perfidy

I dunno about that. I think they lump all non-white folks into a single number, then compare that to the number of white people. That's a little different than saying, "There are more hispanics than whites in Texas".

I'd double check with Johno, but I believe Boston became a minority-majority city (in the way this article describes) not so long ago.

It's twue! It's twue! Boston's population is more than 50% dusky. Not that you'd know it much, since segregation up here is rampant and rigid.

I'm not so sure why news organizations continue to treat this trend as though it were news. "Minority" is a perfectly meaningless concept that is polite code for "people what aren't pale" and "non-white minority" is something of a redundancy as it's used popularly.

Besides, what's the use in measuring and equating "nonwhite minorities" in different regions to each other? Mississippi's heavily black population came about under a very different circumstance than Hawai'i's mix of Asian immigrants with native islanders, which is different in circumstance and fact again from California's mix of Mexican, Asian, and sundry Latino and European population, which is different as can be yet again from the most diverse spot in the United States of America and home to JFK Airport, the great Borough of Queens, which is home to representatives from every single one of the nations on God's gray earth and some that no longer exist besides, not to mention cultural and ethnic groups without nation from Hasidim to Hmong, Kurd to Khoikoi.

So why publish that map up there?

Lemme ask you this, too. Say the population of Anytown, California has recently skewed heavily Armenian. People from Armenia tend to be, for lack of a better term, "white people." Say you break down the population of Anytown by places of origin and cultural derivation, and you find that 40% of the residents are Anglo-Saxon natives of California or internal migrants from other US states, 25% are from other Latin American nations (either recently or descended from immigrants therefrom), 25% are Armenian (ditto, but mostly newcomers), and 10% are from various Asian nations (ditto again). Say that the Armenian population is fairly new and growing fast, and therefore has not yet assimilated in a meaningful way into the larger community; most still speak Armenian as a first language and hang out with other Armenians in the neighborhood.

Is Anytown therefore "majority minority" or is it still "minority minority?" Do Armenians count as "white people," making the balance of white-to-"other" 65-35, or do they count as a "non-white minority," being that many of them speak little to no English and have not assimilated into cultural instutions outside those set up by the Armenian community of Anytown?

If said Armenians do count as a "non-white minority" for the purposes of the map up top there is something seriously screwed up. If said Armenians do not count as a "non-white minority," it is fairly proof that the counting schemes employed for the map above are, in a word, racist and stupid, considering that said Armenians exist as a distinct cultural and linguistic community separate from the "white people" community of Anytown with the bowling and the Elks Lodge and the tuna hotdish hey hey.

Man, I really hate throwing the "r" word around. That last sentence sounds like I am furious at the possibility that cencus data could be evil, when I'm simply at a loss for a less loaded term to describe demographic data that is insufficiently subtle to reflect even a dim approximation of useful reality. Any suggestions?

*Final note: I don't really know why a stupid map set me off. I think I have some deep-seated impulse, gained from my days as a history student, to write about things like this from time to time. Since I don't do this like I usedta when papers were due weekly, sometimes it just comes out like a Labrador's urge to fetch and fetch and fetch again.

I posted the map because it's funny. So long as the unwashed teeming masses make some effort to become American, I couldn't care less what hue they are.

And I liked the title that popped into my head when I saw the map.

B,
Bigots might also consider jumping in the lake. Judging from the map, Lake Michigan is also less than 10% minority.

B, I got no brief with you. That title is pretty much Buckethead Gold Standars, and that map is a perfect excuse to use it. Perhaps I forgot to take my meds today, but that map is really getting up my nose.

J,
What, do you not appreciate the literal expression of color at work on that map?

See, where there's mostly white folks, the states are white. But where there are more "minorities", see, they get browner.

I especially like the shading at work: fewer non-white people is sort of a pale coffee; then there's off-urine, and finally, dooky.

Holy COW! I hadn't even noticed the melaninesque shadings on the map.

Buckethead, dude, where'd you get this? It's gold! Pure gold!

Dooky. Heh. The AP, in many ways the most PC of news services, somehow created a blatantly racist map. How did that happen?

You all will have noticed that I didn't exactly present this map as a sign of the impending Tribulation. I slathered a little sarcasm on that nugget before I served it up.

Johno's point about white minorities is key - back in the nineteenth century, immigration debates raged very similar to the ones we have now. Except that the dusky hued people at the pointy end of the native waspy American's stick are now all considered pearly white. Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, assorted Catholics and other nogoodniks were perceived as a giant turd floating in the glorious Northwest-European Protestant melting pot.

So long as we have some sane limits to the numbers of people arriving on our shores (so that the process of assimilation can actually take place), and so long as we do something (anything) to deal with the problem of illegal imigration, then in another fifty years all the people we're freaking out about - the dooky colored mud people states - will, like the eye-ties, dagos, wops, polaks, hunkies and so on - be just Americans.

Voluntary immigrants eventually assimilate. The only real problem is with the blacks, and that is thanks to the peculiar history of their presence here. Although there has been real progress on that front over the last few decades.

J, I got the map from this AP article

See why I was a geography major? I love data in map format. *hooray*

CODEWORD: hell

(while sitting at work? ain't it the truth!)

I love maps. That's why I have five globes (including one of the moon) and over 30 atlases.

Although, looking at my most recent world atlas (the 21st Century atlas with cool satellite maps) I discovered that the language distribution map is completely PC and retarded. In a sane world, if you code "Indo-European" as a sort of dark lavender color, all of Europe to the Urals and a stringy bit extending along the Trans-Siberian railroad to the Pacific would be purple. Check. But several other parts of the globe would also be purple. Like, say, the entire western hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand, half of New Guinea, parts of Oceana, Liberia and South Africa.

In all of these other regions, the only languages noted were American Indian and Native tongues. I guess the half billion English speakers, and all those Spanish and Porteguese speakers just don't exist in the 21st Century.

CODEWORD: antidisestablishmentarianism