How a more diverse America makes you feel is the core division in our political and
cultural fights right now.
But to see why, you need to know how we’re changing, and how a changing country changes
us.
Here’s the big picture.
The U.S. is at a demographic tipping point - a genuinely historic moment.
2013 was the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of 1 were nonwhite.
By 2016, white deaths had outnumbered white births, but America’s overall population,
it’s not expected to decrease.
And that’s because the Black, Asian and especially Latino and mixed-race populations
they’re also growing.
They’re growing fast.
By 2045, the Census Bureau projects that non-Hispanic whites will be no longer be a majority.
And also that foreign-born residents are going to make up a record share of the population.
So when you show people these numbers about how America is changing, what goes through
their heads, what is their response?
I think people are hearing these changes as somehow a fundamental remaking
of what America is, at least a lot of people are hearing it, and some of them are excited
about it and some of them are not so excited.
We see on average white Americans when they read about this majority-minority shift becoming
more politically conservative.
Jennifer Richeson is a psychologist who studies how people react to demographic
change.
She won a MacArthurGenius Grant for this work.
And what she’s found helps explain a lot of what we’re seeing.
For instance, when white political independents who live in the West were told that whites
were no longer a majority in California, they became 11 percentage points more likely to support the
Republican Party.
That is a huge change.
It’s important to say, this is a human reaction to demographic change, not just a white one.
When presented with similar data on the growing numbers of Hispanics, Asian-Americans shifted
towards more conservative views, Black Americans shifted towards more conservative views.
Being told your group is shrinking
or that it's losing power, it's scary for anyone.
Losing numbers are associated with losing status, losing power, losing currency
in the culture.
There are lots of studies like these, but the one I find myself thinking about the
most was done by Harvard’s Ryan Enos.
What we did is we sent these two Spanish speakers out to catch a train at a certain
time every day over a period of days.
We sent out research assistants and they surveyed these people waiting on the train.
And that little exposure was enough to move these attitudes in this survey.
They're more likely to say we should send those children of immigrants back to Mexico.
They're more likely to say we should decrease immigration from Mexico and they're even more
likely to endorse that English should be the official language of the United States.
We saw a version of this in the election then too, right?
So in States and even in small areas of States in these counties, where the Spanish
population changed very rapidly - we saw that these voters had moved towards supporting
Donald Trump.
And a lot of them actually looked like they were these people who had previously been
Democrats.
So here, then, is what we know: Even gentle, unconscious exposure to reminders
that America is diversifying — and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority
nation — it pushes folks toward more conservative policy opinions, towards more support of the
Republican Party.
So what happens when those reminders aren’t gentle?
Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people.
And they’re changes that, none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like.
Our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected, defended like you've never seen
before.
When Obama was elected in 2008, there was all this talk of America moving into a
post-racial moment.
But the mere existence of Obama’s presidency made a lot more of politics about how you
felt about race.
It had this effect on health care, the stimulus package, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party.
Hell, it even affected how people felt about Obama’s dog.
So the dog is is kind of a fun experiment on a serious topic.
Both Teddy Kennedy, a well-known liberal Democrat, and Barack Obama have the same dog.
Their two dogs are actually related Portuguese water dogs.
So let's see how people respond to these dogs when you tell one that it's Ted Kennedy and
one that it is Barack Obama's.
What happens is that when you tell people it's Barack Obama's racial liberals like the dog more
racial conservatives like the dog less.
Obama polarizes more because of who he is rather than what he says and does.
And so Obama goes through great lengths in both campaigns to try to tamp down racial divisions
to not talk about race. When he does talk about race, he does so in a message of personal
responsibility.
And there was something real here.
A few decades ago a multiracial voter base, it couldn’t drive American politics like it
can now.
Obama won in 2012 with only 39 percent of the white vote -- previous Democratic candidates,
they lost elections in big ways with a lot more support by whites.
But by 2016, Trump also proved that a candidate who is explicitly talking to white fears about
race could win.
The Republicans now have a temptation to explicitly appeal to race.
And you're seeing this throughout Republican primaries in the 2018 cycle and you're seeing
the reverse on the Democratic side.
Abolish ICE as a good example.
That is a policy that Democrats would not have been on board with in the 1990s but their
bases have moved and so the incentives have moved as well.
Now to say American politics is in for turbulence is not to say we are in for
dissolution or civil war.
California went through these changes, it experienced this demographic shift and it
didn’t fall to pieces.
But leading up to that, there was a lot of friction.
Voters passed racially-charged propositions targeting undocumented immigrants, they banned
affirmative action, they restricted bilingual education.
But we also know, right, there are States that have large populations of racial
minorities — largely Black Americans but they're growing in Latinos — that are incredibly
unequal in every way.
Right, so the question is you know we want to think ‘Oh it'll work out, look at California.’
But it could work out and be Mississippi.
As the browning of America continues, this cycle of hope about the future activating
fears about the present, it’s just going to keep going.
In that, politicians who can articulate a vision of this future that is inclusive and inspiring
and nonthreatening — that very mixture Obama sought in '08 — they could reap massive
rewards.
But as long as much of the country feels threatened by the changes they see,
there's also going to be a continuing,
and maybe even a growing, market for politicians like Donald Trump.