When There’s No Demarcation between Black and White in the U.S.

In the Falls Church community of west suburban Washington, D.C., where the author lives, the only black neighbor has hung out a “For Sale” sign, which seems to coincide with the ongoing black migration movement in the United States.

In the past 20 years, African-Americans have been through two trends of migration. One involved moving from the North to the South. Since the beginning of the ‘90s, Northern states like Illinois and Michigan showed an absolute loss of black people, while Southern cities like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston have become emerging middle class black settlements. The other trend is the movement from large cities to the suburbs. In the past 10 years, 92 out of 100 cities in the U.S. showed a decrease in the black population.

In the near future, black people will no longer be the majority of the population in Washington, D.C. According to the just-released 2010 U.S. census, within this decade, Washington, D.C.’s white population has increased by 31.4 percent, accounting for 38.5 percent of the total population in the capital; the black population occupied 50.7 percent of the population, which resulted from an 11.5 percent decrease in those 10 years. Since the end of World War II, the black population has always made up the majority of Washington, D.C.’s population. In 1970, the black population had reached as high as 70 percent of the population. Since 1975, the mayors of the capital have always been black people; it is quite possible that white mayors will emerge in the future.

Looking from a wider angle, we can find that the U.S. population has long showed a feature of “clear demarcation between black and white” in history. The latest data shows that in the last decade America’s white population has increased from 194.6 million to 196.8 million — the growth rate is only 1 percent — and the proportion decreased from 69 percent to 64 percent in the total population. American Latinos increased from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010 — the growth rate is 43 percent — and the proportion reached 16 percent of the whole population. The number of African-Americans is 38.9 million, only taking up 13 percent of the total population, which means they have lost the status as the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S.

According to research project director Blair Ruble* of the Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the latest data reflects that the U.S. will usher in a future of “all minorities.” The capital city, Washington, D.C., just shows one view of what this will look like.

As to the decline of the black population in D.C., some people worried that there will be a tension of the polarization between black and white in local politics. Black people have their own social network in D.C.; once white people are in charge, they will “want doggie parks and bike lanes. … They go into their little cafes. … They don’t connect at church … they don’t volunteer in the neighborhood school, and a lot of longtime black residents feel threatened.”**

Other people think that the population decrease of a certain ethnicity is not the key problem; the problem is whether or not the future policymakers can adhere to racial harmony. [Anthony] Williams, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., thinks that it’s not necessary to worry about the possibility that the features of Washington, D.C. will change in the future. It’s like the situation where Irish culture has strongly influenced Boston, even though the Irish population is not big in the city, and if the governor of Massachusetts, where Boston is located, wants to continue in office, he has to “cotton up to” Irish people. The same goes with Washington, D.C. — even if there’s a white mayor in the capital, he has to deal with black churches, communities, etc.

In the process of the demarcation between black and white blurring in the U.S., it’s inevitable that the country will need to face the many inter-ethnic and economic- and political-interest relationships, along with the bridging and adaptation of the “cultural gap.” So there will be a new interpretation for the racial “melting pot” in the United States.

*Editor’s Note: Blair Ruble is the chair of the Comparative Urban Studies Project and the director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

**Editor’s Note: This quote is attributed to Marshall Brown, the father of Kwame Brown, who is D.C.’s new chairman of the city council.