The newest entrant in the cottage industry of books predicting our demographic future is Diversity Explosion by William Frey (no relation, I think, to Lord Walder Frey of The Twins). While I have yet to read the book, The New Republic [groan] published an excerpt with the clickbait title “The Major Demographic Shift That’s Upending How We Think About Race.”
I can already tell I’m not going to like this book.
The thesis of the excerpt is that multiracial marriages in the United States have been steadily increasing. This is an old story, and the denouement is that eventually races and ethnicities will be so intertwined and generations of “future people” – as a friend of mine playfully described mixed-race babies – will all look so much alike that there can be no racism. Frey isn’t really building a new narrative about population here, he’s just pulling fresh data to support a fairly stale one. The last line of the excerpt, summing up his prediction for the major demographic shift that’s upending how we think about race, reads “it is likely that younger and future generations of Americans from multiracial families will be more likely to embrace their heritage.”
Unfortunately, Frey’s prediction is based on a number of faulty assumptions and analyses:
He conflates self-identified race/ethnicity with socially-identified race/ethnicity. This is a limitation when it comes to using large data sets to make inferences, because race is entirely self-identified in these surveys. This is fine when providing descriptive tabulations of data, but does not suffice when talking about social relations between people. Frey makes a big deal out of the identities that multiracial children assume, and especially how Obama identified himself in the Census, but it’s not clear why this matters.
Obama could have written that he was an Illithid on his Census form, and it wouldn’t change the fact that the vast majority of American society, regardless of ideology, identifies him as black. It truly makes little difference how one self-identifies when a great deal of the outcomes of racism are predicated on unconscious biases.
He examines racial and ethnic mixing like it’s a new thing. Every single ethnicity is “mixed,” not just white Americans. African-Americans are already a mixed race (or, properly, an ethnicity). That hasn’t changed anything regarding the racist social hierarchy – really, a black/white dichotomy – that undergirds the American social world.
He waves his hand at racecraft, but never engages with it. Frey never really tells us why this trend is going to upend the way we think about race, and that’s because such an upending, without drastic changes to the entire formative context of American social life, would be thoroughly ahistorical. Frey talks about the history of dividing white from nonwhite, black from nonblack, but takes those categories as a given.
But he shouldn’t. Race is an amorphous, constantly shifting construct used to justify a series of social relations – in America, the black/white (today, better described as non-black) dichotomy, with blacks on the bottom – that benefits the dominant political, economic, and social order. The muddle of ethnicities in the middle, between white and black, always have a chance to move up within this hierarchy.
Frey suggests that intermarriage among nearly-white ethnics was an important step on the road to integration along with “upward social mobility,” but Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White shows that this was not the case; rather, integration to whiteness for European ethnics was based on repudiation of blackness. In the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, that Irish experience has been constantly replicated, albeit with different details, such as with today’s so-called model minorities.
Frey recalls marriage data from 1960 and says it was “before federal statistics enumerated Hispanics.” But the question about Hispanic background introduced in the 1970 Census didn’t just enumerate Hispanics, it effectively invented the entire Hispanic construct (though it did a poor job counting such people). It mashed together Puerto Ricans who had lived on the Lower East Side since the nineteenth century, wealthy Cubans who had fled Castro in the 1950s, the growing population of Chicanos, and other groups based on a flimsy link of Spanish-language heritage (and presumably a much less flimsy link of socio-economic status). Many newly-dubbed Hispanics were probably surprised to find out that practically overnight they had been banished from whiteness, or at least the near-whiteness of many fellow white-skinned, mostly Catholic ethnicities. If anything, the trend of Hispanics declaring themselves white is simply a return to a status quo of 50 years past, despite the efforts of statisticians.
I have to assume the rest of Diversity Explosion follows this path. It seems to be the nature of this genre to take today’s social constructs as immutable fact and project them out to the future, despite the inherent ahistorical nature of such an undertaking. Many demographers, particularly those who make a lot of money selling books, seem unwilling to critically engage with the formative context and social world in which a population exists and this leads to imagine that a demographic shift will not be accompanied by redefinition of demographics
I suspect this is due to the delimitation of the social sciences decried by those like Eric Wolf. Here a demographer’s job is to study population and it is left to the sociologist, political science, economist, and anthropologist – and historian – to examine other aspects of our social world. Without this engagement, however, the utility of studying population as it is – to say nothing of projecting its composition and analyzing the meaning thereof – is dubious at best, counterproductive at worst.
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