....and back to the big questions, such as, When will Hispanics, Asians, etc. become white people?

John Harwood has a political memo in the Times (10/31/13) about the way in which race bubbles underneath current policy struggles, e.g., ACA, immigration, welfare. He cites polls showing that a higher proportion of whites oppose these policies than non-whites.

"Whites tend to hold negative views of Obamacare, while blacks tend to like it. Specifically, 55 percent of whites, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found this year, consider Mr. Obama’s health care law a bad idea, while 59 percent of blacks call it a good idea. On immigration, 51 percent of whites oppose legal status for illegal residents, but 63 percent of blacks and 76 percent of Hispanics favor it.... Those attitudes, and the continued growth of the nonwhite population, have produced this sometimes-overlooked result: American politics has grown increasingly polarized by race, as well as by party and ideology."

His speculation: whites fear becoming a minority. Doesn't that beg a couple of questions. How are Hispanics nonwhites? Is it because they vote Democratic? Ditto Asians? Or is everyone who votes Democratic non-white, including whites!?

 

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Margaret O’Brien Steinfels is a former editor of Commonweal. 

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