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Ruben Navarrette: Demographic shifts call for new thinking 03/09/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News
A black-and-white America now seems as quaint as black-and-white television.
Demographers have long predicted that Hispanics would, one day, outnumber African-Americans and become the nation's largest minority. Estimates were that it might occur by 2010, then 2004.
Census data now suggests that this historic demographic shift could happen at any minute. Blacks and browns are neck and neck in population.
Last year, census officials estimated that African-Americans, long the country's primary minority, still outnumbered Hispanics by 3 million people.
Then, census officials acknowledged that they didn't account for millions of Hispanic immigrants, both legal and undocumented. In a country where one in every 10 people now is foreign-born, that was no minor oversight.
This week, census officials set the record straight. The head counters now put the U.S. Hispanic population at 35.3 million, about a 60 percent increase from 1990. The African-American population is 34.7 million, having grown just 16 percent during the same 10 years.
Newspaper headlines labeled that a tie – in part, perhaps, because the figures include illegal immigrants.
A tie it is. No matter. The die is cast. Whether the shift happens next month or next year, it will happen. There is no reversing that trend, and it is ahead of schedule.
African-Americans know that. Some shortsighted black leaders fear that any gains for Hispanics – in population, public attention or political power – will come off their plate. On the ground, black residents of cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix or Detroit have seen their neighborhoods change complexion as immigrants move in next door.
Black Americans haven't always reacted well to that change. Surely, a racial group that knows a lot about discrimination and cruelty – about being picked on by the powerful – doesn't count among the proudest moments in its history the support it demonstrated, in states like California, for punitive and overtly racist initiatives aimed at keeping Hispanic immigrants in line.
Some policy-makers don't have much to be proud of, either. This isn't Bill Clinton's America. During eight years in the White House, the man called "America's first black president" was content to limit Hispanic overtures to trips into Mexican restaurants.
Future generations of political leaders – and the media elites who cover them – won't have the luxury of retreating to familiar black-and-white definitions of race relations or civil rights. Whether the issue is affirmative action, racial profiling or improving public education by ending what President Bush calls the "soft bigotry of low expectations," Hispanics will be a big part of the equation.
From Dallas to Des Moines, Hispanics are overcoming passivity and demanding their fair share.
That is all the more reason that America needs to learn how to count. A familiar controversy has erupted again over whether the census registers all Americans and why it is that the Americans it misses always turn out to be minorities.
The possibility that the government may have failed to count whole groups of hardworking, taxpaying Americans is apparently of little concern to the Bush administration. This week, Commerce Secretary Don Evans expressed confidence that the census had achieved a "quality count" and, with that settled, announced that only raw census figures would be used in this year's redrawing of political district boundaries. Others had lobbied for "statistical sampling" – a method that, while less precise, is considered a good way of not missing anyone.
Sticking to raw numbers won't address the findings of an independent survey last year that as many as 3.3 million people may have been left off the 2000 census or claims by officials in U.S. cities that an undercount 10 years ago cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost federal funds.
The Bush administration's script, which could have been written by the Republican National Committee, may be conservative. But it isn't compassionate. Or fair.
Nor is it wise for an administration and a president that make a big deal of trying to prove themselves hospitable to minorities.
An ugly truth is emerging. Republicans may visit a black school. They may even speak a little español. But when it comes time for the messy business of using census figures to carve out legislative districts, too many of them still see an uncounted Hispanic or African-American as just one less Democrat to worry about.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. His e-mail address is .
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