A New Year's Prediction for 2100
Forget 2025....I'm Playing the Long Game
If you are like me, I’m not looking forward to 2025…nor 2026, 2027, or 2028. Being an eternal optimist, I still have very low expectations about what the next four years will bring under a narcissistic-sexual predator president. However, there is one event in the coming year that I am excited about, and it is the birth of my fourth grandchild. It will be a boy, and he is due to arrive in June. That blessed event will override any trepidation I have about the coming year.
As I contemplated being a Grandfather again, it began to enter my mind that my new grandson, born in 2025, will likely live long enough to see a new century in 2100. The average lifespan for a man is around 75 years, so assuming my grandson is healthy and lives a normal life, he will see the turn of another century.
However, there will be nothing normal about the next 75 years, and that is what I want to dwell on for a bit. I hope you will indulge my prognostications as I dwell on the changes my grandson will see in the coming years.
One can only imagine the changes that society will see simply in relation to technology. Can anyone guess where AI will take us by 2100? The prospect is both frightening and exciting at the same time. Popular Mechanics gave this opening assessment of the state of technology by the 22nd century in an article in 2023. Here is the by-line of the article: “Space elevators, tiny machine “swarms,” flying cars, and human/machine mind melds are just the beginning of the future.” Okay, they were predicting flying cars by 2000 when I was a youngster, but something tells me this still might be in our future just 100 years late.
But the changes that interest me more, are the cultural and possible political changes that will come with a rapidly changing demographic. These changes will impact how we live and think, or at least how my grandson will live and think. Let’s start with the year 2060, 35 years from now. That is because demographers are afraid to project much further out than that.
Here is what demographers are predicting, based on trends of the past 100 years.
First, the United States will begin to see a decline in population. The impact of smaller family sizes since the 1940’s and assuming future restrictions on immigration by the fearmongering, nativist-xenophobic Trump administration, will lead to a decline in population. This will have a massive impact on economic growth or contraction, an increase in wages, and political unrest. This unrest is already happening, and unless smarter people are elected to office, it will continue.
Second, by 2060, when my grandson will be 35 years old and perhaps a parent, the population of the oldest Americans will outnumber the population of the youngest Americans, putting more pressure on social programs designed to sustain seniors. This of course is one of the reasons why we need immigration and lots of it, and perhaps after the Trump MAGA movement burns itself out due to infighting and too much hatred, cooler heads will prevail.
Finally, and this is the most important trend, by 2060, non-white people will be the majority in the nation. That date is actually coming sooner, likely around 2044. None-the-less by 2060, almost 6 in 10 Americans will be non-white.
Review this chart from the U.S. census bureau:
I can’t overemphasize how important this change will be. To provide some context, the United States, since it’s beginning, has always been a majority white-skinned nation. When I was born, the US was about 85% white-skinned. In 2020, that number had already declined to roughly 60%. This trend will not change and by 2044, for the first time in US history, we will be a majority non-white nation. And, we will never again after that year be a majority white nation again.
This will have massive ramifications both politically and socially.
This is what the current racist backlash is all about. “Make America Great Again” is code for “Make America White Again…And Keep It That Way.” But this is wishful thinking and a dead-end policy issue. It won’t matter how many abortions are prevented. The only policy issue that could change this is to require by law that every woman bear 3 or 4 children in their lifetime. Good luck with that.
You can see from the chart the trend for the decline of the white population. It is about 2 to 3% per decade. If we extrapolate that out to 2100, then we would expect the white population to be in the mid-30% range. By 2100 then, we could be seeing a country where almost 7 out of 10 people are non-white.
So here is the question about this whole scenario: what will this change mean for those who have white skin? European settlers invented “whiteness” in the later 1600s to provide status and privileges to those from Europe with white skin, who were Protestant, over those who were Native and from Africa. We have codified whiteness ever since to ensure that people with white skin get more, have more advantages, and have higher status in society. We have always been a society based on white supremacy, to put it in more street-level vernacular.
The irony of the construction of racial categories is that racial differences are a myth. White is not a race. Never mind that every government application or form you fill out asks you for your “race.” These racial categories reinforce the white-supremacist construction.
There is a practical reason the racial lists are there. How else would we be able to track wages by group: wealth, homeownership, graduation rates and other metrics of social achievement? Officials use these categories to see if we really are reaching a point where there is true equity across all groups. Sadly, we are not there yet. My hope is that for my grandson’s sake, we can move much closer to true equity by 2060 and beyond.
But as we move toward becoming a much more diverse society, the whole white supremacy oppressive structures and categories will need to be questioned, identified and dismantled. White has been used for 400 years to determine who belongs and who doesn’t. It has been used to determine who is allowed in the country for immigration (see Chinese Exclusion Act and Immigration Act of 1924), and it has been used to disadvantage people with non-white skin, namely Blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans.
The term white has also changed over the centuries. There is no universal definition of who is considered “white.” It was and is a commodity to be bestowed upon groups that work their way into American society, such as the Irish in the 19th century or the Polish in the early 20th century.
What happens to this social construction once those with white skin are no longer the majority? The definition of what an American is will need to change, be revised. A “true American” has always been considered a “white person.” Blacks were given the exception after the Civil War in the 14th Amendment and Native Americans were granted citizenship in 1924. Yet both of these groups have still not been considered “white” and therefore have been subjected to discrimination, abuse and even violence when they tried to raise their standing or got “out of their lane.”
Let me offer this idea for what can and maybe should happen between now and 2060 and beyond. We need to expunge the term “white” as a racial category. It has no meaning biologically and it was only constructed to give the majority privileges and wealth based on the color of their skin. It has been used as an artificial and false definition for citizenship.
The use of the term white is quickly becoming obsolete. The time has come to ditch the term, and redefine what citizenship means in the United States. I believe this will have a profound impact on how we see those who are Black or brown and how we begin to treat them through policy.
How can this start? How about college admissions and school admissions forms begin to change their categories. Then the government (both state and federal) can end its use of “racial categories” for census and other projects. Instead of listing “white” as a category, which makes no sense, I would call on institutions to begin to use the term “Euro-American.” Instead of highlighting skin color, this term highlights point of origin. Using racial categories only accentuates and continues to create differences between humans based on their appearance. Lets change it to point of origin, not appearance.
In 1997, the American Anthropological Association warned of the dangers of dividing Americans by race:
“During the past 50 years, ‘race’ has been scientifically proven to not be a real, natural phenomenon,” they wrote. “More specific, social categories such as ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic group’ are more salient for scientific purposes and have fewer of the negative, racist connotations for which the concept of race was developed.”
The AAA’s recommendations were not implemented and today Americans are taught to think of themselves as belonging to racial categories like white, black, or Asian. Because racial categories on on government forms, people think racial categories are real. They aren’t. Changing our categories to ethnicities and calling it that and ditching even the word “race” or “racial” would help to shift the paradigm.
Ethnicities and cultures are real and are diverse even among those with white skin. European countries are not monolithic so there is much ethnic diversity even between Italian, German, Hungarian, French and English people regardless of their skin tone.
Using the category of Euro-American, African American, Latino American, or Asian American puts all these ethnicities on the same level….ALL are American. Each simply has a different geographic point of origin, which is what the idea of “American” means. Anyone who comes here can become an American. I want my grandson to grow up without the bigoted categories of white and all the rest that comes with it.
Imagine we raise a whole generation of young people who are taught that differences between people because of their ethnic origins and culture are normal and to be accepted and celebrated, and all ethnicities are American, regardless of their skin color. This would move us toward a wonderful goal: equity, inclusion and equal access to opportunities. It is the only way we will become a truly multi-ethnic democracy. I won’t even say “multi-racial” because race has no biological meaning. Its existence as a category is only meant to create a caste system. So, let’s get rid of it. But we do want and need to be a multi-ethnic democracy.
If we begin to use non-racial categories to describe our diversity, we can still track how well those respective ethnic groups are doing on important economic and social metrics. Simply doing away with the term “white” will not expel white supremacy in the minds of people, but definitions and words are important in helping to shift mindsets. We still need to close the wealth gap between African Americans and Euro-Americans…but see the difference? The only difference is the point of origin…not the skin color. We will still need to end discrimination based on white supremacy, but we can still track how well we are doing over the decades.
Policy solutions can be implemented not according to some artificial racial category, but according to what works to help all Americans. We don’t need a policy for “black people” or a policy to benefit Asians, or a policy to benefit “white people.” We need to have policies that work for all Americans.
It makes no sense to continue with the charade of calling people “white” and giving them perks because of it, when they are quickly becoming the minority. It is historically time to change the equation of who is a “real” American. It is high time to end the artificial benefits bestowed upon people with white skin. It is time to end white supremacy. But in the same way white supremacy was constructed at a point in time, it will have to be deconstructed in our immediate future.
I know the next four years doesn’t bode well for my scenario. But we need to play a long game. Time and demographics are on our side. The US will eventually expel the MAGA virus that infects our body politic currently. Younger generations who are more diverse, tolerant and committed to equity will begin to replace the aged MAGA crowd. I hope we can begin these changes for my grandson’s sake and yours.
Happy New Year!
