What Do You Think?

From The American Prospect - 

Prospect Debate: The Illusion of a Minority Majority America

THE EDITORS

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Four knowledgeable commentators respond to Richard Alba’s argument in the Prospect that America will continue to have a white majority. 

In his Winter 2016 article “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority,” Richard Alba argues that highly publicized projections by the U.S. Census have misled the public into thinking that whites in the United States are destined to become a minority by the middle of the century. That projection is incorrect, Alba suggests, for two primary reasons. First, the census data mistakenly assume that children of mixed marriages where one parent is white will identify as nonwhite. Second, the census sees the white “mainstream” as a fixed category even though the conception of whiteness has changed in the past and will likely change again. As a result, Alba contends, America will probably have a white majority for some time to come.

Is that analysis correct? And what does America’s demographic future say about its political future? Four contributors respond to Alba: Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the Census Bureau and now Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University; William Darity Jr., Arts and Sciences Professor of Public Policy at Duke University; Harold Meyerson, the Prospect’s executive editor; and Frank Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Alba has the last word.

Follow the link to read their responses.

http://prospect.org/article/prospect-debate-illusion-minority-majority-america