

Minority Births Outnumbered Whites for the First Time - kumarski
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-census-data-20120517,0,7475788.story

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tokenadult
The lede paragraph says, "The United States has reached a historic tipping
point -- with Latino, Asian, mixed race and African American births
constituting a majority of births for the first time, theU.S. Census Bureau
reported Thursday."

But in the everyday sense of "white," most Latino people are "white," because
the definition of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity used by the federal government

<http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf>

"Definition of Hispanic or Latino Origin Used in the 2010 Census

"'Hispanic or Latino' refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican,
South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of
race."

makes clear that a great variety of people of varying ancestry or "heritage"
or "country of birth" can categorize themselves as Hispanic. Someone self-
designating has the choice to indicate Hispanic ethnicity, by that definition,
and to indicate white "race" after indicating Hispanic ethnicity.

A detailed FAQ on how United States designations of "race" and "ethnicity"
interact with college and university admission policies in the United States

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/13664...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/1366406-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-10-a.html)

goes into much more detail on that controversial issue.

~~~
rdl
It seems pretty clear that they were using the economic/political privilege
form of minority -- which includes most hispanic people except the very top
echelon of mostly-Spanish people in Latin America.

The South American largely-Indian guy who came across the border and now works
in a chicken processing plant in the Southeast or a farm in the West is not
part of the traditional white European power structure in the US, which until
now was a majority.

(I am pretty convinced racial issues in the US will be a lot less important
over the next 30 years, and outright economic and social class will
predominate. I have much more in common personally with an Indian IIT grad H1B
in the Bay Area (or a startup founder) than I do with an nth-generation white
guy from my hometown in Pennsylvania working at a Wawa.)

