Tables turning on majority-white voter populations

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

34. Emerging Democratic majority may never happen

My guess is that Mexican-Americans, a major Latino group, will vote more like Irish- and Italian-Americans than African-Americans. Moreover, as in the case of European-American ethnics, the ethnicity of Mexican-Americans, outside of heavily immigrant enclaves, may become attenuated pretty quickly.

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One result of Latino assimilation may be the collapse of the very idea of a “nonwhite majority” except as a meaningless statistical category. Already a majority of Latinos identify themselves as “white” when given the option on census forms. As I argued in a 1996 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Beige and the Black,” because of the depth of anti-black racism in the U.S., America’s informal racial caste consciousness has always been binary—not whites vs. nonwhites, but blacks vs. non-blacks. The “white” category has been an elastic one that has expanded to incorporate successive non-black immigrant groups—first European “ethnics” and in the future, perhaps, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/17/doomed_by_the_south_why_the_emerging_democratic_majority_may_never_happen/