Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – We have to go all the way back to when this man, Ulysses S. Grant, was leading the Union Army in the Civil War, to comprehend how long ago Arizona’s abortion ban was enacted.
Slavery was in force in 1864, and most Americans — women of all backgrounds and Black people — were not permitted to vote. The resurrection of that law by the Arizona Supreme Court hurls us back to the century before last.
Some 22 states now have near total bans or severe restrictions on abortion — a development that, along with alarm over immigration, sped up in the years since the Census projected a potential inversion of the country’s demographics in less than 20 years.
What happens at merely the thought of a reconfiguration, the looming prospect of 2042, or 2045 — the years the census has predicted as the point of demographic sea change?
These were questions that propelled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, as it trained a light on the stress cracks in this old house, our country.
And then, in 2021, the Census Bureau made a startling announcement in alignment with that underlying premise: For the first time in American history, the white population showed a numerical decline, the only racial or ethnic group to do so. While still in the majority, the share of those who identify as white alone in the population of the United States had fallen from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020, “the lowest on record,” the Associated Press reported.
How we as a nation handle this demographic inversion is one of the major existential questions of our time, which is why I chose to explore this and other aspects of our era in the Afterword to Caste.
The question remains: What and who do we want to be as a nation, and, now, we might ask, what century do we want to be in? | Posted on 11/Apr/2024 02:53:00
