Changing flavor of melting pot
If you want to see the new face of America, come to California. It’s turning more Hispanic, more Asian and more gay.
Consider these snapshots. The teacher in our grandsons’ playgroup switches easily from English to Spanish and back again. The freshman class at the University of California’s Berkeley campus is 44 percent Asian and only 28 percent white. A woman we met in a park drives a blue Volvo station wagon with a car seat for her son and a gay pride sticker that proclaims “Just Married.”
These anecdotes confirm the latest projections from the United States Census: by the year 2050, the number of Asians and Hispanics in this country will triple, and the white population will drop from almost 70 percent to barely 50 percent.
But the rest of America will just be catching up to where California is today. Hispanics already comprise one-third of that state’s population, and whites have fallen below the 50 percent mark. As demographer Hans Johnson told the San Francisco Chronicle, “In many ways, California precedes the nation. We are a state where no group is a majority.”
There’s nothing new about California preceding the nation. From the Hollywood Hills to Silicon Valley, from the Beat Generation to The Beach Boys, from the Gold Rush to the Internet boom, California has shaped American tastes and technology for the last 150 years.
But as the census, and our own observations, suggest, the “next big thing” coming out of California could well have to do with race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. And the impact on American life and politics will be enormous.
Both of this year’s presidential campaigns fully understand these trends, and are spending heavily on Spanish-language advertising. Another telling statistic: there are now about 350 Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States, almost double the number from 15 years ago.
This week, two large companies, AGmobile and Univision Online, announced plans to expand wireless information and entertainment services for “a Spanish-speaking population that continues to explode in numbers and earning power.”
The Asian presence here is just as visible, from the father playing soccer with his son in a neighborhood park to the medical students from U.C. San Francisco crowding the cafes along Irving Street. When writer Richard Rodriguez was asked by a radio interviewer whether he considered himself more Mexican or more American, he replied: “In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city.”
In his book “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” (Viking, 2002), Rodriguez celebrates another trend: the rising rate of intermarriage among these racial groups, what he calls “this new brown meltdown.” The new American role models, he says, are golfer Tiger Woods, shortstop Derek Jeter, and actors Halle Berry and Keanu Reeves — all of whom are of mixed-race parentage.
Same-sex couples are clearly a part of this “new brown meltdown,” the blurring of traditional lines and stereotypes about race and gender. We met two gay white men who are parenting a black daughter here. The woman with the blue Volvo talked happily about raising her son in a “two-mommy family.”
Does this “meltdown,” in all its forms, mean that prejudice will disappear? Of course not. But it does mean the new family that moves in next door could be brown, or gay, or both. That’s already the American way in California.
(Cokie and Steven Roberts are syndicated columnists.)