As amusing as it might be to think of the existential panic that Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly will be thrown into after reading that the U.S. will be a "majority-minority" nation by 2050, I think the tone of the New York Times article is a bit misleading:
The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.
But as the article notes, how race is culturally understood is open to change. And taking into account the number of people who actually identify as white, white people will still comprise a substantial majority of American citizens in 2042 (76%). This is because most of the rise in the "minority" population comes from Latinos, who generally have a different understanding than the historical American definitions of "white" or "black". Depending on whether or not white people in America begin to accept Latinos who self-identify as white, our definition of what makes someone white or not will substantially change, and possibly include or be based mostly on considerations of class, background, and culture. But given that Italians, Jews, and Irish were all once "not white" there's probably room in there for self-identifying white Latinos too.
Of course, it's also possible that Americans will identify more according to definitions that today we would consider multiracial or biracial, but given the importance of racial identity to American politics I think it's more likely that the Dobbses and O'Reilly's of the future will simply have a more "inclusive" notion of what constitutes a "real American" to demagogue to angry audiences. In a more diverse America, those kinds of figures may matter less and less. But it's likely that the definition of what we consider to be "white" will someday include a substantial amount of people who speak Spanish. Hopefully that someone is "white" or not will mean less than it does today.
-- A. Serwer
