Census questions
August 31, 2011 Leave a comment
Boring title, eh? Do population statistics intrigue you? Does the break-down of those statistics into race-based fractions intrigue you more? Some people would answer no to the first question and yes to the second. Those people will find the report called The New Metro Minority Map from the Brookings Institution, of interest. Since I can tell from the WordPress stats I monitor that only a small percentage of you actually click on the links I embed in my posts, I’ll provide a brief synopsis of the article by saying this. Basically, the report concludes that the United States has tipped over the point where whites are a majority of the population. Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians are now, narrowly, a majority. These kinds of reports feed all kinds of analyses by governments and private agencies for all kinds of guidance and recommendations. That’s all good. All I want to say about this is, the analysis is good but let’s not worry about what the data may or may not say.
I look around me at the office and I see people from Jordan, India, Sri Lanka, and Sweden (and that’s all within a 20 foot radius). If I go for a short walk to another area of the floor, I say hi to people from Hong Kong, Taiwan (a guy who this weekend is marrying someone from the Middle East), Philippines, Mexico, Germany, Jamaica, Poland, and Turkey. You get my point. There are a lot of people who represent a variety of ethnic, cultural, and national groups. We all play well together. We don’t even notice that we don’t look or sound alike, until we read a headline about a report such as the one above.