Diversity. DIVERSITY! Uh, what now?
That above video is a discussion between Sam Harris and John McWhorter about wokeness, racism, anti-racism, and new religions. It’s pretty interesting. Give it a whirl at some point in your life.
Now let’s talk for a few moments about diversity, shall we?
“The signature of our democracy”
Herein lies The New York Times morning newsletter this morning, discussing census outcomes, and someone refers to the results as diversity becoming “the signature of our democracy.” Indeed. It could — and definitely seems — that way. There’s a lot to unpack, however.
What We Learned
The new data show that Hispanics accounted for about half the country’s growth over the past decade, up by about 23 percent. The Asian population grew faster than expected — up by about 36 percent, a rise that made up nearly a fifth of the country’s total. Nearly one in four Americans now identifies as either Hispanic or Asian. The Black population grew by 6 percent, an increase that represented about a tenth of the country’s growth.
Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose the fastest, jumping to 13.5 million from 6 million.
The white population declined for the first time in history. People who identify themselves as white on the census form have been decreasing as a share of the country’s population since the 1960s, when the United States lifted strict ethnic quotas aimed at keeping the country Northern and Western European.
That drop, of 2.6 percent, was driven in part by the aging of the white population — the median age was 44 in 2019, compared with 30 for Hispanics — and a long-running decline in the birthrate. Some social scientists theorized that another potential reason for the decrease was that more Americans who previously identified as white on the census are…
