“Do you feel concerned or hopeful about the fact that racial minorities will soon make up a majority of the U.S. population?”
If your dinner table talk resembles some I’ve encountered recently, then you’ve experienced the passionate range of emotions—from head-hanging pessimism to button-popping optimism to shoulder-shrugging ambivalence—that this question usually sparks in private, just-among-friends debates. But rarely does such talk enter polite, public conversation. I suspect that’s because few people are daring enough to ask, fearing the backlash that almost always follows honest discussions involving race.
That’s a pity. Our nation’s failure to publicly and candidly grapple with the changing demographics only postpones a necessary conversation about what kind of country we will choose to become. For sure, change is coming. By 2050—possibly sooner—the nation’s combined populations of racial and ethnic Americans (Blacks, Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans) will outnumber White Americans.
So now, in 2011, how do most Americans feel about what’s to come in the future? Not much, according to a recent study conducted by the Applied Research Center, a think tank that researches issues related to racial justice. After surveying about 2,400 adults last spring in a nationwide study, ARC found that “the majority of people have no feelings one way or the other about the changing face of the U.S.”
When asked if they’re “concerned, hopeful or indifferent” about the changing demographics of the nation, a whopping 54.8 percent of the respondents said they’re neither concerned nor hopeful or have no opinion. “The vast majority of the people in the middle simply shrugged their shoulders,” Dominique Apollon, research director at ARC and author of a Colorlines.com report on the findings, told me in an interview.
In his blog post, Apollon quoted a man from Connecticut as saying he didn’t care a whit. “I will be dead in 10 years or so—I think the next generation has to deal with this garbage!”
Such a reaction is, at best, a bittersweet notion. After all, given the harsh and negative tenor of public policy debates over issues that have become highly associated (typically negatively) with race such as immigration, affirmative action, and crime, I consider it a victory that larger numbers of Americans aren’t more alarmed by the changing demographics of the nation.
