A DEMOGRAPHIC \u2018TIPPING POINT\u2019 FOR THE U.S.
\nBy Phil Kent<\/p>\n
\u201cFor America\u2019s children, the future is now,\u201d says University of New Hampshire sociologist Kenneth Johnson. He estimates minorities could overtake the white population by 2050 and found minorities comprised 48 percent of U.S. children born in 2008, compared to 37 percent in 1990. This year could be the \u201ctipping point\u201d when minority babies outnumber white babies.<\/p>\n
If this trend is not reversed– and it could be if an immigration moratorium were imposed– what Vassar College author Hua Hsu labels America\u2019s white \u201ccentrifugal core\u201d will slowly disappear. This leads to big questions: What will be the values and ideas of a multicultural America? What will it mean to be white after \u201cwhiteness\u201d no longer defines the cultural mainstream?<\/p>\n
Hsu notes that a glimpse is seen with the popularity of black-originated hip-hop. It opposes the pop mainstream and isn\u2019t assimilating into a traditional, single white iconic image of style\u2014 and growing numbers of young whites purchase such music.<\/p>\n
Television and movies will increasingly have diverse casts– with whites downgraded. New York radio personality Peter Rosenberg gushes that it is \u201cnow very cool and in to have multicultural friends.\u201d The advertising world will radically change. Brown Johnson, a Nickelodean executive speaking before the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, touts TV characters who don\u2019t conform to \u201cthe white, middle class mold.\u201d Hispanic marketer Rochelle Newman-Carrasco further notes \u201cit has become harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many whites \u201cwill flee into whiteness.\u201d They will move to where other fair-skinned brethren are to retain their identity\u2014 nostalgically yearning for an American authenticity where everyone speaks English. Politically, the country will become more balkanized, with white leaders forming and breaking alliances with their black and Hispanic counterparts. (An example: Gwinnett County\u2014 outside of Atlanta, Ga.\u2014 will turn into an Hispanic\/Muslim enclave if present trends continue. Whites there are already moving to \u201cfriendlier\u201d areas.)<\/p>\n
Karl Carter of Atlanta\u2019s youth-oriented GTM (Guerrilla Tactics Media), interviewed by Hsu, says \u201cfor young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image.\u201d Will that mean rejecting the values of the founding fathers and, say, the Eurocentric legal system?<\/p>\n
Many Americans may aspire to be \u201cpost-racial.\u201d But everyone\u2014 even after 2050\u2014 will basically live within the class structure and racial categories inherited from the early 21st century. In this vein, Hsu believes that race will still be \u201csomething we cling to\u2026 as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.\u201d<\/p>\n
It may be instructive to reflect on the 1990s transformation of South Africa from white to black rule in a majority black country. Ironically, black activist Winnie Mandela recently complained that whites \u201cstill dominate\u201d that country economically. So while whites may be a minority in the U.S. by mid-century, their influence will still be enormous because of their economic and monetary clout. But in the new non-white country, will the poorer majority rest content with a wealthy white minority, or will it find ways to expropriate that wealth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Appeared in the April 2010 Middle American News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":75,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-233","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/233\/revisions\/432"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philkentconsulting.com\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}