They refused to pass gun control laws as gun violence disproportionately ravaged Black communities.
Republican governors, mostly in Southern states, even refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. As the Kaiser Family Foundation points out, “Medicaid is the largest source of insurance coverage for people with H.I.V., estimated to cover 42 percent” of the adult population with H.I.V., “compared to just 13 percent of the adult population overall.” It adds that Medicaid beneficiaries with H.I.V. are more likely to be male, Black and dually eligible for Medicare. So H.I.V. continues to rage in the South, even though we now have treatments that prevent the transmission of the virus.
On every level, in every way, these forces, whether wittingly or not, worked to prevent the nonwhite population from growing. And yet it did.
As The New York Times reported:
Hispanics accounted for about half the country’s growth over the past decade, up by about 23 percent. The Asian population grew faster than expected — up by about 36 percent, a rise that made up nearly a fifth of the country’s total. Nearly one in four Americans now identifies as either Hispanic or Asian. The Black population grew by 6 percent, an increase that represented about a tenth of the country’s growth. Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose the fastest, jumping to 13.5 million from 6 million.
Meanwhile, the white population, in absolute numbers, declined for the first time in the history of the country.
This data is dreadful for white supremacists. As Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Chicago, told me by phone, “These people experience this kind of shift as an apocalyptic threat.”
Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield. The only option left to white supremacists at this point is to find ways to help white people maintain their grip on power even as they become a minority in the population, and the best way to do that is to deny as many minorities as possible access to that power.