General Social Survey participants were asked: "From what countries or part of the world did your ancestors come?" The answers listed in the table above include ethnicities with substantial numbers of white and non-white people (self-identified). The first column of numbers are the percent of the group who self-dentified as white when surveyed some time in the 1970s or 1980s, while the second column of numbers are the corresponding numbers for the past two decades. Finally, the last column is the difference between the first two. (Most of the categories have large sample sizes, with a few exceptions like Arabs in the earlier period having only 29).
You can see that, with the exception of American Indians, fewer people now consider themselves to be white.
The drop over the two periods is substantial in all other groups. If American society is so racist against minorities, why is whiteness so much less desirable than 20 years ago? If whiteness carries with it so many advantages, why are fewer people trying to pass as white? Liberal researchers tell us that living among white bigots forces minorities to give up trying to be white. For this to be the case, recent conditions would have to be dramatically worse than in the past. That is untenable.
There may be a similarity to the drop in identity of founding stock Americans.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I didn't attempt to locate the data myself to verify, a friend of mine told me he had looked at the national origins data of the US census over the 20th century and found a drop _in absolute numbers_ of about 6 million English/British.
Even the newer figures show that being white remains very popular in America. Consider: 40% of Mexican-origin people still claim to be white, notwithstanding the fact that they come from a country in which the white percentage is barely in the double digits. Heck, 10% of Asian Indians still say they're white, when in reality it's more like zero percent.
ReplyDeletePeter
"If whiteness carries with it so many advantages, why are fewer people trying to pass as white"
ReplyDeleteYet, according to results in the GSS survey, minorities do have a high opinion of whites when they're asked questions regarding intelligence, tendency towards violence, and willingness to marry
The dominant narrative of the immigration extremists now in control of the US has been that founding stock Americans treated immigrants to the US as "the other" with the same dynamics of labor vs elite going back at least to the "Know Nothings". That this started with slavery of "blacks" by "whites" should not detract from the immigrant labor-elite vise grip that attacked the American Yeoman Farmer who brought the territory of the US to fruition far more than any plantation or corporation.
ReplyDeleteThe 20th century American history was, then, simply the process of dispossessing the founding stock American of not just his "identity" but of his very land.