Post-White America's tyranny of the masses.

• Author: Thomson, James W.
• Position: Life in America

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"The unassailable privileges of the white races have been thrown away, squandered, betrayed.... The exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on its lords."

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the future represents an as yet dimly understood critical juncture in U.S. history that could be characterized as an implicit rejection of our Western (read white) heritage in favor of a very uncertain multicultural (read nonwhite) future. This compelling theme has been explored in terms of demographics and related cultural issues by Hua Hsu, an Asian-American professor teaching at Vassar College in a cover story for The Atlantic. For Hsu, the statistics tell the basic underlying story: the white population is declining steadily at a rate far below the minimum replacement level. Legal and illegal immigration now adds about 1,500,000 individuals to the U.S. population every year, the highest level in American history--and most of these immigrants are people of color.

The Census Bureau has forecast that those groups now classified as racial minorities (Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans) will comprise a majority of the total population by 2042. For those younger than 18, the shift to majority-minority racial status will occur in 2023, which means that, from now on, every new child born in the U.S. will be a member of the first post-white generation.

Speculating on the racial destiny of our nation always has been a fashionable--but hotly debated--pursuit. In 2004, the Columbia University Press published a compilation of well over 100 such musings written during the past two centuries. Among the authors were Franz Boas, W.E.B. DuBois, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, Marcus Garvey, and Thomas Jefferson to name just a few of the luminaries. Yet, two of the most popular American authors concerned with racial issues in the 20th century were not included--Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard--because both were unashamed advocates of "scientific racism." Hsu singled out Grant and Stoddard for specific scorn as examples of the privileged white male racists of the 1920s who defended white supremacy. The term scientific racism refers to the historical practice of using dubious scientific methods by some "racial scientists" to advance, justify, and defend the alleged superiority of the white (Caucasian) race over nonwhite races but, as Brace Baum staled in The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, which traces the turbulent political history of racial identity concepts over the last three centuries, racial science emerged in Western Europe during the 17th century as a joint product of the Enlightenment and development of natural history. Consequently, the racist works of Grant and Stoddard and their like-minded brethren can be interpreted as the flawed results of a lengthy, controversial, and highly speculative process that has evolved continually up to the present day with the current investigation of the human genome.

Grant was an outspoken...