Richard Alba - The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream

1. xi

No man is an island, entire of itself, wrote the great English metaphysical poet John Donne. Likewise, one could say that no author (of nonfiction, at least) writes alone, regardless of what the title page says.

Based on ideas I have pursued for decades, this book has been enriched by many exchanges and collaborations over the years with a community of other scholars, including Paul Attewell, Maurice Crul, Nancy Foner, Herb Gans, Phil Kasinitz, Frans Lelie, Douglas Massey, John Mollenkopf, Ann Morning, Dowell Myers, Victor Nee, Jeff Reitz, Roxane Silberman, Mary Waters, and now Van Tran, whom I can happily call a departmental colleague. Nancy, Phil, Jeff, and Van read the entire manuscript and provided numerous helpful suggestions. John and Mary read some key chapters and did the same.

Many other colleagues and friends read all or part of the book in a developmental stage. Jan Willem Duyvendak, Todd Gitlin, and Michael Olneck read the complete version, as did John Iceland and Dowell Myers on behalf of the Press. Toms Jimnez and Victor Ray read portions. At the Census Bureau, Eric Jensen, Nicholas Jones, Kimberly Mehlman Orozco, and their colleagues in the Expert Group on Racial Diversity at the Population Division gave me a detailed set of comments on the chapters most concerned with demographic data issues. I am grateful for the many suggestions from all of these readers.

Paul Starr and Ken Prewitt played critical roles in the germination of the project. At an early stage, when my ideas were focused mainly on census data problems and their implications for the majority-minority conception of the future, Paul invited me after a talk at Princeton to write an article about the issues for The AmericanProspect. He then solicited and published comments from several social scientists, among them Ken, a distinguished political scientist who is also a former Census Bureau director.

Ken and I subsequently formed a partnership to advance the discussion, and we organized a conference to that end. That conference was held in December 2016 at the Russell Sage Foundation, with its support, and resulted in an issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science entitled What Census Data Miss about American Diversity (May 2018). I am very grateful to Sheldon Danziger, the foundations president, for this support, and to Aixa Cintrn-Vlez, program director, and Leana Chatrath, a senior program officer, for their efforts to bring the conference about. The participants in the conference included many prominent demographers and social scientists, who contributed numerous insights about improvements that could be made to our demographic data system; the Census Bureau professionals who attended, along with Katherine Wallman, then the chief statistician of the United States, enriched the conversation afterwards. Thomas Kecskemethy played a vital role in shepherding the conference papers into a first-rate volume, whose papers are repeatedly cited in this book.

I owe a special debt to the professionals of the Census Bureau. There is no way to make the argument of this book without confronting the flaws in our current demographic data system and the part they play in the distorted picture that Americans receive of ethno-racial change in the nation. Inevitably, and despite my best efforts to depict the constraints under which the Census Bureau operates, an account of these flaws reads as criticism of the bureaus practices. Yet I have consistently found the professionals there to be cordial, willing to listen, and helpful, and I have great respect for the work they do. Especially critical for the development of my thinking was a multiple-day visit to the bureau in 2018 as part of its Summer at Census program. Eric Jensen, Nicholas Jones, and Roberto Ramirez were important conversation partners at that time. During the visit, Larry Sink made me aware of the utility of birth certificate data, and he, along with Aliya Saperstein of Stanford University, steered me away from potential problems in using them. My talk to a bureau audience during my visit provided vital reassurance that I was on the right course.

Of the other talks I have given based on materials that appear in this book, the most memorable took place before a home audience, at the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. There, some good friends, Deborah Balk and Ann Morning, engaged me in an intense conversation afterwards. They convinced me to reassess how I was presenting the role of the Census Bureau.

I consistently found colleagues willing to take extra steps to assist me as I assembled the evidence presented here. Nathaniel Kang of the Higher Education Research Institute of UCLA made the parental ethno-racial origin data from the 20012003 freshman survey available to me. Brian Duncan generated some data I requested from the Current Population Survey analysis he and Steve Trejo carried out (discussed in . I thank DVera Cohn for serving as a liaison to other Pew professionals. Joseph Pereira of the CUNY Center for Urban Research was a key resource for demographic data preparation at an early stage of the project. My cousin Stephen Sanacore was my informant for valuable insights about the Uniondale Volunteer Fire Department.