A correction posted at "Census Live Updates: U.S. Grew More Diverse in Past Decade; Most Counties Lost Population/The government released data from the 2020 census showing large increases in the populations of people who identify as Hispanic, Asian and more than one race" (NYT).
How do you make a mistake like that — confusing percent and percentage points?
What's the fastest growing group? Mixed race. That group doubled. Anyone who goes into the group takes away from one of the other groups.
“We are in a weird time demographically,” said Tomás Jiménez, a sociologist at Stanford who writes about immigrants, assimilation and social mobility. “There’s more choice about our individual identities and how we present them than there has ever been. We can presume far less about who somebody is based on the boxes they check compared to previous periods.”
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Statistical illiteracy is found everywhere, all the time. It's an equal opportunity offense.
Perhaps there was an undisclosed test project for removing competency requirements for graduation at the high school the article’s author attended. A forerunner of things to come.
It becomes increasingly difficult to stoke race wars as people of different races procreate together.
But don’t worry, we’ll manage.
"How do you make a mistake like that?"
Reporters are 1) stupid, 2) biased, and/or 3) have an incentive to spice up their reports. To say they are stupid may be too harsh, because it's not realistic to expect them to know much about all the subjects they cover, but they should be able to find sources who do. That's where bias comes in. They'll put more trust in sources that confirm their biases, which isn't unique to reporters. And since if it bleeds it leads, they are incentivized to dramatize their reporting. In this case I'd go with a lot o #1 and a little #3.
It's like reporting on daily Covid cases or deaths rather than a 7 day average. At this point there's no excuse to use the daily count instead of the 7 day average, but we still see it time and again. I can't tell if it's 1, 2 or 3.
"What's the fastest growing group? Mixed race."
Which makes perfect sense, as every couple on every single TV as is interracial.
I proudly skewed the statistical norms in 1993 when I married my missus. We further compounded the statistical mix with our even more mixed kids.
I was reading the other day about how more people were not filling in the information about race and sex on the census form. It is a trend I hope continues. Enumeration does not require classification.
How do I "go into" a mixed-race group? I don't become mixed-race through marriage even if our kids are.
The mixed race category could represent a flight from white.
I am a true Heinz 57, a white woman with at least 10 ethnic groups who immigrated from countries to New Amsterdam, then the English Colonies, and then again in the mid 1800's from many places in Europe. Add to that mix a Mexican grandfather whose Spanish forbears came in probably 1600-1700 and one of them married a Native woman around 1740, so I have a smidgen of that as well as a Spanish surname. I have had my DNA tested, I can verify these countries. But when ask for ethnicity I always say other. I am insulted at the tribalization the census has undertaken over the years. As for race, it is a definition.
I seriously doubt the makers of the census question have any inkling of how much racial intermarriage has taken place during my lifetime. I lived in South Louisiana for 30 years beginning in 1967. There was obvious and acknowledged mixing of the races there at the time. Now in this century I had grandsons who married there, and while they did not marry out of their race, each of them had attendants in the wedding of people of a different race and much darker color. My granddaugter in law is godparent to black children of her best friend.
People do not understand this is not the south of the 1950's. It is a very integrated South, at least in South Louisiana, home of the Cajuns.
I now live in South Texas, I grew up in this small town, when my family moved here in 1949 it was fairly segregated concerning Mexicans, although my family with our blond blue eyed mother was welcomed with open arms, if we had dark skin that would not have been the case. However, now many of the descendants of the kids I grew up with have children and grandchildren with Spanish surnames, and some with Vietnamese.
Life has moved on from the old, segregated ways in South, and all but East, Texas.
It can be advantageous these days for white folks to claim they have a few drops of something else in them. It was probably always true anyways, but now they can prove it with their 23andme report.
Why is Steph Curry considered Black?
Seems to me that he is of predominantly European ancestry. He's not culturally Black either, he was raised by wealthy parents in a suburban environment.
So, ask yourself what makes Steph Curry black? Then ask yourself why the question matters. Dude can ball.
Now let's do Patrick Mahomes.
But what if this entire scenario is just empirically wrong? What if the entire idea of a majority-minority country is based on an illusion? That’s the arresting proposition of some scholars who examine demographic shifts and don’t quite buy the binary nature of the conventional wisdom. One is Richard Alba, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” examines and, I have to say, largely detonates, the majority-minority myth. He does this simply by pointing out how the Census Bureau actually defines “non-white”.
In a weird and creepy echo of the old “one-drop rule,” you are officially counted as “non-white” by the Census if your demographic background has any non-white component to it. So the great majority of Americans whose race is in any way ambiguous or mixed are counted as “non-white” even if they don’t identify as such. And this obviously skews a much more complex reality about race in America. “The group with mixed minority-white parentage is the pivot on which the outcomes of Census Bureau population projections depend,” Alba writes. “If we change our assumptions about its classification, the projected future looks quite different.”
What Alba examines is how these mixed-race populations understand themselves and behave within American society, and his conclusion is that our current situation resembles our assimilationist, melting point past much more than we currently believe. “In some fundamental ways,” Alba argues, “such as educational attainment, social affiliations, and marriage tendencies, the members of mixed groups appear closer to the white side of their background than to the minority side.”
This is particularly true with respect to the offspring of Latino-Anglo and Asian-Anglo couples, who are increasingly assimilated into the new bi-racial and multiracial mainstream. The only exception to this rule, alas, are black-white mixed children — who are more likely to be in single-parent homes, to be poorer and to have bad experiences with law enforcement, and thereby tend to identify with the non-white part of their identity. But even here, Alba notes, white-black children “not infrequently marry whites.” And the core difference between these kids and others is as much about class and family structure as it is about racism.
Andrew Sullivan, "The Majority-Minority Myth", SubStack. Unfortunately pay-walled which is why I copied the long excerpt.
According to the AP if you are born of Indian and Jamaican parents you are African American. By definition.
How many non-Hispanic whites now refuse to report their race? I do, every chance I get. These statistics are garbage.
"Now let's do Patrick Mahomes."
Now let's do Tiger Woods, considered the greatest golfer ever by some, and certainly the greatest black golfer ever.
But Tiger's father is a mix of black and white, while his mother is 100 percent Asian. If you do the math, Tiger is more Asian (half) than anything else. So why isn't he the greatest Asian golfer to have ever lived?
It goes to the Democrat one drop rule...one drop of black blood, even if you look like Pat Boone, is enough to get you barred from the lunch counter in the Democrat's progressive America.
Today's WSJ ...
Where Is America Diversifying the Fastest? Small Midwestern Towns.
Columbus, Ind., hometown of Cummins and Mike Pence, embodies a new kind of immigrant melting pot far from the big city.
One in seven residents in Columbus, Ind., a city of about 50,000, was born outside the United States. Public school students collectively speak more than 50 languages and dialects at home. Roughly three dozen foreign companies operate in the area.
A 45-minute drive south of Indianapolis, the manufacturing and transportation hub set in the middle of sprawling farmland is emblematic of how the nation’s growing ethnic and racial diversity, building for decades in coastal cities and other immigration hubs, is gaining in new areas across the U.S.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-is-america-diversifying-the-fastest-small-midwestern-towns-11628860161?st=f539svnfh8c9nlw&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
When asked for my race, in the last 15 years I reported "other."
When a space appears to fill in what "other" means, I write in "American."
No pushback so far.
"How do you make a mistake like that?"
People who are not very good at their jobs make mistakes like that.
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