Relax, Tucker Carlson, Reports of ‘Replacement’ Are Greatly Exaggerated
For example, there is the matter of what we’re talking about when we classify by race. The race and ethnicity questions have changed with each new decade’s census, along with the public’s perceptions of race and ethnicity.
“We shouldn’t be governing in the 21st century by a race classification given us by a German doctor in 1776,” former U.S. Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt told me in 2013, as he was finishing a book titled, “What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans.”
He was referring to the old five-race model that sounds less fashionable than dial telephones today: “Caucasian, Mongolian (Asian), Malay (Pacific Islanders), American Indian and Negro.”
Think of how the race and ethnicity questions leave a lot of respondents in today’s pluralistic society scratching their heads over which box to check. For example, a growing number of Americans who consider themselves to “mixed” are counted as either Black or Hispanic, even though they look or report themselves to be white.
If you simply added half of the “mixed“ respondents to the “white” column, some demographers say, the decline of “white” looks a lot less dramatic.
Besides, as Richard Alba, distinguished professor of sociology at the City University of New York and author of “Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America,” more recently wrote, we make a mistake if we underestimate this country’s so-called melting pot patterns of assimilation.
“There is no reason to presume that what happened to Catholic ethnics decades ago as a result of assimilation — they became the ‘Reagan Democrats’ — won’t repeat itself,” Alba wrote in a recent op-ed.
I’d say Tucker Carlson and others who have misgivings about those American traditions and others should reverse course. Instead of treating newcomers as hostile and un-meltable, try to enlist their vote as you would any other group of Americans. The nation will be better off if we engage in that welcoming process now rather than to try to leave it to our grandchildren.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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