Sound the Alarms

[Content Note: Racism.]

Everybody panic: Census Benchmark for White Americans: More Deaths Than Births.

Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.

The disparity was tiny — only about 12,000 — and was more than made up by a gain of 188,000 as a result of immigration from abroad. But the decrease for the year ending July 1, 2012, coupled with the fact that a majority of births in the United States are now to Hispanic, black and Asian mothers, is further evidence that white Americans will become a minority nationwide within about three decades.

Bad time to be a racist!

There's a lot to despise about the contemptible alarmism that accompanies stories like this one (see also: "Report: Asians fastest growing group" in today's Politico), but worst may be the reprehensible embedded pretense that white privilege is conferred by sheer numbers alone. That is not accurate. White people in the US will be a dominant minority for a long time, as long as it takes to dismantle white privilege. If only it were as simple as "fewer white people; fewer white people being problems" or whatever.

Competing for worst embedded premise in reporting this stuff is the whole White vs. All the Brown People in One Big Monolithic Indistinguishable Group thing. White people will be "outnumbered" by all people collectively deemed non-white. Which elides, for the casual reader, that there are still more white people than any other individual racial minority in the US. But that doesn't fit as neatly into white supremacist frames that pit whites against non-whites.

[Previously: OH NOES; O NOES!; This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day; If they have babies, we will be communists; Tomato, Tomahto.]