2 percent increase over the past 10 years.

All 50 states in the U.S. saw the white share of their populations decrease. Washington state tracked the largest drop, moving from 72.5 percent in 2010 to 63.8 percent in 2020, an 8.7 percent change.

Massachusetts saw the second largest drop in white population, moving from 76.1 percent in 2010 to 67.6 percent in 2020, an 8.5 percent decrease.

The politics of this, at least in the short term, pretty obviously more of a freak-out from conservatives fearing that they are being “replaced” as the face of “Real America.” It’s a large part of what’s fueling the nonsense about stolen elections and the various attempts at voter suppression. At the end of the day, a large number of people implicitly believe that only white votes should count.

The longer-term implication is less obvious. While whiteness is on the one hand a visible thing—a British or French colonialist in the 19th Century was rather obviously something different than a Black African—it is also a social construction. There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Irish and Eastern Europeans weren’t considered “white.” Now, that seems silly. Most of us see Ashkenazi Jews as white but many do not. As Azim notes above, we don’t really have a racial category for Arabs and, while many or most can pass as white, it doesn’t quite fit. This gets even more complicated as people naturally intermarry.

It’s quite possible that “whiteness” simply ceases to be a dominant way that we divide people into “us” and “them.” We’re already blurring race and ethnicity with the Hispanic population, artificially dividing them into racial subcategories.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. MarkedMan says:

    This is going to get ugly. William F. Buckley, still lauded in Republican circles, laid it all out back in the day, and nothing has changed since:

    “Let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote in the editorial, titled “Why The South Must Prevail.”

    “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote,” he goes on. “In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

    Buckley goes on to weigh whether such a position is kosher from a sophisticated, conservative perspective. “The central question that emerges,” he writes, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer is clear:

    The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

    Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as “enlightened,” Buckley then grapples with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “civilized standards” he is intent on upholding.

    Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

    By 1957, when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation, lynchings were continuing in the South, a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow, a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper. Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South, Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing.

    Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro—and a great many Whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote. The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.

    2
  2. Not the IT Dept. says:

    And of course, 450 years ago America (such as it was geographically) was barely white at all but Native American (such as it was demographically). We just think everything revolves around whiteness in the history of this landmass.

    Catholics were not really white either; it’s funny to realize that the KKK were as opposed to Catholics as they were to blacks, at least on paper. And the hoo-haa over Kennedy being the first Catholic president happened in the lifetimes of many people still with us today – 60 years ago, incredibly.

    What changed that? WASPs found they needed to add Catholic votes to their electoral strategies and then eventually the Jews were pulled in to and we started hearing about the “Judeo-Christian” heritage of our nation. It never had anything to do with actual pigmentation as far as the leadership level was concerned. If they decide they need black votes enough, they’ll say Michelle Obama is blonde.

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  3. JKB says:

    Seems like bad news for Democrats. As I’ve said before, the demographic decline of whites will simply mean the dissolution control of minority votes. Groups and factions will shift if they see they can have more impactful influence in Republican circles.

    Democrats can’t afford to lose much of the black vote before their chances of winning elections dwindle. Yet, Democrats oppose school choice favored by black parents, aggressively support CRT-inspired indoctrination in schools which is an actual impediment to minorities developing human capital, and are actively lowering school standards for racial reasons [See Oregon’s recent removal of graduation standards]. Not to mention installing Joe Biden in the White House despite his racist history of aligning himself with racist segregationist Southern Democrats in the Senate and racist “white fear” arguments against busing.

    No doubt the changes in racial percentages will churn things up, but I don’t think they’ll settle out how Democrats expect.

  4. mattbernius says:

    It’s quite possible that “whiteness” simply ceases to be a dominant way that we divide people into “us” and “them.” We’re already blurring race and ethnicity with the Hispanic population, artificially dividing them into racial subcategories.

    This really is the problem with the way we have historically done racial classifications (which is still a relatively modern creation — at least in it’s current form). On more recent surveys we have done at Code for America we’re allowing people to select multiple race/ethnicity (i.e. white or black and latinex) categories to help better account for nuance.

  5. Lounsbury says:

    Now, that seems silly. Most of us see Ashkenazi Jews as white but many do not. As Azim notes above, we don’t really have a racial category for Arabs and, while many or most can pass as white, it doesn’t quite fit.

    The Egyptian American’s self-framing is… interesting given Arab itself is not a racial or colour identity but a linguistic one like Hispanic, and within the Arab world colour itself has issues between different regions. Ethno-racially Sudan, southern Egypt, parts of the Gulf , southern Morocco (and Algeria) all have components that are unambiguously ‘black’ for Americans and even inside the Arab world – one rather encounters this between Levantines and Arabs of regions with darker components.

    Arab or Middle Eastern itself as a category is rather more problematic than the Egyptian American is apparently aware.

    3
  6. Michael Reynolds says:

    There’s a pretty simple solution for panicky racist psychos like @JKB: – white people could have more children.

    I wonder why white folks stopped having babies? How about you, JoKeBait? How many babies have you had? Are you and some poor, disappointed woman holding up your end?

    10
  7. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Lounsbury:
    It’s almost as if humans don’t fall neatly into the categories preferred by Americans.

    15
  8. Scott F. says:

    @JKB:

    Groups and factions will shift if they see they can have more impactful influence in Republican circles.

    Democrats can’t afford to lose much of the black vote before their chances of winning elections dwindle.

    … because the Republican Party has been proven itself to be so incredibly more adept at adjusting to demographic trends. (See: recent open embrace of the Proud Boys)

    8
  9. Teve says:

    The only significant Demographic that votes majority Republican is white with no college degree.

    Accordingly, if you think a reduction in the number of white people will be good for Republicans, well…Bless Your Heart. ❤️

    9
  10. Kylopod says:

    I think a lot of confusion comes from the fact that Hispanics in America are continually lumped together as inherently “nonwhite,” and as a distinct racial group unto themselves (where even black Hispanics are overlooked).

    1
  11. Gustopher says:

    @Teve: We have heart emojis now?

    Is that the plain emoji? ❤️

    Is that the less than three? <3

    1
  12. Gustopher says:

    We will be replaced! And it can’t happen soon enough, because a lot of us white folks seem to be racist morons.

    10
  13. Teve says:

    @Gustopher: no idea how it works. I type “heart” on my iPad, the iPad keyboard suggests a heart ❤️ shape, and somehow the comment interpreter doesn’t reject it.

    1
  14. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    At the end of the day, a large number of people implicitly believe that only white votes should count.

    I can see why they think that. Until about 1965, that was pretty much the situation. And blacks as a “voting bloc” came even later (assuming that such a bloc even exists).

    1
  15. grumpy realist says:

    …I would have liked to have seen Mr. Buckley confronted with having to carry out the standard physics doctorate defence that many of my non-“white” classmates brilliantly surmounted. But he would have probably found some other reason as to why we are all considered “inferior”.

    3
  16. mattbernius says:

    @Kylopod:

    I think a lot of confusion comes from the fact that Hispanics in America are continually lumped together as inherently “nonwhite,” and as a distinct racial group unto themselves (where even black Hispanics are overlooked).

    Correct. “Hispanic” is especially problematic.

    But the mixing of race and ethnicity, especially with smaller groups, creates these problems in lots of ways. Another example is the category of “Asian” that condenses the diverse populations of the largest area of land on the earth into a single seemingly homogenious category.

    Part of the challenge for this is a bias towards creating statistically significant sample sets for quantitative analysis. And so the bias is to collapsing difference rather than maintaining it.

    3
  17. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @grumpy realist: I think he probably would have noted you as “the exceptions” and either gone on to explain why you wouldn’t be able to lift your brothers and sisters up or ask what you were going to do to accomplish such lifting. Maybe both.

    3
  18. mattbernius says:

    @JKB:

    Not to mention installing Joe Biden in the White House despite his racist history of aligning himself with racist segregationist Southern Democrats in the Senate and racist “white fear” arguments against busing.

    Man, this is such a low energy troll my dude. I can’t believe you didn’t roll out “it was the republicans that freed the slaves and what about Robert Byrd?!”

    The entire “why are Blacks too dumb to see all that, get off the Democratic Plantations, and finally vote Republican… wait, why is it bad to call them ‘dumb’ and talk about ‘Plantations”?!” is sooo predictable.

    You must really feel bad that your fantasies for Trump being reinstalled today went up in smoke. Or is the absolute failure of the Pillow-Guy’s here comes the proof that dominion and China stole the election? I mean you were on that train so early!

    11
  19. Lounsbury says:

    @Michael Reynolds: or even internal Arab ethnic views. Within region the generally very pale Levantines are notoriously quite racist towards dark skinned for example. Pan arab images, media rather tends to focus on the Levantine or Egyptian north self-perception (as in white to be direct) and one rarely sees darker skinned people (except from the Gulf where petrol money talks).

    1
  20. Gustopher says:

    @mattbernius:

    Man, this is such a low energy troll my dude. I can’t believe you didn’t roll out “it was the republicans that freed the slaves and what about Robert Byrd?!”

    That is one of my brother’s favorites. He has a whole bunch of memes layout out all the horrible racist things Democrats did and apparently history ended around the time of the voting rights act.

    The entire “why are Blacks too dumb to see all that, get off the Democratic Plantations, and finally vote Republican… wait, why is it bad to call them ‘dumb’ and talk about ‘Plantations”?!” is sooo predictable.

    My brother thinks they are being bought off. Apparently, you don’t even need an ID to get an ObamaPhone! They will give them to anyone, and he knows where you get them, and last time I was visiting, he was really unwilling to take me there so we could get our ObamaPhones.

    Like, dude, free phone? With paid service. Why wouldn’t you get a free phone? It could have been a brotherly bonding experience, getting our free phones. It would have been great.

    When I pointed out that his skin is a little darker, and that he could pass for Latino so he wouldn’t look out of place, he got really offended for some reason.

    10
  21. Michael Reynolds says:

    The whole ‘Democrats did it, too, way back in. . .’ is so unintentionally revealing. It contains within it the assumption that what Democrats did on X date was wrong, and that this wrong justifies current wrongs by Republicans on date Y. It’s the Cain excuse: Well, Cain murdered a guy, why shouldn’t I?

    Or maybe it’s the toddler excuse. I used to shit in my pants, now you’re telling me I have to use a toilet?

    There’s no escaping the fact that this is not a moral defense. Rather it expresses the notion that we have a right to live down to the worst of human behavior. But then again, that is a pretty apt summary of the Republican Party’s cosmology. It could be the GOP motto: still shitting our pants after the other kids have learned better.

    10
  22. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Gustopher: You are so mean. I’m so proud of you.

    3
  23. ImProPer says:

    @MarkedMan:

    Not sympathizing with Buckley, and his archaic racial views, but he is an outright visionary, compared to the modern GQP.
    Exhibit 1. JKB’s post. Buckley’s dated excerpts unfortunately seem to be a peak rather than a valley for intellectualism in the modern Republican party.

    3
  24. DrDaveT says:

    The graph indicates that we clearly need to be out recruiting more native Americans, polynesians, aboriginal Australians, and Ainu.

    “Place conquered/eradicated by whites is getting less white” is a pretty universal statement, and no more a source of concern here than anywhere else.

    1
  25. Kylopod says:

    @ImProPer: The problem with Buckley isn’t about whether he compares favorably to the nuttier elements of the right, it’s that a large part of his purpose was providing the racist scam known as the American conservative movement a facade of respectability it never deserved. If everything had been left to the Birchers, we’d have never ended up with Reagan or Trump. He paved the path by fooling a lot of people into thinking it was an intellectually respectable movement, enabling it to become ensconced in the mainstream so that it readied the country for an eventual takeover by the extremists he pretended not to support.

    3
  26. Mister Bluster says:

    @JKB:..Groups and factions will shift if they see they can have more impactful influence in Republican circles.

    The KKK and the American Nazi Party are two groups and factions that already have an impactful influence in Donald Trump’s Republican circles.
    I’ve got no use for any of them.

    5
  27. Kurtz says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    The whole ‘Democrats did it, too, way back in. . .’ is so unintentionally revealing.

    For some, yes. It allows the least curious and thoughtful to claim that if one has a clue about history, then one knows that the Dems started the KKK and enacted Jim Crow laws.

    But for the slightly more curious and thoughtful…I’ll go to something I’ve hammered frequently here. There is a cottage industry of ‘history’ written by pundits and (some former) scholars who target the second group. If one expresses skepticism of the stupid argument you highlight, there is someone willing to write about the ‘party-switch myth’ to keep the bullshit going with a little lysol.

    Details don’t need to be consistent. Other current example: vaxxxers. One doesn’t have to persuade every receptive person that the vaccines have human fetal tissue in them. That works for some. For others, a different lie works–it has cholesterol and plastic in it and they want to inject that straight into my blood!!!1!11 (seen on Twitter today.)

    1
  28. Teve says:

    @Gustopher: i used to work for one of the major cell carriers. The ‘Obamaphones’ I saw were like $49 Alcatels and TCLs. If someone gave you one for free you’d chuck it in a dumpster.

  29. Kari Q says:

    Decades ago, someone very close to me came to me, very upset, saying “We’re no longer the majority.” I hadn’t a clue what they meant at first. Finally I came to understand that they were devastated by the news that California was now majority non-white. This was an emotional watershed for them to a degree that stunned me.

    The anger we’ve been seeing on the right is exactly what I saw in that person when the long-predicted ‘whites as plurality’ finally happened. It was followed by the virulently anti-immigrant prop. 187.

    I learned from that moment. The reaction we’re seeing from the racist quarters to this news is mild compared to the fear and anger to come.

    4
  30. Teve says:

    “Oh yeah well the racists who vote with me woulda been registered Democrats 100 years ago!” is…a less than devastating argument.

    1
  31. Teve says:

    mattbernius says:
    Friday, 13 August 2021 at 12:50
    @JKB:

    Not to mention installing Joe Biden in the White House despite his racist history of aligning himself with racist segregationist Southern Democrats in the Senate and racist “white fear” arguments against busing.

    1) yes, we installed Biden, unseemly rewarding him for receiving 81,283,361 votes.

    2) 9 out of 10 Black voters voted for Biden. “All those Blacks shoulda voted for us, but they were all too dumb to figure out who to vote for…” proves that Black voters did in fact know who to vote for.

    6
  32. Scott F. says:

    @Kari Q:

    The reaction we’re seeing from the racist quarters to this news is mild compared to the fear and anger to come.

    I’m curious if this person close to you is still fearful and angry. It’s been more than 25 years of ‘whites as plurality’ and the dreaded ‘replacement’ hasn’t really materialized. Asian and Hispanic influence on the culture in California is evident – there sure are a lot more choices for shopping and dining – but it’s been additive not hasn’t supplanted anything this liberal can see.

    2
  33. Matt Bernius says:

    @Teve:
    Great catch, he cannot bring himself to write “elected” can he?

    2
  34. ImProPer says:

    @Kylopod:

    Point well taken. I don’t like playing what ifs with historical figures, but doubt Mr. Buckley would be a member of the modern GQP. I agree that race relations have devolved well into scam territory. Up until Buckley’s time it was what it was. If one were to pinch their nose, his prose is an insightful view of our unflattering, not so distant past. Pseudoscientific eugenics, and large swaths of poor people, with no access to quality education, serving as a terrible, and false example, were unfortunately the norm back then. It was mainly just plain old ignorance . Today the ignorance is wilful.

  35. Gustopher says:

    @Teve: I have been assured that the ObamaPhone is an iPhone, not the top of the line iPhone, but a perfectly respectable iPhone.

    Maybe the iPhone SE — does SE stand for Subsidy Edition?

    And yet, despite this pretty great ObamaPhone that they are handing out to everyone, and him knowing where to get them, he just wasn’t willing to go stand in line and wait for one. Could have sold it on Craigslist, if nothing else.

    (My iPhone 8 has a cracked screen, a broken lightning port, and barely holds a charge, so I could use a decent ObamaPhone about now.)

    (I’m pretty sure Hunter Biden has an ObamaLaptop…)

  36. Monala says:

    @Kari Q: it’s like the meme that asks, “Why are you worried about white people becoming a minority? Are minorities treated badly or something?”

    5
  37. Monala says:

    I’ve been fascinated by the multiple left wing articles out now that are trying to understand how Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner lost the House special election in Democratic +30 Ohio-11. Democratic corruption, dark money, etc. are all to blame, certainly not Turner being a bad candidate who had spent the last five years living out of state and crapping on Democrats (and losing to a local with deep community ties).

    One of the takes says that Turner won the Black vote while her rival Shontel Brown won the white vote, because Turner won Cleveland proper and Brown won the suburbs. But people from Cleveland have pushed back, pointing out that many Cleveland neighborhoods have become white gentrified communities over the last two decades, while many of Cleveland’s suburbs are multiracial or predominantly Black.

    1
  38. Kylopod says:

    @ImProPer:

    I don’t like playing what ifs with historical figures, but doubt Mr. Buckley would be a member of the modern GQP.

    No way to know for sure, but he always played footsie with the the extremist precursors of today’s GOP. In the 1990s, I came across a piece by him in which he commented on President Clinton’s tiff with Rush Limbaugh. I was young and generally uninformed about politics, but I already knew Limbaugh as the guy spreading conspiracy theories about the Clintons having offed Vince Foster and speaking of liberals in a way that reminded me heavily of schoolyard bullies. In my naivete, I expected the intellectual giant of the conservative movement to denounce Limbaugh’s lies and name-calling. Buckley did nothing of the sort. He conceded that Limbaugh “inspires hate” and that “if I were a liberal, I would hate him,” but he went on to suggest that Democrats like FDR and Truman used to do the same thing. He made it sound like Limbaugh’s only sin was being mean to liberals. He was just playing good cop to Limbaugh’s bad cop, without in any way rejecting the substance of Limbaugh’s views. It was one of the first inklings I had that the right was rotten to its core.

    6
  39. JKB says:

    @Teve:

    Yes, Biden did get 90% of the black voters. <But that'd down 3 points from 2016 and 7 points from 2012.

    Ironically, the non-college whites, so much maligned here, were the numbers that put Biden over the top. While declining, they are still 44% of the electorate so a few percentage points one way or another and it's a different race.

    This was crucial to Biden’s success for two main reasons.a href=”https://www.vox.com/2021/5/10/22425178/catalist-report-2020-election-biden-trump-demographics”> First, white non-college voters continue to make up a very large chunk of the electorate. Catalist estimates that their share of the electorate has been shrinking, but they still were 44 percent of all voters in 2020. And second, they make up an even larger share of the electorate in some key swing states.

  40. Kylopod says:

    @JKB:

    Yes, Biden did get 90% of the black voters. <But that'd down 3 points from 2016 and 7 points from 2012.

    That’s been disputed. Initial exit polls from 2020 (which were plagued with problems) did show Biden doing significantly worse among black voters than other recent Democrats (and more or less comparable to John Kerry’s numbers in 2004). However, a couple of months ago Pew released a study suggesting that Biden’s share of the black vote was about the same as Hillary’s (albeit with far greater turnout). He did worse than Obama both times, but that’s not exactly surprising. And Trump’s share of the black vote was still in single digits.

    Also, while it’s true that Biden’s victory can be attributed to an increase in white support, he also benefited from an increase in turnout among minorities. Even if Trump’s share of the vote among blacks and Hispanics increased from 2016, the greater turnout among these already Dem-leaning groups meant it gave Biden a net increase in support relative to Hillary (I’ve calculated this), and this was crucial to his victories in Georgia and Arizona.

    8
  41. Teve says:

    @Gustopher: a brand new iPhone SE in the box probly has a resale value of $300. I’ll stand in line for that 😛

    1
  42. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Teve: You’d chuck it in the dumpster. I found them serviceable enough for my needs–making telephone calls and sending texts.

  43. Gustopher says:

    @JKB:

    Yes, Biden did get 90% of the black voters. But that’d down 3 points from 2016 and 7 points from 2012.

    So, do you think the Democrats are doing something amazing for Black folks to get this level of loyalty, or do you think that the Republicans are doing something amazingly awful? Both?

    3-4 points is basically noise in most of these polls, so I wouldn’t be crowing too much about fluctuations from a 2016 baseline too much.

    (and did 97% of Black voters vote for Obama? Holy shit, that’s like Third World Country Dictator levels of support)

    1
  44. Teve says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    Just nutha ignint cracker says:
    Friday, 13 August 2021 at 16:37
    @Teve: You’d chuck it in the dumpster. I found them serviceable enough for my needs–making telephone calls and sending texts.

    What are “Telephone calls”? Is that like Facetime?

    3
  45. mattbernius says:

    @Kylopod:

    Also, while it’s true that Biden’s victory can be attributed to an increase in white support, he also benefited from an increase in turnout among minorities. Even if Trump’s share of the vote among blacks and Hispanics increased from 2016, the greater turnout among these already Dem-leaning groups meant it gave Biden a net increase in support relative to Hillary (I’ve calculated this), and this was crucial to his victories in Georgia and Arizona.

    Correct. Which is also backed up by the construction of the latest rounds of GOP state voting reform bills which have largely been focused on surpressing minority votes in hopes of adding additional friction when it comes to turn-out in contested areas.

    1
  46. Slugger says:

    I’m 75, and I’m going to be replaced in a fairly short time. So it goes. In the meantime, estoy estudiando español. The italics are temporary.

    2
  47. grumpy realist says:

    @Teve: Reminds me of a comment some doofus over on the right said after the 2nd Obama election: “if we leave out the black vote, Romney won!”

    ….shows precisely how the votes of those of a darker shade of skin are regarded by the right, no?

    Grrr.

    4
  48. Kylopod says:

    @grumpy realist:

    Reminds me of a comment some doofus over on the right said after the 2nd Obama election: “if we leave out the black vote, Romney won!”

    That I don’t remember, but I do remember Byron York in 2009 arguing that Obama really wasn’t popular once you took out the black vote. Is that perhaps what you had in mind? (Of course I’m sure other people at other times have used similar kinds of arguments, so you may be remembering correctly.)

    1
  49. ImProPer says:

    @Kylopod:

    “No way to know for sure, but he always played footsie with the the extremist precursors of today’s GOP.”

    For sure. His denouncement of Robert Weltch and the Birtchers wasn’t an instant rebuke of their craziness. It was only after that craziness started gaining a wide audience, and threatened to over take his quasi intellectualism and replace it with reactionary paranoia. Most of his friends, and those whose company he preferred tended to be the leading liberals of the day, from what I understand. On his side from Reagan on down it must of been really galling to someone who tried to create an intellectual conservative movement.

    2
  50. Teve says:

    @Kylopod: i could be misremembering, but i recall it was something slightly horribler, like, “Obama’s not really as popular as the polls indicate, because he’s extremely popular with blacks.”

  51. Kylopod says:

    @ImProPer:

    His denouncement of Robert Weltch and the Birtchers wasn’t an instant rebuke of their craziness.

    This is somewhat of a myth. He denounced Welch but declined to denounce the Birchers as a whole, and he made it sound like Welch was an aberration from the movement.

  52. ImProPer says:

    @Kylopod:

    “This is somewhat of a myth. He denounced Welch but declined to denounce the Birchers as a whole, and he made it sound like Welch was an aberration from the movement.”

    Myth or not, I was but an infant during this time, and his embrace of the more genteel versions, Regan et. al. serve as scathing indictment against his professed desire for a conservative intellectual movement in the Republican party.

  53. ImProPer says:

    @ImProPer:

    Uggg, no edit button. At least I can say I’m not a member of the GQP, lol

    1
  54. gVOR08 says:

    @Kylopod: I’ve seen more than one pundit say Trump won the blue collar vote. Generally someone corrects them that no, Hillary and Biden both won the blue collar vote, Trump only won the white blue collar vote. Vanilla isn’t a flavor in the minds of many.

    2
  55. Kylopod says:

    @gVOR08:

    I’ve seen more than one pundit say Trump won the blue collar vote. Generally someone corrects them that no, Hillary and Biden both won the blue collar vote, Trump only won the white blue collar vote.

    It depends how you define the term. Most pollsters focus on whether a voter has a college degree or not (which usually means bachelor’s and up), not on what type of work the voter is doing. Trump did win the vote of people (of all races) without college degrees both times.

    It’s true, though, that both Hillary and Biden did better than Trump among voters making less than 100K, while Trump did better among the over-100K crowd.

    1
  56. Monala says:

    @Kylopod: no, Biden won non-white voters without college degrees. link

  57. Kylopod says:

    @Monala: I meant that Trump won the vote of people without college degrees overall–regardless of race. But yes, when you break it down by race, POC of all education levels voted for Biden, whites of all education levels for Trump.

    2
  58. Kylopod says:

    According to CNN’s exit polls (imperfect as they are, they’ve got more immediate data than the Pew poll):

    College graduates: Biden 55-43
    No college degree: Trump 50-48
    White college grads: Biden 51-48
    White non-grads: Trump 67-32
    POC college grads: Biden 70-27
    POC non-grads: Biden 72-26

    According to this, I was wrong about one thing, which is that Biden did narrowly win the vote of white college grads.

    3
  59. grumpy realist says:

    @Kylopod: That must have been it. A very silly remark from the individual involved.

  60. Teve says:

    Teve says:
    Friday, 13 August 2021 at 11:13

    The only significant Demographic that votes majority Republican is white with no college degree.

  61. Kylopod says:

    @Teve: That’s something that apparently changed in 2020 relative to the last two elections (both Trump in 2016 and Romney in 2012 won the vote of white college grads), and even then it was within the margin of error.

    1
  62. Kari Q says:

    @Scott F.:

    They left California for a state with a higher percentage white population shortly after and died a few years ago. Knowing them, I suspect they would still be upset.

    Personally, I love the diversity and find all white areas boring and strange. They were born in a very white area and never really adjusted to the diversity.

    3
  63. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Teve: 😀 😀 😀

    1
  64. de stijl says:

    In pro ‘rassling there is the heel-face turn (bad guy gets won over to the good side) and the face-heel turn (good guy gets pulled to the dark side). Twists and turns – it’s quite Shakespearean in arc and denouement. Motivation. Trait specific allegiances. It is more sophisticated than you would imagine.

    Rs are banking on the fact that they were the OG emancipation party and obtusely ignoring that since the early 60’s have been the party of white supremacy. Dixiecrats fled from D to R.

    Ds are banking on their flight from white supremacy towards egalitarianism in the 20th.

    The Voting Rights Act did not happen in a vacuum. The Civil Rights Act. 1964 / 65 was a decided turn in our political history.

    A new alignment that still plays out today.

  65. Kylopod says:

    @de stijl:

    In pro ‘rassling there is the heel-face turn (bad guy gets won over to the good side) and the face-heel turn (good guy gets pulled to the dark side).

    I learned the term from TV Tropes. I didn’t know it came from wrestling (a subject I know nothing about).

    I never thought of applying it to the two parties’ realignment over race because I’ve never conceptualized the parties as singular entities. It happened as a process, really starting in the ’30s when a lot of groups (including blacks) began voting Democrat for the first time, and this shifted the party’s center of gravity away from the South, so that Southern whites were just one of several factions in the party. Over the next few decades there was a struggle between these different factions, and Democratic politicians had to do a careful balancing act to keep them together. A book I read revealed that when Kennedy got involved in getting MLK released from prison over a trumped-up traffic charge in 1960, he maneuvered things so this information was only released to the African American press. Kennedy was so petrified of incurring the wrath of Southern whites that he once tried to have Sammy Davis Jr. kicked out of a White House party.

    I suppose you could say LBJ was the one who did the “heel face turn” in his decision to pursue the CRA and VRA (and make sure they were far-reaching, quite unlike the CRAs of the ’50s). It was a ballsy thing to do, especially because it led to Republican domination of the presidency from 1968-1988.

    In 1980 shortly after Reagan’s election, a column in National Review actually boasted about how the Dems had been fatally wounded by losing the Dixiecrats to the GOP:

    “The first, faint rumblings of the anti-liberal revolution were felt in 1948, as the formerly solid South broke away from the Democratic Party and ran a Dixiecrat campaign against Truman. It gathered its energies under Eisenhower, then burst to the surface again in 1964 as Goldwater, invading the Old Confederacy, showed that the South was indeed up for grabs. The revolution really got rolling in 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon between them put together a 60 to 40 landslide against the liberal candidate, Hubert Humphrey. It reached into all sections of the country when Nixon achieved his 49-state trouncing of George McGovern…. What made Jimmy Carter and much else possible was Watergate. Carter will be seen historically as essentially an interim figure, something that was stuffed into a crack in the wall. He was able to bring the South back into the Democratic column for just one more electoral hurrah, and then watched it disappear again in the direction of Reagan. But Carter was an aberration, historically considered, and with Reagan the anti-liberal revolution got back on the tracks and rolled once more.”

    While this column did not explicitly admit that the “anti-liberalism” of the Dixiecrats was centered around racism, it was pretty open about the history that the GOP has since tried to scrub.

    1
  66. de stijl says:

    @Kylopod:

    TV Tropes deserves many accolades. It is a dear resource. (To all, bookmark if you have not yet.)

    It has helped me to understand many media offerings in a different light.

    As to 60s realignment (and had been the trend for decades) Ds were trending towards inclusion and Rs were trending towards exclusion.

    Not a realignment, but a formal acknowledgement of decades-long trends.

    The post Civil War alliances and allegiances had broken entirely and had become topsy turvy.

    LBJ is not a favorite of mine, but when push came to shove he chose correctly. I appreciate his personal thought journey.

    At the end of the day I am about extending equal rights and everyday consideration and general politeness and good-willed regard to all citizens.

    In the 20th and then into the 21st Ds succeeded when Rs failed in this regard.

    I know where I stand.

    1
  67. Kylopod says:

    @de stijl: On TV Tropes, I wrote a significant part of the section on Early Installment Weirdness for US politics.

    Early Installment Weirdness is when you look back on the early seasons of a show, or the first couple of movies from a long-running series, and notice things are very different from what came later and what people most associate with that series. (Example: In the first season of All in the Family, Jean Stapleton hadn’t yet developed Edith’s trademark voice and spoke in a more normal voice.) But since TV Tropes applies each trope to just about everything, it contains a page for Real Life, which includes a section on US Politics. There I provided a lot of my knowledge about topics like the Articles of Confederation, the parties before the rise of the Republicans, and the 20th century realignment that led the South and the Northeast to swap places in partisan allegiance.

    2
  68. de stijl says:

    @Kylopod:

    Like the first season of Buffy. Well into second season.

    When the writer room got a full understanding of what and what should not be about for Season 3.

    Get serious and not just one-off episode baddies but existential threats a lot of previous episodes that were early episode weirdness.

    Xander as a swim team stud. Xander as anything but a self-identified “good-guy” creeper and stalker.

    Willow as anything less than a anxiety prone bad-ass.

  69. de stijl says:

    As to America getting less white and majority minority? I welcome it.

    We whites fucked up badly even when we had every privilege and benefit the world can offer.

    A less majoritarian white America is welcome in my book.

    A muddled mess is way better than one group claiming superiority and hegemony by right of racial numerical dominance. That is stupid bullshit.