The obituary page in your local newspaper is more important than most people know.
It tells us a lot about the turbulence of our country’s politics.
The obits are a regular reminder that white people are dying and they aren’t being replaced by white babies.
In 2015, for the first time, more white deaths were recorded in most of the U.S. than white births.
Shrinkage but Not Extinction
But let’s be absolutely clear: this is not about the extinction of the white race. It is about whites losing majority status in the population. Big difference.
The slogan, Make America Great Again, is an admission that greatness, as defined by nostalgic white conservatives, has been lost. “Again” is the key word. Many believe Make America Great Again is political dog-whistle code for Make America White Again. It’s not going to happen, no matter how many walls are built, no matter how many alternative facts are concocted.
In ever-increasing numbers, the odds are, a pregnant woman in the United States is a woman of color.
Hispanics are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Sooner or later, they will discover the power of the ballot box. White Rule in America is coming to an end.
Many people know this. It is not news. The decline of America’s white population and the rise of minorities has been an ongoing story for a long time.
But the significance of it seems to get lost in the day-to-day coverage of the rude, crude racist and bigoted bile that spews out of the White House.
Whites are Deeply Frightened
The intent of this commentary is to remind you the nastiness is about millions of people who are frightened about the not-so-distant future.
White fear, panic and hatred in this country has many roots but in modern times perhaps the tap root is this man:
Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, the first black to ever hold that office. He was elected President twice.
That means every day for eight years he was a reminder that ethnic group power is shifting in the United States of America. He sometimes went overboard trying to avoid being seen as an angry black man, but it didn’t make any difference. The color of his skin was enough to remind whites that one of them wasn’t leading the country:
“It’s the idea held by generations of citizens, who believe America is a constant work in progress, who believe that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.”
The so-called Squad is another visible reminder of the decline of white power. It’s four women-of-color, as the cliché goes, who were elected to Congress in 2018.
The informal leader is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The others are Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts. Together they are challenging white male rule in Washington, D.C. as it’s never been challenged before.
The Bigot-in-Chief tweeted they should go back to the countries they came from.
Three of the four were born in the United States and the fourth, Ilhan Omar, is a fully naturalized citizen who emigrated from Somalia.
Whether these congressional newbies can accomplish anything legislatively remains to be seen. But they’ve shaken the white establishment.
The Inciter-in-Chief
The current occupant of the Oval Office landed there in large part because he stoked white fear over black and brown people gaining political power in America.
The mainstream media keep acting shocked by whatever hatred belches out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue any given day. They know full well this is a steady stream of fuel to feed the flames of white fear in America. And the media secretly love it because it gives them a new outrage to chatter about.
Let’s review some cold hard facts that make many white Americans batshit crazy.
Census figures show whites are going to be just another minority in the United States by 2045. Whites will make up 49.7% of the nation’s population. Various other minorities will make up the rest.
To put this another way, by 2045 Whites will be the dominant minority in the U.S., but other minority groups can form coalitions that can outnumber Caucasians at the ballot box.
It won’t just happen at some magical date in 2045. It’s happening now, by age group, as the population gets older.
The Vanishing White Baby
White babies and toddlers are already a minority among other kids in the same age group.
In 2020, American whites will be a minority among all of the nation’s young people age 18 or younger.
Let me repeat that: whites 18 and under will be a numerical minority in the United States in 2020.
William Frey is one of the nation’s foremost demographers. In an interview for the Brookings Institution he said the decline of the nation’s white population is irreversible:
“It’s a demographic phenomenon that’s based on the older white population and the lower fertility of the whites who are in their child-bearing years. That’s not going to bounce back.”
The infamous wall along the southern border isn’t about illegal aliens or undocumented immigrants. More than anything, it’s a pathetic but inflammatory symbol of what White America has lost: its status as the dominant, ruling racial group. To maintain a viable workforce, the USA is going to have to get browner, wall or no wall.
Robert P. Jones is the author of a book with the blunt title, “The End of White Christian America.” He was interviewed in 2016 on the PBS News Hour:
“We’re at a moment where we really are having to come to terms with the passing of this era, it’s really a cultural era. And I think to understand Trump supporters and their grief, the anger that we see from them and why he’s been able to appeal to them. Really, his appeal to them has not been that he’s one of them. His appeal to them has been to appeal to this nostalgia and loss and grief, and when he says ‘Make America Great Again’ he’s saying ‘I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches, says things like ‘We’re going to say Merry Christmas again in this country, not Happy Holidays. Those are all about big cultural shifts that I think are driving a lot of anxiety among conservative White Christians today.”
That anxiety is partly-fueled by the decline in church congregations. The Gallup polling service reports church membership in America is down sharply in the past two decades.
Not only that, women outnumber men. It’s been that way for some time and it is further numerical evidence that the era of white male rule in the United States is near an end. White men don’t like it, not one bit. This explains why so many of them are in denial and desperately support a rabble-rousing flim-flam man who claims he’s going to somehow defy the facts, restore White Male Rule and Make America Great Again.
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