The Changing Face Of America

Demographers have been predicting for a while now that the United States will someday be a country in which whites no longer make up the majority of the population. But the 2010 census shows that this may be happening even faster than was previously thought.

In 2000, there were six states where whites were the minorities in nursery schools, preschools and kindergartens. There are now eight states plus the District of Columbia -- Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Mississippi and Hawaii. And there are three other states that are right at the tipping point -- Louisiana, Georgia and Maryland.

And the number of whites has dropped significantly as a percentage of overall school enrollment. In 2000, whites made up 64.6% of all school enrollment. That has now dropped to only 58.8% of all school enrollment. That's a drop of 5.8%, and with minorities growing at a faster rate than whites, they could actually make up a slight majority of all students in another 10 years.

And the group showing the biggest growth is Hispanics. While the number of whites grew by 9.7% in the last 10 years, that paled in comparison to the 37% growth of the Hispanic population. Hispanics actually made up about half of the population growth in the U.S. in the last 10 years. In 1989 Hispanics made up 10% of the children in kindergartens. By 2000 that had climbed to 18%, and in 2009 it was at least 23%.

This goes a long way toward explaining the recent actions of the Republican Party. For a virtually all white political party, this has to be a very scary prospect. It tells us why they are screaming to fence the country in, deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants, and opposing a path to citizenship for immigrants. They are trying to maintain their white majority and white privilege.

But racist and anti-immigrant policies are not going to do anything but cause bad feelings and further alienate the party from the majority of Americans. The cat is out of the bag and no one's going to get him back in that bag. The future is coming and it's going to be made up of a much more diverse population.

If the Republicans want to survive as a viable political party, they need to start now revising their policies and making them much more acceptable to minorities. They can still be economically conservative, but the xenophobia and racism has to go. If it doesn't, they might find themselves going the way of the Whig Party -- to extinction.