The End of White America?

According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, racial minorities will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Noting that "The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American," in a fascinating article in The Atlantic, Hua Hsu asks:

If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

Tough questions, to be sure. I tend to think that post-white America will be less racially divided. Each new generation is more tolerant of different races and cultures. Although we are not there yet, I don't expect this to change. Hsu agrees:

..we aspire to be post-racial, but we still live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why—as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

I'll drink to that. What I look forward to is not the end of white America but the end of a world where no social value or privilege is placed on the color of your skin.