We see predictions that in about 25 years people of color will outnumber whites. Some Americans automatically assume it's a plot.
Meanwhile, millions of fair-skinned folks flock to beaches in the quest for darker skin.
On the world scale, white people have always been a minority; most of the planet's inhabitants are Asian. The human race started out 200,000 years ago in Africa, where dark skin protects from the hot tropical sun. Scientists now think that light skin didn't evolve until 6,000 to 12,000 years ago--late in the story of Homo sapiens.
There's no accepted definition of who is white. If you include light-skinned people of North Africa, the Middle East, and northern India, whites may be as many as 20 percent of the world population.
However, the 19th century theory underlying white supremacy used the much narrower definition "Protestant northern Europeans" to exclude Slavs, Jews, southern Europeans, and Catholic Irish. White race theory adores Saxons and Angles who invaded England in the fifth century, but ignores native Britons, Vikings, Normans, and others who contributed their genes to a mixed British heritage.
To a large extent, race is determined by political decisions turned into laws. In the early 1930s, America had more race legislation than any other country, even South Africa, according to James Q. Whitman in "Hitler's American Model": rules about American Indians, immigration regulations, citizenship criteria, laws in 30 states against miscegenation. In 1933 the influential German lawyer Heinrich Krieger was an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, studying Jim Crow laws as a model for Nazi Germany.
I hope everybody knows that scientifically speaking, there is no such thing as race. It's a social construct, a myth. Instead, a physical anthropologist might talk about 200 or so overlapping ethnic populations. Genetic research shows that any two people from the same population are almost as different from each other as two individuals from two different populations.
As kids we were taught that five races are based on five colors of skin. But using my own eyes, it was obvious that we are all shades of brown or pinkish tan. I surely wasn't the color of snow and pearls, skeletons, ghosts, maggots, and paste; I never saw anybody remotely red or yellow. Instead of skin color, we could divide ourselves up by blood types. Or whether we're an innie or an outie.
So much for skin and bones. A lot of white fears swirl around our southern borders, boundaries established in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the Mexican American War. The war was contrived by President James Polk, who believed that expansion was our "Manifest Destiny." Ulysses S. Grant called the war "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
In the Guadalupe treaty, Mexico ceded 500,000 square miles of land to the United States. One-half of Mexico became one-third of the U.S. All this booty led to intense political conflict: Should the newly annexed territory be slave or free? Growing sectional antagonisms virtually guaranteed civil war a decade later; 620,000 war dead was a stiff price to pay for the dream of cotton plantations from sea to shining sea.
Ironically, most Mexican Americans live in the states that were formerly Mexican territory.
Immigrants now at the southern border are mostly Central Americans fleeing drought, poverty, corrupt governments, and gang violence. The U.S. bears some responsibility for those conditions, going back to armed interference in the region and support for corrupt and authoritarian governments.
A reasonable policy would shore up Honduras and El Salvador so that people do not feel compelled to leave home in order to survive. Trump preferred to stoke fears about an invasion by brown people.
The economically insecure are easily persuaded that their jobs are at risk from other ethnic groups, whatever economists say. This leads to something like Hobbes' war of all against all. Historically, America has seen a type of ethnic cleansing against many minority groups. Now, automation such as self-driving vehicles threatens jobs, but it is easier to vent resentment against flesh-and-blood rivals than against AIs and robots.
Are white people really afraid of being outnumbered by a variety of others who look slightly different? Or is it just that after 400 years, some of us are used to being top dog and don't really want things to change?
Exactly what shade of tan will Americans be in 2045?
Does it really matter?
Coralie Koonce is a writer living in Fayetteville. Her latest book is "Twelve Dispositions: A Field Guide to Humans."