By Erica Werner/AP
In a state where there is no majority racial or ethnic population, some are asking whether there is a future for the term “minority.”
Census figures released in March showed non-Latino whites made up 47 percent of California’s population — the first time whites weren’t in the majority since the census began to keep accurate numbers.
The next-largest group, Latinos, accounted for 32 percent of the populace. Asian Americans make up some 13 percent of the population, and in San Francisco that number jumps up to 30.7 percent.
“You have the fact that you have no ethnic majority now, so if you have no majority, what’s minority?” said Frederick R. Lynch, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. “The classification machinery is pretty antique.”
Diane Chin, executive director of the Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), said that the movement to discontinue use of the term started in the 1990s.
“Folks have been using ‘people of color’ because there is a real sense that the term minority connotes not just a numerical standing but a real political disenfranchisement,” Chin said.
The San Diego City Council addressed the issue last month by voting to strike the word “minority” from official use.
Deputy Mayor George Stevens, a longtime civil rights activist, said he brought the resolution forward after a conversation with a high school senior convinced him that students referred to as minorities are burdened with lowered expectations.
He said he first proposed the measure two years ago, and the timing with the release of the census figures was coincidental.
“Remember, it never referred to numbers in the first place. It referred to us as being different, as being less than,” Stevens said. “I’m not less than anybody. I haven’t used the word in a very long time.”
But not everyone is ready to abandon the term.
“I think passing a resolution to say that we can’t use that word, I think it’s ridiculous, personally,” said Scott Gunderson Rosa, director of communications in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “I was a minority and that helped me get scholarships to college, and there are a lot of other positive uses for the word.”
The literal meaning of minority is less than 50 percent. To many people, however, it implies a range of other characteristics, including underprivileged or disadvantaged, experts said.
“My concern would be that the entire concept of rights for people of color or rights for certain ‘minorities’ or anti-majority people would be thrown by the wayside,” Chin said. “Clearly there is language within legislation, dealing with affirmative action programs and others, where the term minority is important.”
Lynch said the term gained currency during the civil rights and affirmative action battles of the 1960s and is therefore associated with the experiences of the baby boom generation.
In heterogeneous California, many young people say they never use the term.
“It hasn’t been necessarily useful,” said Marvin Hencey, a 28-year-old junior at Cal State Los Angeles who is white. “You have Asian people, and then you have Taiwanese and Chinese ... You can’t lump everything together because there are too many of each.”
But social scientists say the term is unlikely to be discarded anytime soon. While California — along with New Mexico, Hawaii and the District of Columbia — has no majority group, the country as a whole is still predominantly white.
“Especially for Asian Americans, we have a long, long way to go before we reach a critical mass in this country,” Chin said.
To many in the country, “minority” is a neutral term to designate any person of color.
Moreover, even in places with no majority population, whites still occupy most positions of power. Some worry that eliminating the word minority could obscure that fact.
“There’s only one black and one Latino member on the San Diego City Council. Ninety-eight percent of economic power in the city of San Diego is in white hands,” said Jane Rhodes, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. “It totally obscures the economic reality.”
But experts also said much of Americans’ vocabulary for race and ethnicity is outmoded. Although there’s no consensus about what word or words could replace minority, some argue for use of more specific terms when talking about racial and ethnic groups.
“There are so many better terms than minority,” said F. Chris Garcia, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who said the term has been out of favor on campus for years. “Eventually, we’ll probably change the language tremendously.”
Neela Banerjee also contributed to this report. |
