White Males Don't Add Up


In this season of the Census, in this era of diversity, we should understand something about ourselves--white males are a minority.
Less than one-third of the U.S. population are white males of all ages. Less than one-fourth are white men in the workforce. Under fifty percent makes them a minority.
That should be a simple fact to absorb. But we play a demographic shell game in which such arithmetic takes on political and emotional weight.
It's a new idea and it changes how we look at each other.
If white men are a minority, how come they don't realize it?
If white men are a minority, how come other minorities treat them as the majority, as the "dominant culture?"
If white men are a minority, how come they're a majority in your company? The answer is that your company doesn't reflect the country, or your state or city. It's time for a reality check.
If white men are a minority, how come they have most of the positions of power? The answer is that we have white minority rule.
What difference does it make? In this country's cultural history, it has made a big difference whether some individual or group is a minority or not. When we say "minority," we usually have meant "non-white" or "people of color." It's a little more complicated, since many women are in the habit of calling themselves a minority when in fact females outnumber males in every age group after infancy. The country is more than fifty percent female. We are used to speaking of "women and minorities" as a category of the workforce, which leaves white males as the other category, implying that white males are the majority. They're not.
The language of Affirmative Action and Equal Employment relies on Census figures. But we're not analyzing the numbers very well.
What we mean when we speak about dominant white males is their cultural, psychological, ideological, and physical power, since their predominance in positions of power is out of all proportion to their actual numbers. For many people, the term "white male" refers to a form of white male fundamentalism which includes colonialism, suppression, oppression, and domination of other people, including nonconforming, deviant and dissident white males.
In some cases, all white men are labeled white males, even if they don't fit the mold or the psychographic profile. That's been our shorthand for describing the cultural dynamics of our society. But it isn't accurate, it isn't fair, and it isn't constructive.
Are we fighting over the status of who gets to be a minority? For 160 years (after Native Americans were displaced and "disappeared"), African Americans have been the primary minority in the country, but that position is about to be taken over by Latinos. Of course, the largest minority group are people covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It goes counter to our habit to call white men a minority. But we need to look again.
There is no majority. Minorities all, any group is a fraction of the whole. It's not helpful to create factions, to set one group against another.
If we are going to live up to the best potential of diversity as an expanded community, we need to stop calling each other names, even if those names are government-approved. We're shortchanging our humanity, we're leaving out the multiplier effects of working together, across categories and labels. It's time to move on to a higher level than arithmetic.

March 28, 2000