http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2145687/Non-white-births-outnumber-white-Ethnic-minorities-surpasses-whites-US-time.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Most of us have been following this story peripherally for years now, and it is inevitable that many of us have speculated on its consequences and implications. But the demographics seem clear, America is no longer a white country.

But just what does it mean to be white? Hispanics can be of any race, but they seem to be lumped into the non-white category routinely. I’m Hispanic, but there’s no way anyone could tell by my speech, mannerisms, appearance, dress…you name it. Most people guess I’m Italian or even Middle Eastern. An astute observer might notice subtle cues in the changes in my behavior if I were interacting with a predominantly Latin crowd, but until I started speaking Spanish it still wouldn’t be obvious.

I live in a community where there are an enormous number of Latins whose parents immigrated from Latin America, but where they themselves speak only English. And they are having children, often with their non-Latin spouses, who are culturally not Latin at all. So how do we classify them? How do they see themselves?

The largest Hispanic community in the USA is people of Mexican descent, who are concentrated in the western states. Most of these are immigrants and the children of immigrants, although a substantial portion of them have been residents of that area since prior to the American annexation of Mexican lands, indeed, prior to the American Revolution. These are people who have been traditionally poor. They are dark-skinned because most of them have some Indian blood, the oppressed majority of Mexico. They are as alien to me as Hottentots. The upper class Mexicans look Northern European, the whites descended from the Spanish conquistadors look white, they don’t look ‘Hispanic’. Except for those Spaniards from southern Spain, who intermingled with Arab and North African peoples, you can’t visually distinguish a Spaniard from a Frenchman, or a German, for that matter. Just what does it mean to call a Hispanic a ‘minority’?

Throughout much of its history, America has considered Italians, Irishmen, Portuguese, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans as minorities, while most Northern Europeans have been quickly absorbed into the majority. The last to be assimilatred have been the darker-skinned races, although religion, language and culture have obviously played a role, too. Poverty has been a major descriminator, too, especially with the Irish.

Blacks are still considered a minority, although the vast bulk of them are descended from slaves who were already resident in North America when the Declaration of Independence was drafted. They are more American than most of the whites. And by blood, most of them carry white genes, from centuries of rape.

Regardless of how you define majority and minority, the mix is definitely changing, and so will the definitiion. Even the majority as defined today will still remain a plurality for the forseeable future, perhaps less than the minority, but still outnumbering the individual minoriy groups considered separately.

The inevitable comments on racism should be inserted here, but I don’t think that is going to be an issue in the future. I have seen enormous strides in the elimination of racism in my own lifetime, and although the evil still exists, it is now at least considered bad manners, and its practitioners have been forced to disguise it. Its residual effects will be with us for centuries, but the worst is over now, America can justifiably be proud in the progress it has made in eliminating racism in the last half-century. I’ve seen it unfold before my eyes, I’m a Southerner, it has been quite remarkable.

But even the total elimination of racism will not eliminate cultural or ethnic conflict, and those conflicts often morph gradually into economic and class struggles, and they will merge imperceptibly into political divisions. So the legacy of racism will be with us for a long time, it will continue to surface, often disguised and even unrecognizable to its practitioners. Perhaps my own history makes me hyper-sensitive to these issues, but I see the legacy of racism emerging into our national dialog all the time, usually unrecognized, often by those who are shouting the loudest.

The shifting of America from white to non-white, whatever that means, is going to bring big changes. I don’t think we can really predict how they will manifest themselves, and it will all probably play out differently in different parts of the country.

The Great Melting Pot continues to boil. Embrace that. Far from being a weakness, it is our greatest strength; look at how the monocultural societies of old Europe are struggling with immigration now. We are an international society, a continental culture, like Hellenistic Greece or the Late Roman Empire, our strength and resilience comes from our diversity. We are the joining of the tribes, the first glimpse of what the world will probably look like a thousand years from now.