New Census Shows Fewer White Americans, But That’s Because of How We’re Counting

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Aug 22, 2021

Well, yes, we all did as a country when we turned to Afghanistan, initially to find the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on our homeland — and the whole world is still watching.

The irony of digging up the old “replacement theories,” which have energized the far-right in European countries even more, is how they ignore such developments in our democracy as Republican Donald Trump’s surprisingly large turnout of immigrants and nonwhites in 2020.

Our politics reflect our national character as a multiracial democracy and our endless struggle to hold it together. Voters change over time and so do political parties in response to how well their interests and complaints are being heard and acted upon.

Changes in the ways we categorize ourselves reflect changes in our society, including our national divisions. In the second half of the 19th century, for example, when census data helped drive bogus scientific racial theories to justify racial discrimination, the survey added “quadroons” (one-quarter Black) and “octoroons” (one-eighth Black) as categories in 1890.

Census forms changed in every decade to try to keep up with shifting racial and ethnic standards. The softening of our racial and ethnic lines is a reflection of changing times and perhaps the growing awareness, thanks to the popularity of DNA ancestry searches, of how little our color tells us about who we really are.

Ultimately, as sociologist Richard Alba, author of “Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America,” says, this blurring of our old racial-ethnic lines serves to bring us together more than it tears us apart.

Indeed, as I heard more than one civil rights leader say in recent decades, we Americans came here on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now. We can swim together or sink alone.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)