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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

Majority Minority?

By Matthew Yglesias
May 17 2007, 11:45 AM ET Comment

The news that DC is shifting from blac k majority to black plurality (via Sommer Mathis) is kind of interesting, but further down they get onto a more intriguing issue, the oft-heard claim that the USA will be "majority-minority" (i.e., plurality white rather than mostly white) by 2040:

But Lang questions whether the term "minority" will be defined the same way by then. Nearly 2 percent of the population is identified as multiracial, he noted. And that percentage is likely to rise with intermarriage among races and ethnic groups. The notion of what is "white" is also likely to shift as it has since the 1900s, when Southern and Eastern Europeans were not counted as white.

"I don't think that officially there will ever be a moment where we're at majority-minority status, because long before you get to that point, the meaning of the term majority will be completely redefined," he said.


Interestingly, I knew the history of shifting definitions of whiteness but managed to never consider the possibility that it might further shift in the future. But, of course, when you think about it that makes a lot of sense.

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