Minorities becoming majorities:
I suppose it would be hard to live in the United States for the past couple or three decades without noticing a demographic trend. I am no fancier of the term “race.” I do not find it a useful term for describing folks. I used to think “European” was a good term for describing the bulk of my friends and acquaintances and “African” for describing most of the rest. “African” presents me no problem, although I make the reservation that the “Africans” I knew and know are pretty much all from a tiny subset of the enormous diversity that marks the population of that continent. However “European” refers to a classical myth about a woman called Europa. We are told that this is the origin of the term, which thus should be considered neutral. The problem is that the “eu” prefix in Greek means “ideal,” “perfect” or “just right.” Since the Greeks had any number of squabbles with western Asians, I sense just a whiff of Eurocentric chauvinism in the term “European.” But nobody else seems to have noticed, so bear with.
Africans and Europeans are in relative decline in the United States. Particularly the Europeans of the Northeast are dwindling. This is hardly news of course but if you want to check the score card, the matter is being treated as news. (Minority Report ECONOMIST vol. 399. no. 8727 April 2, 2011 page 25)
The issue of what population exists in greater numbers is of course unimportant. There was a time when it was assumed that the “melting pot” process in America would give us a homogenous population in which one could not define distinct groups. Then one could well argue that we were all living happily ever after. Instead of that, we are watching groups die, beginning with rich Yankee whites and ending something like sixty years later with the death of the poorest of the poor.
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