Possible New GOP Coalitions

[Mr. Morden]

Indeed, the racial categories that exist today won't necessarily exist in the same way decades from now:

http://prospect.org/article/democrats-demographic-dreams

[Mr. Morden]

Indeed, the racial categories that exist today won't necessarily exist in the same way decades from now:

http://prospect.org/article/democrats-demographic-dreams

I don't think we can assume that Latino's will integrate poltically, look at African Americans.

We can't assume that they will and we can't assume that they won't.  My point is that we just don't know.  Whatever racial categories that we have today might look completely different several decades from now.  For example, "Hispanics" weren't always considered a separate racial category in the way they are today.  Neither have Arabs for that matter.  Sometimes they have been considered a separate racial category, and sometimes they haven't been.

In any case, as pointed out in the column I link to, there's an increasing number of cross-racial marriages between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, as well as between whites and Asians, who are producing an increasing number of biracial and multi-racial offspring.  Exactly how those children grow up to think of themselves, and whether they even grow up to think of themselves in strongly racialized terms at all, is an open question.

[Mr. Morden]

True, you never know for sure. But given the nature of American racial and social hierarchies it would be most likely that biracial Hispanic/Whites would identify as whites and that light skinned Hispanics generally will start identifying as whites. Many biracial Asian/Whites will have an upper middle class background and people with high social status are generally perceived as whiter than people with low status.

I agree.  The category of "whiteness" has ever changing boundaries, many of which are ridiculously arbitrary.  It could essentially swallow up several categories of people in the future who are currently excluded.  Especially since "whiteness" is basically associated with the "mainstream" in the USA, and an increasing number of people without 100% European heritage are helping to define the mainstream nowadays.

And of course, we have no idea whether racial identity will have the same sort of impact on people's view of their place in the world in the same way 30 or 40 years from now.  You could certainly make the case that it's gotten less important in the last 30 or 40 years, so who's to say it won't get less important still in the future?