California and the End of White America

Originally publisned on October 17, 1999

...In many respects, the civil-rights/Great Society era of the 1960′s represented the culmination of this vision of America. A shamed but wholly dominant white society created a cornucopia of social-welfare and social-engineering programs (Headstart, busing, affirmative action), largely aimed at blacks and intended to serve as partial atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow while easing black entrance into the American dream. But the ideology that evolved to justify these programs also radically changed the terms of the American social compact, replacing the emphasis on assimilation with an emphasis on ethnic difference.

Two further events occurred simultaneously with the completion of the old American racial agenda, and they drastically magnified the impact of this ideological change: the passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which reopened America to large-scale immigration after a 40-year hiatus, and, as a direct consequence of affirmative-action politics, the creation of the Hispanic racial category.

Over the past 30 years and at a growing pace, more than 25 million new immigrants–80 percent of non-European origin–have entered America, and they and their descendants now constitute a rapidly growing fraction of our total population. Well over half of these new immigrants have been Hispanic, and this ethnic group–today defined in racial terms, with all the attendant special treatment under official government policies–will by itself represent between 20 and 25 percent of America by the middle of the approaching century, at which point Americans of European origin will have become a minority of the population.

A future America in which both whites and all other ethnic groups see themselves as minorities will be far different from our traditional majority-white/minority-black society. Since the 1960′s, the deepening ideological decay of the American melting pot, especially among the journalists and intellectuals who shape our thoughts, has transformed our official self-image from that of a nation of individuals living in a common culture into that of a nation of groups arrayed against one another in an ethnic spoils system. Multiculturalism and “diversity” thoroughly dominate our nation’s schools and politics and public discourse, encouraging minorities to exercise influence through the mobilization of ethnic or racial grievance. Under this framework, the rise of a similar ethnic-grievance movement among America’s emerging white minority is likely, perhaps inevitable...

As the first major state to face the political reality of a shrinking white minority, California has become the laboratory of America’s ethnic future...

It is therefore a tragedy of the first order that, even as the reality of the American melting pot remains as powerful as ever, the ideology behind it has almost disappeared, having been replaced by the “diversity” model and by the politics of grievance. A social ideology that allots to blacks and Latinos and Asians their own separatist institutions and suggested shares of society’s benefits cannot long be prevented from extending itself to whites as well, especially as whites become merely one minority among many minorities. Before it is altogether too late, those who support this status quo must realize that the diversity prescription contains the seeds of national dissolution...
 

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