Census-ible

I saw a something online the other day where the person pondered what boxes on the census form should be checked for a person of multi-ethnicity. A comment in response came from someone who's presumably marking the box for "White" on his census form—if he's filling it out at all—(and probably has some issues with the policy of Affirmative Action) where he remarked something to the effect of how it's better to check the boxes for minorities as those areas get a disproportionate amount of federal funding.

That may or may not be the case, but it did raise an inadvertent point: If the money is going toward areas more populated with those in minority groups, the best thing that could happen for someone who would implicitly lament such a policy would be for the demographic in which he is included to become a minority itself.

It's been estimated for years (by whoever estimates such things) that in some coming census it will be revealed that whites will no longer be the majority in this country. However, imagine if after the forms from this 2010 census are tallied it's discovered that such an event has already come to pass. At first glance one would expect those in the Tea Party movement (the I-want-my-country-back crowd) to be alarmed by this, but if Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and company think about it, such news should be welcomed by them.

They fancy themselves to be a persecuted minority, but as it has stood they haven't had the census numbers to back up that delusion perception. However, if it came out that their skin color was no longer the one shared by a majority of Americans they'd get to feel like they'd finally made it to be a put-upon portion of society. Sure, those of their race might still have most of the money and power, but it wouldn't have the numbers. They could revel in how their unfounded concerns had come to pass.

What a paranoid dream come true!

~

On the 2020 census form one can only hope that there's a box for "White, but please don't put me in the same category as the nutcases and whackjobs."

Or perhaps by that point we'll have ceased to track people on the basis of race or ethnicity (or whatever the heck those boxes on this census actually represented) and will group people on more logical grounds, such as those who know that it's is not the possessive of it and those who don't give a crap and will include an apostrophe even when they do not mean to indicate the contraction of it is.

Just a thought. Eh, we have ten years to get that figured out.