I am slowly de-Hulking, and will likely be back to normal by the weekend, which means new stuff for you to read at the beginning of next week. Until then, this might help tide you over:
The United States is about to undergo a major makeover. By 2050 – though some demographers predict it will be by 2042 – the U.S. will have a non-white majority population for the first time in its history. No tightening of immigration laws can hold this off: The biggest jump in the 2010 census, for example, came not from Latino immigration but from the Latino birth rate. In fact, except for European-Americans, every ethnic and racial group – African-Americans, Asian-Americans, even American Indians and Alaska natives – is growing by double-digit percentages. The hardening of political battle lines we have witnessed since the election of U.S. President Barack Obama is just a foretaste of what will probably be a rocky transition to a new United States. Will it be less united than ever?
In reality, even after 2050, whites will remain the group with the largest plurality. More importantly, liberal inheritance laws have produced a cross-generational payoff for the legacy of white economic advantage. This means that the distribution of economic resources will not change as quickly as the demographics because, as Andrew Hacker revealed in his study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,” the way race affects economics is not measured in wages but in real estate (most households’ primary source of wealth). For every dollar that white families have, African-American families have only 10 cents, and Latino families have only 12 cents. Furthermore, the recent subprime mortgage crisis hit the newest and poorest homeowners the hardest – groups that are disproportionately made up of people of color.
It’s interesting and worth a read.
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