Red, white…and who?

By David E. Hayes-Bautista and Gregory Rodriguez

The spring of 1990, a Time magazine cover story posed a question this country cannot yet begin to answer "What will the US be like when Whites are no longer the majority?" While the full "browning of America" - as Time called it lies far into the next century, a growing number of cities, counties and regions throughout the United States are undergoing fundamental demographic changes today. Born of an ideology intent on preparing a hobbled people for their place at the starting line - as President Lyndon Johnson put it in the speech that introduced the Great Society - the language we use to speak of nonwhites is ill-equipped to tackle the possibility of their preeminence. From Florida to California, newspapers spin oxymoronic headlines concerning school boards, city councils, even entire cities that are "majority minority." The rigid notions with which we view minority populations strain to explain the birth of post-Anglo America.

The term minority, originally meant to signify a dissenting political opinion or party, by the 1960s had come to refer to non white groups that had suffered at the hands of a white majority. Today, minority is ascribed almost exclusively to racial and ethnic groups and has acquired a meaning utterly foreign to the concept used in "The Federalist Papers." No longer denoting a proud, defiant group requiring protection from the tyranny of the majority, minority has come to refer to the undesirable "other" of American social life: dark-skinned people who live disorganized lives of poverty, crime, welfare dependency, unemployment, gangs and broken homes. With the efforts of the Great Society, the term that had evolved from a political to a racial term eventually became a behavioral term. Minorities came to be defined by their dysfunctions.

The assumption of minority dysfunction resounds daily in print -and electronic media, throughout legislative halls and, ironically, within minority organizations themselves. With nearly perverse pride, they have been known to compete with each other to present their communities as the most impaired, and hence more eligible for public attention and resources. In California, a local grant writer was reprimanded for not describing Latino educational achievement in terms worse than the reality. In an essay that appeared in Forbes magazine last year, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University, noted how many black leaders "are loath to acknowledge the existence or the black middle class lest it take attention away from the conditions in which much of black America lives. Minorities' strengths are seen as either anathema or anomaly. Problems have been their most salient source of power.

Aside from the pernicious effect this narrow self-definition may have on minorities, in an era of decreasing opulence and a shrinking tax base, it also has lost its efficacy. There are more and more minorities competing for fewer and fewer "minority dollars." In a number of cities, blacks and Latinos are said to be at each others' throats. If Los Angeles is any measure of the rest of the nation, however, the real tension between the two groups exists among leaders and activists more than it does among neighbors. By driving the assumption that nonwhites have no choice but to fight for "white society's" remaining peanuts, minority discourse actually incites tensions. In a sadly misguided and even dangerous article in the October 1992 Atlantic Monthly, Jack Miles made a case for the Latino displacement of blacks in Los Angeles. His thesis hinged on the belief that if there were no Latinos, "nonblack employers would be forced to hire blacks." If he had taken a less patronizing and fatalistic view of his subjects, he would have noted, as has Joel Kotkin, an economics writer, that Los Angeles' "minorities," especially Latinos, are themselves becoming the most vital producers of jobs and goods in the region, and it is on their entrepreneurial abilities that Southern California's hopes for revival ride. Current discourse only considers a nonwhite group's need for a piece of the pie without acknowledging the group's desire and capacity to enlarge the pie.

As undesirable as it is to have ethnic groups pitted against each other, belief in a. monolithic nonwhite population is equally detrimental. Although the idea that all nonwhites have a common cause may have political logic - as well as indicate a welcome interatomic solidarity - it leads to hurtful policy decisions. After last year's tragedy in the streets of Los Angeles, conservative and liberal politicians alike bemoaned the underclass ills - among them labor force desertion and the absence of family structure - that produced it. The problem is that the profile does not fit the 51 percent of South Central Los Angeles residents who are Latino. Contrary to popular assumption, that population has rates of traditional family formation and labor participation well above LA's Anglos, as well as rates of welfare dependence and infant mortality that are substantially lower. Predictably though, rebuilding and policy efforts have focused on issues that affect only one of the area's nonwhite groups while igniting the issues that confront the other. Formulated with the assumption that the concerns of African-Americans and Latinos, are identical, community programs - such as providing role models for fatherless children or teaching entrepreneurial skills - were inappropriate for over half of the area's residents. The idea of a multidimensional nonwhite population, even in a county in which Latinos have reached numerical parity with Anglos, was inconceivable.

Despite the many attempts in this country's history to link "Americanness" to a single racial group, America's promise still lies in its liberation from Old World notions that political and ethnic identities are one and the same. Irrespective of the intentions of its creators, minority discourse has fallen victim to the same divisive paradigm. Contemporary society remains divided into Americans and minorities, a scheme that separates the issues and concerns of the emergent majority from the "mainstream."

As we begin to plan and think for a changing America, it is imperative not only that we recognize its many component groups, but also that we see them for their strengths as well as their weaknesses; for their abilities as well as their needs; for their commonality as well as their differences –so called minorities must not continue to be seen as this country's fraction of failure, for failure is a slim base upon which to build a future. Acknowledging our collective and varied capacity as Americans also seems a far more effective way to combat the many ills that beset us today.

The goal, of course, is inclusion. Yet while historically minorities, with the exception of African-Americans, have been able to "work their way up the social ladder" and achieve "a valid claim of being 'white,'" as Andrew Hacker, the political scientist, has written, the majority of tomorrow's Americans will automatically fall into that darker nation. In what, then, are we being included?

The genius of America has always been the essentially unfinished nature of its cultural identity. While the American creed, the great unifying principles of our political democracy, has and will continue to endure, the American social character must be allowed to evolve. As our nation begins the transition into the post-Anglo era, we are faced with the task of redefining what it is to be an American.

David E. Hayes-Bautista, the co-author of "Burden of Support Young Latinos in an Aging Society" (Stanford University Press), is director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and professor of medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. Gregory is a writer. They are working on a book on the Latinization of California.