Chapter Seventeen
In June of 1997, I was invited to go to the White House to help President Bill Clinton write a speech about race. I was one of a group of civil rights leaders and scholars who met with the president to share ideas on the subject. During the meeting I pointed out that sometime in the twenty-first century, whites will become a minority in the US population. “Yes,” I said, “we will all be minorities.”
A few days later President Clinton gave the speech, titled “One America in the Twenty-First Century: The President’s Initiative on Race,” to the graduating class of the University of California at San Diego. “A half-century from now,” he told the students, “when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America.”
He then presented highlights from our nation’s multicultural past:
Consider this: we were born with a Declaration of Independence which asserted that we were all created equal and a Constitution that enshrined slavery. We fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery and preserve the union, but we remained a house divided and unequal by law for another century. We advanced across the continent in the name of freedom, yet in so doing we pushed Native Americans off their land, often crushing their culture and their livelihood. . . . In World War II, Japanese-Americans fought valiantly for freedom in Europe, taking great casualties, while at home their families were herded into internment camps. The famed Tuskegee Airmen lost none of the bombers they guarded during the war, but their African-American heritage cost them many rights when they came back home in peace. . . .
In his conclusion, Clinton identified the challenge we faced: “Will we become not two, but many Americas, separate, unequal, and isolated? Or will we draw strength from all our people and our ancient faith in the quality of human dignity, to become the world’s first truly multi-racial democracy?”
The future is in our hands. The choices we make will be shaped by our view of our own history. A history that leaves out minorities reinforces separation, but a history that includes everyone bridges the divides between groups.
On their voyage through history, the people of America have found their paths crisscrossing one another in events such as Bacon’s Rebellion, the Civil War, and World War II. Their lives and cultures have swirled together, from the first meeting of Powhatan Indians and English colonists on the Virginia shore to the latest Mexican immigrants crossing the border. But America’s dilemma has been the denial of its diversity.
We originally came from many different shores, and our diversity has been at the center of the making of America. Signs of our ethnic diversity can be found across the land—Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinatown, Harlem, the Lower East Side, places with Indian names and Spanish names, music with African American origins, and songs such as “White Christmas” written by a Russian Jewish immigrant known as Irving Berlin.
Marginalized minorities have sung “We shall overcome” as they struggled for equality and respect. Their struggle must continue, but they have won a multitude of victories: the abolition of slavery; the integration of the US armed forces and of public schools; the extending of naturalized citizenship to all immigrants regardless of race; the overturning of laws against interracial marriage; apologies to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II; and the awakening of America to its amazing diversity.
What does the future hold? The promise of the twenty-first century is the promise of the changing colors of the American people. Demography, the study of population trends, is redefining who is an American. White Americans will not be a majority for much longer—America will truly be a nation of minorities.
The time has come for us to embrace our varied selves, because a new America is approaching, a society where diversity is destiny. Woven into our multicultural national story are the heartfelt verse of African American poet Langston Hughes, who wrote,
Let America be America again.
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Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
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Equality is in the air we breathe.