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The Economics and Politics of Race
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12771 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1987 |
4,048 Words |
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Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute and a
nationally syndicated columnist. |
The historic movement of millions of immigrants and the great variety of racial and ethnic groups that constitute its population today make the United States a unique study in race and ethnicity. The very concept of ethnic "minorities" is misleading in the United States, where there is no ethnic majority. While Caucasians form a large majority - 87 percent - of the population of the United States, ethnic breakdowns among whites (and blacks) remain significant, and there is nothing approaching an ethnic majority. A majority-minority characterization would have been valid in colonial America, when more than three-quarters of the inhabitants of the 13 colonies were of British ancestry, but by the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, they were only about half of the population. While it is fashionable to talk as if there were still an Anglo-Saxon majority today, they are in fact only 14 percent of the American population. They are the largest single group in the population, but are not even close to being a majority.
Even these data understate the ethnic heterogeneity of the American population. Each of these groups contain many individuals whose ancestry is a mixture with other groups. More than two-thirds of all Americans who give their ancestry as English also list other ancestries. So do nearly four-fifths of all American Indians. For the United States as a whole, only 45 percent of the population consists of people of a single ancestry (as far as they know), while 38 percent know their ancestry to be multiple, and 17 percent do not specify. Racially, Anglo-Saxon dominance is a myth.
Sometimes it is the Anglo-Saxon culture that is considered oppressively dominant, requiring all others to abandon their heritage as the price of
... (1996 of 25393 Characters)
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