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The Economics and Politics of Race
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12771 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1987 |
4,048 Words |
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Thomas Sowell
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The historic movement of millions of immigrants and the great variety of racial and ethnic groups that constitute its population today make the United States a unique study in race and ethnicity. The very concept of ethnic "minorities" is misleading in the United States, where there is no ethnic majority. While Caucasians form a large majority - 87 percent - of the population of the United States, ethnic breakdowns among whites (and blacks) remain significant, and there is nothing approaching an ethnic majority. A majority-minority characterization would have been valid in colonial America, when more than three-quarters of the inhabitants of the 13 colonies were of British ancestry, but by the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, they were only about half of the population. While it is fashionable to talk as if there were still an Anglo-Saxon majority today, they are in fact only 14 percent of the American population. They are the largest single group in the population, but are not even close to being a majority.
Even these data understate the ethnic heterogeneity of the American population. Each of these groups contain many individuals whose ancestry is a mixture with other groups. More than two-thirds of all Americans who give their ancestry as English also list other ancestries. So do nearly four-fifths of all American Indians. For the United States as a whole, only 45 percent of the population consists of people of a single ancestry (as far as they know), while 38 percent know their ancestry to be multiple, and 17 percent do not specify. Racially, Anglo-Saxon dominance is a myth.
Sometimes it is the Anglo-Saxon culture that is considered oppressively dominant, requiring all others to abandon their heritage as the price of acceptance or progress in American society. Historically, however, Japanese, German, and Jewish immigrants began their rise to prosperity while barely speaking English, retaining many cultural traits and living in isolated communities. More generally, cultural adaptation in the United States has been a two-way process - the general culture containing many features once peculiar to particular ethnic groups. American popular music is based on music once peculiar to blacks - the blues and jazz. Nothing is more American than frankfurters and hamburgers, but both are named for cities in Germany because they originated with German Americans. American slang has likewise incorporated ethnic peculiarities. The habit of addressing someone as "man" originated with blacks and the phrase "go for broke" originated with Japanese Americans. Nothing is more American than cowboys and the old West, but these cowboys use ranching practices that originated with the Spaniards when they occupied the southwest, and the American pioneers crossed the western plains in covered wagons that were once peculiar to German farmers in Pennsylvania.
What is loosely and misleadingly called an "Anglo" society or culture in the United States is in fact a mosaic with prominent features of Semitic, Hispanic, Negro, Asiatic, and other origins. The American clothing industry was essentialy created by Jews, as were most of the great motion picture studios. The American beer industry and piano industry are the creations of Germans. Contract gardening in California was created and dominated by the Japanese. Even organized crime in America has had a distinct ethnic flavor, being dominated in historical succession by the Irish, then the Jews, and then the Italians. The great American political machines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were almost invariably Irish political machines - and their attitudes
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