American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-first Century

Introduction: Multicultural Insights from the Study of Demography

Introduction: Multicultural Insights from the Study of Demography Nancy A. Denton and Stewart E. Tolnay 1 Today, the United States, as a nation, is engaging in many discussions of its population diversity.1 Nowhere is this trend more prominent than on college campuses, where discussions about what should be taught have resulted in what one observer has called “PC panic.”(Gitlin, 1996:177). While these discussions do allow different opinions to be aired, and sometimes serve to bring together members of many different groups, the resulting dialogue about American diversity all too often sounds like a cacophony. Combining the voices of people not previously heard with much regularity, such as Blacks or women, with the new immigrants and native-born White Americans can often be contentious. For listeners as well as participants, it is often not clear how to make sense of the discussions or the underlying societal diversity that gives rise to them. Perhaps a common “starting line” for discussions of diversity and multiculturalism would lend some order to the currently dissonant and disorganized discussion. We argue that a better understanding of the racial and ethnic groups responsible for American diversity, and the demographic forces affecting those groups, is a reasonable point of departure for participants in the “diversity debates.” It is toward that goal of better demographic understanding that the current volume is addressed. The chapters in this volume reflect up-to-date demographic analyses of basic population processes in the contemporary U.S. population.2 As such, they are not directed to the more politicized aspects of the national diversity debate per se. Yet, we argue in this introduction that they are relevant to the diversity debate because to understand the issues of diversity and political correctness , it is necessary to first understand the fundamental demographic processes that underlie them. This point it not necessarily obvious, so we will lay out our case here. In doing so, we will address such questions as: How can an analysis of demographic data provide any meaningful insights into the debate over American diversity? Given the stridency of the debate and the conflicts among people from the various groups, wouldn’t law, history, economics , psychology, or any of a number of other disciplines have more to offer than demography, the study of numbers, births, and deaths? Isn’t the demog- raphy of increasing numbers of different types of people obvious to all those commenting on the contemporary scene? It is certainly true that nearly all discussions of U.S. population diversity talk about the numbers of different groups of people, and some even discuss the future implied by projecting these numbers forward in time. However, it is equally true that virtually no one contributing to the diversity debate has thoroughly examined the key demographic processes separately: fertility, mortality , and migration. Neither does the literature offer a reasonable discussion of the interrelationship among these demographic facts of life, or their association with the fundamental life processes of education, labor force participation , marriage, neighborhood context, and aging. But it is just such questions that are grist for the demographer’s mill. Demographers have long focused on documenting, describing, and explaining differences among groups of people with regard to many key aspects of life: the number of children women have, marriage rates, life expectancy, moving within a country or to a new one, educational attainment, labor force participation rates, neighborhood distributions, and aging. Furthermore, key elements in all social demographic analyses are race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. Thus, demographers are in a unique position to inform the debates about population diversity with more than just numbers. This is hardly to argue that demography is destiny, but rather that the momentum of demographic processes, well known to demographers, forms the underpinning of all the other aspects of people’s lives in the modern world. In a very real sense, the social world we observe, including the substantial racial and ethnic diversity within it, is the product of those phenomena that occupy demographers. We are arguing that some of the stridency and antagonism of the contemporary debates over racial and ethnic diversity results in part from either ignoring or fundamentally misunderstanding past, current, and future demographic changes in U.S. society. Understanding these demographic underpinnings challenges our assumption that we can completely control the increasing diversity, points out how some of the increasing diversity is internal to the United States and will continue regardless of what happens to immigration, and reveals that part of the...