Looking ahead: racial trends in the United States

Daedalus Winter 2005 In April of 2004, the quarterly newsletter Migration News summarized the most recent data on race and ethnicity from the U.S. Census Bureau: “In 2000, the racial/ethnic makeup of US residents was: White, 69 percent; Hispanic and Black, 13 percent each; and Asian and other, six percent. By 2050, these percentages are projected to be: 50, 24, 15, and 13.”1For anyone who has been studying racial trends in America these 1⁄2gures weren’t surprising.1 But the newsletter’s conclusion certainly was: “It is possible that, by 2050, today’s racial and ethnic categories will no longer be in use.” Migration News is a scholarly publication that “summarizes the most important immigration and integration developments.”2 It is produced by Migration Dialogue, a group at the University of California, Davis, that aspires to provide “timely, factual and nonpartisan information and analysis of international migration issues.” Migration News cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as fanciful or ideological–and yet in the middle of a summary of census data its authors produced the astonishing prognosis that “by 2050, today’s racial and ethnic categories will no longer be in use.” If Migration News is correct, residents of the United States will, within the lifetime of many readers of this issue of Daedalus, no longer talk of blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans, but will instead speak of–what? Jennifer L. Hochschild