About the authors:  Richard Alba is a distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His most recent book i

The Myth of a Majority-Minority America

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2021-06-14 05:00:05

About the authors: Richard Alba is a distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His most recent book is The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream. Morris Levy is an associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Dowell Myers is a professor of policy, planning, and demography at the University of Southern California.

In recent years, demographers and pundits have latched on to the idea that, within a generation, the United States will inevitably become a majority-minority nation, with nonwhite people outnumbering white people. In the minds of many Americans, this ethno-racial transition betokens political, cultural, and social upheaval, because a white majority has dominated the nation since its founding. But our research on immigration, public opinion, and racial demography reveals something quite different: By softening and blurring racial and ethnic lines, diversity is bringing Americans together more than it is tearing the country apart.

The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”

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