OH NOES

Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik in the Washington Post—Census: Minority babies are now majority in United States.

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation's babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That's almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.

...The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change.

Underlying white people's alarmism about this statistic is the fear that people of color will "get into power" and treat whites as badly as whites have been treating people of color. (Whoooooops!)

Which is: 1. Why so many white people fiercely defend white privilege, in order that whites may remain a dominant minority; and 2. Reflective of a profound ignorance rooted in the assumption that people of color are monolithic and/or united in a hatred of white people, with no issues of racial animus creating divisions among non-white racial groups. (Which white supremacists help foment.) It's just one big wave of brown and black people with locked arms intent on destroying white people!

I'll leave you to deconstruct the many layers of fuckery embedded in white fear of non-white babies in comments.

I will first, however, just quickly note that the "darkening of America" reaching this apocalyptic tipping point and the simultaneous enactment of a record number of anti-choice restrictions in state houses across the country is not a coincidence. The white male Republican legislators primarily responsible for these restrictions are trying to force white women to have more white babies. (Never mind women of color will be forced to have more babies, too.) Conservative legislation, conservative Christian reproductive movements like Quiverfull, conservative broadcasting showcasing huge white broods like the Duggars, conservative anti-immigration policies, border walls—it's all been a response to this moment.

And yet the world spins on.