If you are a political news junkie like me, you have doubtless encountered stories that make much of the fact that U.S. politics will be quite different when white voters become a minority and we become what some call a multicultural democracy.
The 2020 census reported that the number of self-identified white voters fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.3% a decade later. Soon, pundits tell us, election results may change dramatically as “non-white” voters move into the majority.
One of the more interesting book titles in this debate is Steve Phillips, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. American democracy, Phillips points out, was built on inequality and white superiority from the beginning. It has taken over two centuries to finally secure the vote for poor people, women and (more or less) for black Americans.
Our founding fathers, adds DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, never intended to extend the vote beyond wealthy, landowning white males. (YES magazine, Fall, 2023, p. 50).
Phillips and Cooper are encouraged by the “browning of America.” More and more Latino Americans wish to be seen as multi-racial instead of white. In the 2010 Census 53% of Latinos identified as white; by 2020, only 20% said they were white; most claimed more than one race.
However, this statistical shift in Latino census figures is misleading if we Democrats expect it to result in more Latino votes for Democrats. Many Hispanic voters are very conservative, opposed to illegal immigration, and supportive of the moral position of the Catholic Church on abortion.
On the other side of the demographic debate, we find the whole question of white superiority, highlighted by the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally organized by right-wing extremists, the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Proud Boys, other right-wing hate-groups and treasonous Confederate flag-bearing Americans.
Again, American history certainly supports the idea of white supremacy. Author Steve Phillips believes a new age is beginning in American politics. His argument is contained in the title of his 2016 book: Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. Beginning with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalitionin 1983 and moving steadily upward to the election of Ralph Warnock in Georgia in 2021, Philips echoes the words of Cooper: “We have the votes to win.” (YES magazine, Fall 2023, p. 52)
As much as I support a multi-cultural majoritarian voting bloc in America, I must get off the Phillips-Cooper train of thought at the next station. These men are, I am saddened and chagrined to say, putting too much emphasis on skin color and not enough on poverty and other economic issues that determine how people vote, regardless of their ethnic background or race.
Democrats cannot be caught up in the demographic illusion that a majority of non-whites (a murky category) will vote against Republicans. Nor should they assume that all white men and women voters are white supremacists and that we need the browns and blacks to save our democratic republic.
What both white and non-white multicultural or multiracial voters will all do is respond to political leaders who will take their economic, social, and cultural needs seriously. They want to know that government leaders care about them.
Trump did not display that caring while president or since, although he talked the talk. President Biden has responded to middle and lower-class voters, whatever their racial or cultural background, who need good, union-protected jobs, protection from corrupt politicians, decent health care (especially for pregnant women), and the hope that might come with a conversion to truth-telling in government and the media.
All these issues are more important than whether American voters are white, brown, black, or some combination of the above.
We all should respect our ancestry, but that is not where we live our lives. We need political leaders who truly care about how we can live more productive and happier lives in healthy communities.
Democrats, of whatever color, do a better job than Republicans, of whatever color, of responding to American needs and desires.