Race on the 2010 census: Hispanics & the shrinking white majority

Race on the 2010 census: Hispanics & the shrinking white majorityAt our country's founding, we made race the constitutional test for those capable of self-government.Our nation's organic document allocated congressional seats among the states in proportion to "the whole Number of free Persons . . .excluding Indians not taxed [and] three fifths of all other Persons." 1 The Constitution then commanded that a census divine those racial numbers every ten years.From its first enumeration in 1790, the decennial census formed part of the process by which the racial state elaborated itself and society, race and democracy.In the two centuries plus since, every census has tabulated the number of "white" persons in the United States. 2 The original Constitution clearly envisioned a polity comprised of whites-they would be, as the census bureau put it in 1852, "the governing race." 3 And whites have remained politically, economically, and socially dominant, notwithstanding the Reconstruction Amendments that ended the explicit allocation of political representation along racial lines.The modern census shows that b y almost every relevant sociological measure whites continue to occupy the superior position in American society.But a demographic revolution is underway, the result of a long history of US expansion, colonial incursions, and gunboat diplomacy throughout the Western