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• Majority-Minority Myths
• Jake Rosenfeld (bio)

The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream
by Richard Alba
Princeton University Press, 2020, 336 pp. Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics
by Zoltan L. Hajnal
Cambridge University Press, 2020, 362 pp. The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals
by Christopher T. Stout
University of Virginia Press, 2020, 268 pp.

In a commencement address at the University of California, San Diego in 1997, President Bill Clinton spoke of a time when white people would no longer constitute a majority in the United States. In the decades since, the idea that growing diversity will bring about a “majority-minority” America in the near future has become a widespread belief across the ideological spectrum, propelled by periodic Census updates, like a report that 2013 marked the first year that more non-white babies had been born in the United States than white ones.

There are three major problems with this now-clichéd belief. First, it scares many white people, pushing their political stances toward the right. Numerous studies confirm that merely mentioning the demographic shift is enough to change their political views. As Ezra Klein has written, “The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it.” Many white people interpret stories about the imminent reordering of the country’s racial and ethnic hierarchy as a threat.

Second, it leads Democrats astray. Divvying up the nation between whites and nonwhites implies a neat, fixed, and immutable ordering of a complex set of shifting racial and ethnic identities. The corollary— that a shared political identity should bind minorities to a leftist, emancipatory project against white oppression—induces complacency in Democratic Party organizing and policymaking realms, and ignores the varied ethnic and class backgrounds of those who comprise this broad,diverse population.

The 2020 election shook the premise that nonwhite voters shared a liberal political identity, with growing evidence of an across-the-board shift toward the GOP among Latinos and, to a smaller degree, African Americans. But evidence that the “browning of America” may not lead to progressive nirvana predated the election. Bush’s 2004 re-election bid was buoyed by his record performance among Latinos. Since then, between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted for Republican presidential candidates despite the restrictionist turn in the party’s immigration policies.

Which brings us to the third problem with the majority-minority claim: it’s empirically wrong.

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Understanding why it’s wrong requires [End Page 137] a look at a couple of momentous demographic developments of the past few decades, along with how the Census makes sense of them. These are the topics sociologist Richard Alba explores in his important new book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream.

During a period when xenophobic political campaigns, anti-immigrant policies, and the resurgence of white supremacy have generated so many headlines, millions of white Americans have befriended, married, and had children with minorities. One in ten children recently born in the United States has parents with different ethic identities. That percentage will inevitably grow; one in six marriages today pair individuals with distinct ethnicities. More than 40 percent of all these intermarriages involve whites marrying Latinos.

The children of many of these mixed partnerships have helped propel another underappreciated dynamic of the past few decades: the mass incorporation of millions of minorities into the American mainstream. This trend extends beyond traditionally high-achieving Asian-American subpopulations. Among high school graduates, students with at least some Hispanic heritage now continue on to college at the same rate as white students. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of Hispanic-background individuals who finished college with a BA doubled. They now comprise 13 percent of all entrants into our most selective colleges and universities.

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Outside a Latinos for Trump campaign rally in Orlando, Florida, in October 2020 (Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

These children of minority-white partnerships are the fulcrum upon which the majority-minority hypothesis pivots. The Census’s demographic projections rest on a racial and ethnic...

中文翻译：

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多数-少数民族神话

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 多数-少数民族神话
• 杰克·罗森菲尔德（生物）

大人口错觉：多数，少数人，而扩大美国的主流
由理查德·阿尔巴
。普林斯顿大学出版社，2020年，336页危险地分为：种族和阶级形状如何赢得与美国政治中失去
的佐尔坦·L.哈伊纳尔
剑桥大学出版社2020年，362页。身份政治的案例：极化，人口变化和种族
诉求
，弗吉尼亚大学出版社的克里斯托弗·斯托特（Christopher T. Stout ）弗吉尼亚大学出版社，2020年，268页。

1997年，比尔·克林顿（Bill Clinton）总统在加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校的开幕式演讲中谈到，白人将不再在美国占多数。在此后的几十年中，不断的人口普查更新推动了这种观念的发展，这种观念在不久的将来已成为跨意识形态领域的一种普遍观念，这种观念在不久的将来会带来“多数-少数派”美国，例如2013年是第一年的报告。在美国出生的非白人婴儿比白人多。

这种如今已经流行的信念存在三个主要问题。首先，它使许多白人感到恐惧，将他们的政治立场推向正确的方向。大量研究证实，仅提及人口变化就足以改变他们的政治观点。正如埃兹拉·克莱因（Ezra Klein）所写，“激活某人身份的最简单方法就是威胁它。” 许多白人将有关该国种族和族裔等级即将改组的故事解释为威胁。

其次，它使民主党人误入歧途。在白人和非白人之间划分国家意味着对种族和民族身份不断变化的复杂集合进行整洁，固定和不变的排序。必然的结果是，共同的政治身份应将少数群体与反对白人压迫的左翼，解放性的项目联系起来，在民主党的组织和决策领域引起自满，而无视组成这一广泛多样的人口的民族和阶级背景的不同。

2020年的选举动摇了一个前提，即非白人选民拥有自由的政治身份，越来越多的证据表明，拉丁美洲人以及较小程度上的非裔美国人朝着共和党全面过渡。但是有证据表明，在选举之前，“美国的沦陷”可能不会导致进步的必杀技。布什2004年的竞选连任受到他在拉丁美洲人中创纪录的表现的鼓舞。从那以后，尽管该党的移民政策出现了限制主义转折，但仍有四分之一至三分之一的拉美裔人投票支持共和党总统候选人。

这将我们带到了少数群体主张的第三个问题：凭经验是错误的。

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要了解错误原因的原因，需要[End Page 137]来了解过去几十年中一些重要的人口变化，以及人口普查如何理解这些变化。这些是社会学家理查德·阿尔巴（Richard Alba）在其重要的新书《伟大的人口幻觉：多数，少数群体和扩展的美国主流》中探讨的主题。

在仇外政治运动，反移民政策以及白人至上的浪潮引起如此多的头条新闻的时期，成千上万的白人美国人已经结了婚，结婚并育有少数族裔的孩子。最近在美国出生的孩子中，十分之一的父母拥有不同的道德特性。这个百分比将不可避免地增长；今天，六分之一的婚姻将不同种族的人配对。在所有这些通婚中，有40％以上是与拉丁裔结婚的白人。

这些混合伙伴关系中许多人的子女推动了过去几十年另一个被低估的动力：数百万少数民族大规模融入美国主流。这种趋势超出了传统上成绩斐然的亚裔美国人的群体。在高中毕业生中，至少具有西班牙裔传统的学生现在继续以与白人学生相同的速度上大学。在2004年至2014年之间，获得文学学士学位的西班牙裔背景个人数量翻了一番。现在，他们占进入我们最挑剔的大学的所有参与者的13％。

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2020年10月在佛罗里达州奥兰多举行的针对特朗普竞选活动的拉丁美洲人集会之外（Paul Hennessy / NurPhoto via Getty Images）

这些少数族裔-白人合伙企业的孩子是多数-少数派假设所基于的支点。人口普查的人口预测基于种族和民族。