A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS:

A Race Of Races (Joel Kotkin 02/02/2010, New Geography)

By 2039, due largely to immigrants and their offspring, non-Europeans will constitute the majority of working-age Americans, and by around 2050 non-Hispanic whites could well be in the minority.

But this should not be seen so much as a matter of ethnic succession as multiracial amalgamation. The group likely to grow fastest, for example, will be made up of people, like President Obama himself, who are of mixed race. Theirs is no more demonstrable evidence of the changing racial attitudes of Americans. As recently as 1987 slightly less than half of Americans approved of interracial couples. By 2007, according to the Pew Center, 83% supported them. Among the millennial generation, who will make up the majority of adults in 2050, 94% approve of such matches.

Today roughly 20% of Americans, according to Pew Research Center, say they have a relative married to someone of another race. Mixed-race couples tend to be younger; over two-fifths of mixed-race Americans are under 18 years of age. In the coming decades this group will play an ever greater role in society. According to sociologists at UC, Irvine, by 2050 mixed-race people could account for one in five Americans.

The result will be a U.S. best described in Walt Whitman's prophetic phrase as "the race of races." No other advanced, populous country will enjoy such ethnic diversity.

The U.S. will likely remain militarily and even economically preeminent, but much of its power will stem from its status as the world's only multiracial superpower. America's global reach will extend well beyond Coca-Cola, Boeing and the Seventh Fleet and express itself in the most intimate cultural and familial ties.

America's example is always a more important weapon than its arms.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2010 6:45 AM