I work at an extremely diverse school. No one is in the majority. It makes for wonderful class engagement.
Most people in my experience simply don’t care, that’s the problem. It’s just not an issue. The media are the ones who are amplifying these problems and/or not providing necessary context, in order to promote their own agenda.
The days of genuine racism/bigotry are dying (thankfully) due in large part to the older generations dying off. Younger people today, on both sides of the aisle, are far more socially liberal than were their parents/grandparents. I feel the future of political parties will be based more on economic differences than social differences.
Demographic shifts will have significant consequences nationally, as evidenced by the LA Times/USC survey:
http://eeditionmobile.latimes.com/Olive/Tablet/LATimes/SharedArticle.aspx?href=LAT%2F2016%2F11%2F17&id=Ar01901
I wish I could agree with you, @fractalmstr. I’d be happy to live in that world but as long as I see evidence to the contrary, both reported by the media and witnessed first hand, I can’t be as sanguine. I do agree that a greater number of young people are open-minded and accepting of difference. That does give me hope.
@momsquad yup. That’s why I said it can’t happen fast enough :-bd
“Calexit” is a popular term now, but “Cal-just be patient” is the reality.
And regarding the Asians, that’s only really happened in the last few decades as some longtime Asian-American neighbors of older relatives could attest.
Before that, the wealth and power were held by caucasians…especially those who were descendants of American businessmen who instigated a coup to overthrow what was the sovereign independent nation of Hawaii in the 1890’s*.
- One of the issues which caused friction between the Hawaiian monarchy government and the American businessmen was the allowing of Asian immigrants/naturalized Hawaiians the right to vote in Hawaiian elections. This led to the "Bayonet Constitution" which stripped those voting rights from Asian immigrants/naturalized Hawaiians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1887_Constitution_of_the_Kingdom_of_Hawaii
Yes, one of the HI country clubs always allowed asians full membership. It is much more prestigious than the one of the others that banned asians from being members until fairly recently.
I think it may be cultural change and the fear of being left out of the dominant culture.
There’s an area near me that is heavily Hispanic – mostly recent immigrants without much money, who are taking advantage of the fact that this neighborhood is one of the rare places in our county that has a good supply of reasonably priced rental apartments. There’s a big shopping mall in the middle of this area. If you go to that mall, you’re likely to hear more Spanish than English being spoken. For some English-speaking Americans, this is a very weird experience – they’re in the United States, in their hometown, but they can’t understand most of the conversations around them.
I think some people are afraid that their overall experience of life in America will turn into something like the experience that English speakers have at this mall – that suddenly, they won’t feel at home in their own country.
As that “are you in a bubble” quiz in the other thread shows, is there really a predominate “white culture” in this country?
I am one of those odd people who are excited about the shift in demographics. I see this shift as a shift towards greater diversity which will hopefully lead to a shift in power. No, I did not just say I don’t want white people to have any power in this country. I want a shift. I want it to have a better spread over a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Our country has economic and social problems that cannot be fixed without changing how we currently do things.
And honestly, I’d like to walk into a room and not be the only black woman or any minority for that matter. I know some white men in this country in certain industries feel the same way, too. It’s not as if white people are not to be desired or to be seen, but I want to see and hear other people, too.
I agree with this, but it will only be based more on economic differences rather than social differences when everyone is granted the same social liberties.
@doschicos I do believe there is a predominate “white culture” in this country even if the majority of whites don’t subscribe to it. Although, I do believe the influence of this culture isn’t as reaching as it used to be.
An exception which only affects the tiny minority who have the financial and social capital means of qualifying for membership does not necessarily disprove the fact that up until a few decades ago, most of the wealth and power were held by the White ruling elite in Hawaii.
Especially the descendants of Sanford Dole and his fellow American businessmen/coup instigators.
One illustration of this dominance was the cumulative effects of earlier territory/state governments’ effective neglect of the local public school system*. A factor in why HI even now has the highest percentage of K-12 students attending private/boarding schools.
- As far as those governments' were concerned, the public schools were for the children of lower SES Asian immigrants and Native Hawaiians and thus, not worth funding too much or paying much heed to...especially considering the vast majority were sending their kids to private schools in Hawaii or boarding schools on the US mainland.
This factor is one major reason why none of the upper/upper-middle class neighbors of my Hawaiian based relatives nor they themselves ever considered sending their kids to the local public schools for K-12.
My relative works for a HI medical insurance company. Her co-workers speak their native tongue which is not English and she feels left out as she has no idea what they’re talking about at all. Still, she’s been there for 25 years, so it must not be too bad for her.
Can we please stop saying “predominate” when it should be “predominant” (for the sake of those of us who are special snowflakes when it comes to grammar).
Considering, I mistype things all the time (just in my original post I kept getting different rather than difference)…I can’t promise a thing. 
You’re right, @marian. Sometimes I just type away and need to slow down - both for my own grammar errors and spell check’s sake.
As long as we all can communicate with one another in a common language - English - all will be okay. If we become Balkanized into groups that keep to themselves, speaking a polyglot of languages, then we become well, the Balkans.
The fears are nothing new, in the late 19th century (least according to my US history class that I actually liked in college), the old WASP gentry, the people who were the mainstay of schools like Harvard and Yale, old money, call them what you want, were worried about ‘their’ culture being lost with all the immigration…it is where large donations to colleges, and where institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, or classical orchestras, were founded to maintain “their” culture. In the 19th century, there were 2 big waves of Jews, the first was from Germany in the mid 1800’s, the second was in the latter half from Russia when the Pogroms hit, and the first wave looked down on the second wave, same things with Irish immigrants and so forth.
I think there are two things are work here. For one, there are still places in this country where there are very, very few minorities, Ohio was one of those places, I think Wisconsin and Iowa and Idaho are like that, and when you have spent your life in areas with only people like you, this kind of thing is a threat. likewise, other areas for the first time, that were once immune to immigration, have now faced people different than themselves coming to live, and that causes issues.
As far as the ‘changing of the culture’, that is a kind of weird one to me, because this is a country of cultures, not culture, that may share some things in common but not others. Southern culture can be very different than the culture of a northern city, Chicago and NYC have somewhat different cultures, so what culture are we talking about? As far as the language issue goes, English will likely remain our lingua franca, I have heard all the complaints that hispanics especially aren’t learnig the language, and that is not true. What we are seeing was true in the good old days, ethnic groups tended to congregate together, and if you walked on the streets of the lower east side a hundred years ago you would hear Yiddish and Russian and Italian being spoken, if you lived in Greenpoint polish, it you lived in Hamtranck, Michigan it would be polish, and so forth. We have seen a huge surge of people coming from Mexico and Central America in recent years and that pattern is repeated…but guess what, go a generation, and kids might be bilingual (as my father was with Italian), but they are going to be speaking English on a native level, even if their parents don’t. My grandparents never really learned English to any level, in large part because they were living in areas where most of the people spoke Italian, they could get by, but it was broken shrug…you go to Flushing in Queens, you will hear Cantonese and the Fukien dialect and some Mandarin, you will hear Peshtun and Hindi and other South Asian languages, and the kids of those people end up being typically American kids (ungrateful, of course, that their mother was in labor 18 hours for them, without drugs, so they wouldn’t end up like their idiot cousin Jimmy lol…from a quirky, funny movie called “Saving Face”).
A lot of it is fear of the unknown, and as others have pointed out people adjust. In 1920 they passed restrictive immigration laws that basically stopped immigration from south Europe and eastern Europe, because people from there were seen as being “non white” and “a threat to the culture” (and further reaffirmed the policy of no Asian immigration)…and as a result for a long time we had very little immigration to this country, that didn’t change until the 1960’s when they revised immigration laws and then in the 80’s with massses of immigrants from Central and South America, to todays waves (the one exception was the migration of Puerto Ricans to the US in the 1940’s and 50’s, because they were US citizens, said tension documented in “West Side Story”…their grandkids today are probably complaining about those coming from Mexico and Central America smile).
@Hanna once [url=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18416978/#Comment_18416978]wrote[/url] that “the vast majority of white people […] do not consider universities where they will not be in the majority.”
Also, on these forums, most posters appear to avoid suggesting historically black schools to posters who are not known to be black. The fact that most historically black schools have few non-black students indicates that they have a marketability problem with non-black students, despite some of them offering generous scholarships.