I get to the New York Times web page, and right there in the upper left hand portion of the front page is this headline: Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S. Not that we haven't known this was coming:
After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.
Really, this is unexceptional news: in the year that ended in July 2011,
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births.
Hence the Dream Act, hence the problems the Republican Party is having. Really no surprise, and I'd guess for the great majority of us here this is just how it is, and it's interesting. But for some people the world is coming to an end now.
And now for some top comments from the right-wing blogosphere.
At Freep the link is to the Wall Street Journal, which has some good maps.
BUT they're confused about what the map says. some of them think the legend is the share of births bar chart, not the overall population percentage majority line at the top:
the legend is all the same red.............what’s up with that
I wondered also. Perhaps the legend didn’t want to appear raciss...
Whatever.
It's more disturbing beyond that. Marvel at the explanatory matrix:
More whites are required to work so that those on welfare can continue to procreate and pop out kids. White men such as myself are in the dubious position of having to work, pay taxes, pay my mortgage and bills, and then find time to have children. The “minorities” seem content procreating with little regard for the welfare of the child, so realistically, this report isn’t saying anything more than minorities are procreating at a faster rate than whites.
Minorities also tend to be incarcerated more and involved in more murders than whites, so the scales likely balance out over the span of decades.
Malthusian!
In 50 years (or maybe less) the US will have become a Third World nation...all thanks to the immigration policies of the Rat Party,led by the likes of Ted Kennedy.
Ted Kennedy! Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed it.
I blame the feminist movement, personally. More women working into their 30s and pushing their biological clocks further and further. When they do have babies, they have one, maybe two. Three-plus-child households are rare among whites.
Then there’s the media pushing this fake image of beauty, women become self-conscious and don’t want to have babies in fear of going all “fun house mirror.”
Meanwhile, those who do have babies young find out how difficult it is to raise a child with a lower income and don’t want to have another until they are “established.”
It’s become impossible to raise a child in a single-income household and still hold on to this ideal that life is all sunshine and butterflies. Reality is a cruel mistress, but minorities don’t care about that; many are content with sucking on the public teat.
The Women's Movement!
Does this mean that “white minority children” are now eligible for all those preferences now given to other minorities? Will they be eligible for “affirmative action” programs, CHIP, Head start, etc? Being the cynic that I am I already know the answer, I'm just curious what their hypocritical explanation will be.
The white victims!
Red State? National Review Online? Lucianne.com? CRICKETS.
This is the problem the Right has. A statistic like this is all about opportunity, specifically the opportunity this nation has to make good on all the promises of equality contained in the Constitution. Seems that the difference between how we see this as Democrats and how they see this as whatever they are is that we see an entire nation, and all they see is a country divided into at least three groups: white, privileged minority, non-white people on welfare.
Maybe it's like marriage equality. As more people get to know their multicultural neighbors, maybe they'll understand that even thought there are cultural and religious differences we're more like each other than we are unlike each other. Maybe that's why the big cities of California are as Democratic as they are, like Houston, like Chicago, like Boston, like New York.
The Times article concludes with this:
And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.
“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”
Exactly.