“People
went crazy,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern
California, of the 2008 projection that non-Hispanic whites would drop below
half the population by 2042.CreditCreditJenna Schoenefeld for The New York
Times
Nov. 22, 2018
WASHINGTON
— The graphic was splashy by the Census Bureau’s standards and it showed an unmistakable moment in
America’s future: the year 2044, when white Americans were projected to fall
below half the population and lose their majority status.
The presentation
of the data disturbed Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw
it while looking through a government report. The graphic made demographic
change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing, he thought,
and could provoke a political backlash.
So after
the report’s release three years ago, he organized a meeting with Katherine
Wallman, at the time the chief statistician for the United States.
“I said
‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public
affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a
description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that
becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”
In a nation
preoccupied by race, the moment when white Americans will make up less than
half the country’s population has become an object of fascination.
For white
nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of
racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican
power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine
voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.
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But many
academics have grown increasingly uneasy with the public fixation. They point
to recent research demonstrating the data’s power to shape perceptions. Some
are questioning the assumptions the Census Bureau is making about race, and
whether projecting the American population even makes sense at a time of rapid
demographic change when the categories themselves seem to be shifting.
Jennifer
Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk
immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a
marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At
first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to
study.
But she
did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New
York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their
findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about
the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial
minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support
restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose
status and face discrimination in the future.
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Mary
Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she
saw the research.
“It was
like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she
said.
Beyond
concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning
whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they
say, is whom the government counts as white.
In the
Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been
counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This has had the effect of
understating the size of the white population, they say, because many Americans
with one white parent may identify as white or partly white. On their census
forms, Americans can choose more than one race and whether they are of Hispanic
origin.
Among
Asians and Hispanics, more than a
quarter marry
outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born
Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be
a small group now — around 7
percent of the population, according to Pew — but will steadily grow. Are those children
white? Are they minority? Are they both? What about the grandchildren?
“The
question really for us as a society is there are all these people who look
white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean
anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting time, an
indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very strongly.”
The Census
Bureau has long produced projections of the American population, but they were
rarely the topic of talk shows or newspaper headlines.
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Then, in
August 2008 at the height of Barack Obama’s campaign for president, the
bureau projected that non-Hispanic whites
would drop below half the population by 2042, far earlier than expected. (The projections,
which change with birth, death and migration rates, have also placed the shift
in 2050 and in 2044.)
“The census
data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” said
Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York.CreditGabriella
Angotti-Jones/The New York Times
Image
“The census
data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” said
Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York.CreditGabriella
Angotti-Jones/The New York Times
“That’s
what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University
of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”
It was not
just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers
watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the
idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his
work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white
Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that
could come from immigration.
“It was
conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to
overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”
Dr. Myers
and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce
a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found
that the negative
effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how
the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young
people through intermarriage.
It is
unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared,
but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965
Voting Rights Act.
Ms.
Wallman, the chief statistician for the United States from 1992 to 2017, who
helped develop the first governmentwide standard for data on race and ethnicity
that came into use in the late 1970s, said she did not like having to
categorize by race, but that the government had to for oversight.
“I wish we
didn’t have to ask,” she said. “But to me, that’s the rock and the hard place.”
Race is
difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social
category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about
genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s,
the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population,
there were furious arguments over how to categorize newcomers from Europe.
But
eventually, the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be
considered white.
That is
because race is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political
science professor at Georgetown University.
“The closer
you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King,
author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist
who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never
allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the
long-term legacy of slavery.
To Richard
Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, the Census Bureau’s
projections seemed stuck in an outdated classification system. The bureau
assigns a nonwhite label to most people who are reported as having both white
and minority ancestry, he said. He likened this to the one-drop rule, a
19th-century system of racial classification in which having even one African
ancestor meant you were black.
“The census
data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba
said. “There might never be a majority-minority society; it’s unclear.”
Asked for a
response to Dr. Alba’s critique, a Census Bureau spokesman said in an email
that “we constantly consult with stakeholders, and scholars, including Richard
Alba and other federal agencies to improve our techniques, methodologies, and
testing of population projections.”
William
Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, argued that the Census Bureau
was doing the best that it could at a time whensociety was changing
quickly. He was
skeptical that today’s Asians and Hispanics were analogous to the white ethnic
Americans of the 20th century, and believed that a less conservative count
would not do much to change the bigger picture. Besides, it is not the job of
academics to protect people from demographic change, he said.
“Irrespective
of the year, or the turning point, the message needs to come out about what the
actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We are becoming a much more racially diverse
society among our young generation.”
Others say
they are not sugarcoating statistics, but showing that the numbers have many
interpretations, and that white-versus-everyone-else is only one. It not only
reduces the American patchwork to a crude, divisive political formula, they
say, but perhaps more important — with the categories in flux — it might not
even be true.
The Census
Bureau released new projections this year in March filled with data about the
country’s future. In the coming decades, adults 65 and older will outnumber children for the first time in
the country’s history. The share of mixed-race children is set to double.
But there
was no mention of a year when white Americans would fall below half the population.
When asked
about the change, a spokesman for the Bureau said: “It was just us getting back
to sticking to data.”
A version
of this article appears in print on Nov. 23, 2018, on Page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Racial Projection by the
Census Is Making Demographers Uneasy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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