I remember hearing somewhere that by 2015 a majority of the under 18 crowd will be nonwhite in America. Will this lead to sort of a balkanization of America with ethnic clashes/wars, pogroms and ethnically polarized voting? It seems like the 2010 election was sort of a harbinger of things to come.
Wars and pogroms, no. We already have ethnically polarized voting, and it may get worse before it gets better. Under a worst-case scenario violent ethnic clashes are possible, but I think it far more likely that the worst outbreaks (outside of criminal gangs) will more resemble the ethnic fueds that (used to?) take place in New York as recently as the early eighties (there was some sort of bizarre fued between the Catholics and Jews in an ethnically and religiously integrated neighborhood when my family lived on Long Island back when I was two-I'm not aware of any violence, but there was palpable tension*).
*The first thing the neighborhood kids said to my sisters was to ask whether we were Jewish or Catholic; being Protestants, we and the Buddhist family down the street were graciously allowed to stay the hell out of it.
