Anxiety Over Racial Changes: Nothing New


Philander Smith University




For the fifth in the series, we spoke to Jelani Cobb, Ph.D., an associate professor of history and Africana studies at Rutgers University and author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He explained that a national focus on -- and anxiety about -- a decrease in the country's white population is nothing new for the United States, and cited historical examples to prove that an increase in the population of blacks and Hispanics will by no means necessarily translate into an increase in political power for either group.


Jelani Cobb: It's hard to summarize it as positive or negative. I think a lot of things will be different. One, in raw numbers, large populations should translate into a larger share of political influence and cultural power. But that's not necessarily the case. For instance, the number of Hispanics in the country is technically larger than the number of African Americans, but the Congressional Black Caucus is larger than the Congressional Hispanic Caucus because a large portion of the Hispanic population has not been organized. So, in and of itself, the demographic change doesn't necessarily mean anything.


JC: Oh, sure, there are other things, like what proportion of people are going to college? What proportion of people are going to prison? What are the median-income comparisons? What is the degree of political organization in communities? There are a ton of variables that are much more important.

So people also focus on the number, but the nativist paranoia that some whites have -- that society is going to change, that it won't be the same America -- is, not coincidentally, the same perspective that Anglo-Saxon whites had in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when they were being outnumbered not by people of color but by different types of white people from different parts of Europe. It was Theodore Roosevelt who said it was the duty of every Anglo-Saxon woman to have as many children as she could.

That was also one of the reasons why the initial opposition to abortion in the country took place, because people were concerned that the native-born white population would not increase fast enough and abortion would diminish the number of Anglo-Saxons in American society. So it's the same kind of paranoia that occurred when people were confronted with the Italians, the Irish and other people who were coming to the United States in large numbers then that we see currently when we look at some of the nativist concerns about immigration, the Arizona bill and the immigration law that passed in Alabama. Those are echoes of things we've heard before. It's the same group fear with the same pure numerical basis.