Matthew Yglesias makes an important point about our oft-predicted brown future:
I think this is a widely misreported trend. When the New York Times recently did a piece on me, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel exactly zero people complained about the massive over-representation of people of Latin American ancestry that reflected. People saw it as a profile of four white dudes. Which is what it was. But my dad’s family is from Cuba, Ezra’s dad’s family is from Brazil, and Brian’s mom’s family is from Chile. That’s kind of a funny coincidence, but the combination of continued immigration and intermarriage means that over time a larger and larger share of American people will be partially descended from Latin American countries. That will probably change various aspects of American life in various ways. But we’re not going to become a predominantly Spanish-speaking country, race isn’t going to stop being a social construct, and it won’t cease being the case that the primary “race issue” is the gap between black people (almost all of whom are in part descended from white people) and a fairly miscellaneous group of socially dominant whites.
I have a piece coming out soon on this, but one of the problems with a related set of trend stories predicting a browner and more post-racial America is that the definition of whiteness in the U.S. is hardly static and shifted dramatically less than a century ago when we began to consider Jews, Italians, and Irish people white. Before then, there was a lot of ethnically charged pseudoscience about the inborn, immutable tendencies of each group that today sounds really idiotic. But the point is even when as the U.S. gets browner, many of the people who were once considered brown are going to start considering themselves white.
