September 30, 2004

Newsflash! Country Becoming Less White

In news that is sure to make pouty white people even poutier, Census Bureau estimates released today showed that there are more places around the country that have become "minority majority" enclaves -- since 2000 -- including that one place considered the last bastion for conservative whiteness in California: Orange County.

    Denver and Orange County, Calif., as well as remote Yoakum County, Texas, and Barbour County, Ala., are among 26 counties where whites who are not Hispanic have lost their majority status since 2000. That's now the case in 280 of the nation's 3,141 counties, further evidence that diversity has spread.

    It means more Americans may have to ask: Who's a minority?

    "It's a moving target," says Robert Lang, head of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "The majority will be the minority and we'll relabel minorities the majority. It's just a matter of time."

Who is a minority indeed. This may be surprising for those folks who actually think Orange County, CA resembles anything like The OC portrayed on the boob tube (and is probably shocking for many L.A.'s westsiders as well who rarely venture east of the 405), but those of us who have lived down there know better. I spent a good chunk of my formative years behind the Orange Curtain -- I was an undergraduate at UC Irvine (sorry, can't work up the passion to cheer "go Anteaters!") -- and I can tell you that the campus was long ago a "minority majority" university, possibly the most colored in the entire country. It certainly was the most "yellow" by far, and whites comprise only 28 percent of the student body.

(Spare me the play on all the school's acronyms: University of Chinese Immigrants, University of Civics and Integras, and so on and so forth...I know 'em all.)

The university's demographics presaged the changes now coloring the rest of Orange County. By the time I graduated, the Asian American population alone was around 49 percent. Last I heard, it's over 50 percent of the student population, and has consistently hovered above that mark over the past decade. I imagine by the next decennial Census, OC's demographics will resemble UCI circa 1994.

Not that I'm rushing to move down there anytime soon. If wide, wide street lanes, flat suburban landscapes, and master-planned, multiplex entertainment centers are your thing (Dave & Buster's anyone?), then the OC might just be heavenly -- and I'm sure it is for many people. But this post-suburban, would-be paradise is all a bit too bland and "nerdistan" for me -- as my colleague Joel puts it. Furthermore, traffic congestion has inconceivably grown worse than anything in L.A. (locals call it the "Orange Crush") and housing prices now exceed anything found in San Francisco (median: $655.3K vs. $647.3K). Can you dig it? I can't.

More about Orange County's new demographics here.

UPDATE: Latino Pundit links to this story showing similar trends happening in Long Island, NY. It's the same story: a graying white population and emerging immigrant base. Amazingly, Nassau's white population actually shrank by 5 percent since 2000.

Posted by thomas at September 30, 2004 12:19 PM | TrackBack