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The browning of America

Coming demographic shift is both a success and a challenge

BY REIHAN SALAM

While the rest of America’s political obsessives were focused on the epic battle in Madison, Wis., I was working from Venice Beach, Calif., a beautiful semi-gentrified neighborhood on the western edge of Los Angeles. As a nondriver, I had the pleasure of taking the bus downtown, where I was part of a sea of nonwhite faces. Angelenos generally assume that pedestrians are dangerous lunatics with a death wish, and that the only reason you would ever ride the bus as an adult is if you’ve had one drunk-driving arrest too many or you’re living on the edge of poverty. That’s not quite true.

I spent my hours on Metro Rapid Line 733 daydreaming about a future in which brown, urban Americans will be in the majority. To get a sense of what that future will look like, it helps to contemplate the demographics of Americans under the age of 5. Barely half of them are, to use the infelicitous bureaucratic phrase, "non-Hispanic whites." A quarter of under-5's are Hispanic, as opposed to 22 percent of under-18's, and many American children are the products of what we still call "intermarriages."

History tells us that our familiar ethnocultural distinctions will eventually break down. Just as Americans of Irish and Italian and Jewish origin were once considered seditious and unassimilable aliens by native-born Protestants of northern European stock, one gets the strong impression that intermarriage will melt seemingly unmeltable ethnic groups. Asian-Americans, once victims of intense persecution, have by and large been embraced by the larger culture. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this phenomenon is the fact that a large majority of Japanese-Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s have one non-Japanese parent, usually of European origin.

Rather more dramatically, a growing Hispanic population has transformed our cultural sensibilities. With each passing year, the United States feels less like a European offshoot and more like a Latin-style hybrid. Immigration from Mexico has changed the look and feel of entire cities and regions. During the first half of the 20th century, Los Angeles was known as "Iowa-on-the-Pacific," a description that would strike us as ridiculous. Today’s L.A. is a sprawling Latin-Anglo-Asian metropolis that leads the global entertainment industry because it is a deeply global city that speaks to the fantasies of Mexico City, Tehran and Tokyo all at the same time.

It is easy to celebrate the browning of America, particularly for those of us who identify as brown. But this demographic transformation also represents a challenge. In "The Blurring of the Color Line," sociologist Richard Alba argues that the mass retirement of the baby boom generation creates an opportunity for African-Americans and Hispanics. Those who've been excluded from the highest echelons of our society will finally get a crack at the most prestigious and powerful jobs, provided they have the necessary skills. In a zero-sum world, members of different ethnic groups fiercely fight over economic and political power, for the gains of one group appear to come at the expense of another. That is at least one reason why our political fights have felt so raw and intense in recent years.

A growing economy, in contrast, allows everyone to make progress at the same time, thus easing anxieties about losing status. As America's non-Hispanic white population ages and shrinks, and as the economy recovers, the broken schools, mass incarceration and high rates of child poverty that hit African-Americans and Hispanics particularly hard won’t just be something for privileged Americans to feel sad or guilty about. They will represent a serious threat to our prosperity.

Late last year, the Kurdish-Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji wrote a provocative essay observing that European-origin students in the United States outperform the vast majority of European-origin students in Europe. Yet the U.S. as a whole fared considerably less well, due to the relatively weak performance of Hispanics and African-Americans. One could describe this as a triumph for America's public schools — see, they're not so bad after all! But, as Sanandaji notes, Hispanics represent 22 percent of the U.S. student population and African-Americans represent 17 percent. These aren't trivial numbers, and those numbers are growing. If our schools can't meet the challenge of educating Latino and black students to a world-class standard, there is no question that our economic advantage will erode.

Retooling our schools to make them work for all of our students, not just middle-class white kids, will be an extremely tough process, and it’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable and angry. The public school teachers protesting against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill in Madison are good people who are looking out for their interests, their families and workers like them. Moreover, I have no doubt that the governor’s proposals are far from perfect. But Wisconsin’s teachers seem to think that the old way of doing business works just fine. And that’s just unbelievable.

Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)