White Americans No Longer Majority By 2042

But the mode is the most common value, not the number of points in the sample that have that value.

Apparently you're unconsciously accepting the Redneck definition that Latin American, Semitic and Indo-Iranian people are not Caucasian. That's their way of making a racist paradigm even more racist. The Semites, Persians and Indic peoples are as "Caucasian" as any Northern European; after all, the original "Aryans" were from India.

It's harder to categorize the Latinos, since their countries are where ours (hopefully) will be in a few more generations: a thoroughly homogenized gene pool where everybody's just different shades of brown. (Yeah I know they're not so egalitarian when it comes to their Indian populations.) But I'd estimate that in most of Latin America, European ancestry predominates. So unless you delve into some even more disgusting ancient racial terms like "half-breed," they'd have to go in the "Caucasian" column.

Personally if I have to give people labels I'd rather identify them by their cultural affiliation than the color of their skin. A person who is "African-American" can slowly adopt our language, food, entertainment and other cultural norms, hang out with us, and he'll lose his hyphen and just be an American. But if he's "black," he can never change that.

No one calls Senator Inouye or computer mogul Wang "yellow." They're "Asian-Americans," or just "Americans." No one calls George Lopez or America Ferrera "brown." So why is Barack Obama, whose mother was as Caucasian as my mother, called "black" instead of "African-American"? Or just "American"?

 

Look dude, if you're going to use an obsolete, offensive paradigm, then for the goddess's sake at least use it correctly by its own standards. In this paradigm there were only three "races": caucasoid, negroid and mongolid. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which people got pigeonholed into each of those three categories.

As for the "east of the Caucasus" rule, that's ludicrous. The Balts and Slavs are more closely related to the Indic and Iranic peoples than they are to the Western Europeans. So if the Lithuanians and Russians get invited into the exclusive Caucasian Club then you have to let in the Bengalis and Tajiks too.

The Magyars, Bulgars and Finns aren't even of Indo-European ancestry, and have ties to people from much further east who would be classified with the mongoloids or at least called mixed-mongoloid. But nobody ever considered not calling the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Estonians "Caucasian."

And if you don't call the Arabs, Jews, Lebanese, Assyrians, Palestinians, Kurds, and other Semitic people caucasoid, then what pray tell are they? Negroid or mongoloid? Those are the only other two choices that paradigm gives you. These are the tribes that founded Western civilization back when the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans were still in Anatolia trying to figure out farming. What excuse is there for excluding them from the club of "White People"???

This shows just how stupid the paradigm is and why it's not used any more except with severe qualifications and disclaimers.

You're a little off. Mestizo is the Spanish word for a mixture of European and Indian blood. By now it probably applies to 90% of the population of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and to a large percentage of South Americans--all the people we norteamericanos call latinos. Many of whom claim to be "pure Spanish."

As for racist connotations, I wouldn't bandy "mulatto" around in polite company, although "Creole" seems to be allowable. As for mestizo, I spent most of my life in the Southwest where Spanish slang was widely used and the word just didn't seem to come up very often. When it did it was just regarded as an anthropological comment.

But times have changed and people are more sensitive so I'd be careful. My mother's Bohemian family called themselves "bohunks" but by the 1950s that was considered a slur. Words go in and out of vogue at random. Shvartze is the grammatically correct Yiddish word for black person, but at exactly the same time when African-Americans started demanding to be called "black people" in English, they demanded that American Jews stop calling them shvartzes. Kraut was an insult left over from WWII that would get you beaten up by a German, but now Europe has a genre of music called krautrock.

I didn't mean precisely that it's rude or offensive. My point is that by labeling people with their skin color you're arbitrarily pigeonholing them by an attribute that they can't change, yet is--in the words of Haile Selassie, Ras Tafari Makonnen--no more important than the color of their eyes.

I don't encourage anyone to call me or people like me "white." If you insist on discussing my ancestry you can call me a Euro-American. But I don't consider myself any more or less American than Martin Luther King and so it seems ridiculous to put us in different categories because my skin has less melanin.

 

It's just national guilt. It started after WWII when the Baby Boomers realized what assholes their elders' generation had been, the world over. Nuclear weapons against civilian targets, a Holocaust, comfort women... and rampant racism. Their hearts were in the right place but they couldn't foresee the problems their charity would eventually create. They must be forgiven even as we unravel the problems caused by Affirmative Discrimination.

For all the problems created by those among us who love, it's insignificant compared to the problems created by those among us who hate. The unconstitutional war in Iraq has cost us:

• Almost two trillion dollars
• The international goodwill that was focused on America after 9/11
• The grudging tolerance of the world's two billion Muslims
• The fragile stability in the Middle East radiated from the only secular, pro-Western country in the region

As for the dismal state of the dollar, you can thank the Bush administration, Congress, the Federal Reserve and the dim-witted leaders of our financial industry for our economic crisis, not internationalism and certainly not charity. See the review in today's Washington Post of four scathing new books, one by no less an authority than über-capitalist George Soros.

I understand your ire but it's misplaced. The USA has always had a food surplus. We're the country in which the single greatest nutritional problem among our poor people is obesity, remember? We pay farmers not to grow crops. My state of California, with its thirty million people, is mostly farmland. The Western Hemisphere, with its relatively sparse population and land that hasn't been continuously farmed by ten thousand years of civilizations, could easily feed the entire world using only sustainable agriculture.

The real problem with throwing food at the Third World is that it never gets to the people who need it. It's always intercepted by the despots who rule the Third World. They sell it on the black market and use the money to buy the weapons with which they keep their people down.