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By Root 1890 0

Asian subgroups such as Chinese or Vietnamese, are not the only market-dominant minorities in America’s inner cities. In certain communities—Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, for example—Orthodox Jews are a highly visible “outsider” entrepreneurial minority, deeply resented by the much more numerous, and far poorer, African-American majorities around them. In 1991, after ethnic violence broke out when a Hasidic Jewish driver in Crown Heights struck and killed a black child, anger on both sides ran especially high. “You’re not going to run New York City any longer,” Nancy Mere, an African-American Housing Authority assistant, shouted at Orthodox Jewish leaders at a news conference at city hall. “It was okay when our mothers were cleaning your floors and taking care of your babies—that was okay. But we’re not going to have it anymore.” Mere then added, expressing a typical sentiment, “We hear about the Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust. Well, the black man has lived through a holocaust in this city and it’s terrible, and we’re not taking it anymore.”

Meanwhile, black community leaders have done their share in fomenting resentment against entrepreneurial minorities. At a series of fiery rallies in 1995, and shortly after calling for anti-Korean boycotts, Reide called for mass boycotts targeting Jewish-owned businesses. “Nobody loves money any more than the Jewish people,” he yelled in a speech that was broadcast live on radio station WWRL. In response to charges that national black leaders like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan were anti-Semitic, Reide threatened, to thunderous applause, that unless the accusations stopped, “we will marshal six million black men and women and boycott every Jewish-owned business throughout the United States.” He then named specific targets: “There are 91 Waldbaum’s stores; we will boycott them. There are 618 nationwide Toys ‘R’ Us stores; we will boycott them. There are 145 New York City Key Food shopping markets; we will boycott them. We will boycott Macy’s.”

30

The “Browning of America”

According to the latest census data, in the state of California the number of whites is less than the combined number of Hispanic-, Asian-, and African-Americans. In the United States as a whole, the Census Bureau projects that whites will be a minority by 2060.

31 At that point, if these projections hold true, the United States may well have a market-dominant minority at the national level, starting in the latter half of this century.

Nevertheless, anxiety about “the browning of America” must be kept in perspective. There are powerful reasons to think that majority-based ethnonationalist movements targeting a white market-dominant minority are unlikely to develop in the United States. To begin with, given how large a percentage of America’s population will still be white, it is extremely implausible that an antiwhite political movement could be democratically successful in the United States. Moreover, unlike most developing countries, there is a strong, ethnically crosscutting national identity in the United States, which would make it far more difficult for politicians to portray American whites as “outsiders” stealing the wealth from America’s “true” Hispanic, black, or Asian “owners.” (If Native Americans were still a majority in the United States, it might be a very different story.) In addition, rates of ethnic intermarriage and cultural assimilation are relatively high in the United States. While intermarriage is no guarantee against ethnic conflict, it is hard to imagine that American society will ever again look like a South Africa or Indonesia, where ethnic intermarriage rates are virtually nil.

Finally, as in all the Western nations, America’s less well off are rich by comparison to their developing-world counterparts. In the United States, even blue-collar workers have cars, television sets, and some savings. At work they are entitled to health benefits, paid vacations, and disability compensation. Outside the West, great majorities own no property and live in hopeless, open-sewer poverty.