Worth pondering as you red through the material on the political institutions.
This straddles the line between fact and opinion, but it raises interesting questions about what factors might cause a minority in a state to continue to dominate over a majority despite being in a majoritarian democracy.
See if you can understand those factors and their impact.
Sometime in 2004, the United States Census Bureau tells us, Texas became a majority-minority state. Setting aside the somewhat paradoxical nature of the phrase “majority minority,” the numbers were fairly straightforward. Non-Hispanic white residents, who had dominated the state since their first mass migration in the 1830s, now made up a mere 49.8 percent of Texas’s population. Hispanics made up 34.6 percent, African Americans 12.1 percent, and Asian Americans, American Indians, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders another 4.8 percent. Together, those groups added up to a bit more than 50 percent. An exciting turning point for Texas!
. . . Yet when you pull back and look at our statewide political leaders and the priorities of the Texas Legislature, it’s hard to remember a time when our government was less responsive to many minority residents’ concerns. Try to forget for a moment whether you’re conservative or liberal or something in between. As a simple matter of empirical observation, it’s clear that the majority of minorities in the state vote Democratic and that a disproportionate number of people of color live in our urban areas. But despite the huge demographic shift, Republicans continue to have a lock on the Lege, where they’re undermining our major cities’ ability to govern by, for instance, taking over Houston’s schools and threatening to turn Austin into a capitol district essentially run by the Legislature. Which is to say, the Lege is taking away many minorities’ ability to make their own political choices.
This is a relatively new development. Through the nineties and the first part of this century, Texas Republicans were fairly solicitous of Latinos. When he was governor, George W. Bush was proud of his outreach to Hispanic voters, many of whom didn’t seem to mind the broken Spanish he employed on the campaign trail. His successor, Rick Perry, came out against some of Arizona’s more stringent anti-immigrant measures, saying he believed “it would not be the right direction for Texas.”
Compare this with Governor Greg Abbott’s eager attempt to prove to his base that he could bus more immigrants to northern states, sometimes in the dead of winter, than Ron DeSantis could. Or numerous Republican politicians’ gleeful willingness to build a costly, environmentally ruinous, and ineffective border wall that is damaging an ancient wilderness and a vital and centuries-old border culture.
. . . So why hasn’t Texas made similar moves? There’s no single reason. Gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts has made it more difficult for Democrats to win, as has the rising influence of wealthy conservative donors. A turn to the left by members of Gen Z has prompted many Republicans to move even further to the right. And, of course, there’s the complicated matter of some Latinos moving to the right.
All of those explanations would seem to apply to the other majority-
minority states. And yet New Mexico, which has many conservative Hispanics who are centuries removed from the immigrant experience, offers free college tuition to high school graduates and has relatively strong gun-control laws.
No, something else is at work here, and I think our Texas-size sense of state pride is at the heart of it all. Texas identity, as it has been passed down to generations of schoolchildren, is rooted in a pantheon of mythic freedom fighters, rugged individuals, and devout families. These legends were created by Anglos in the nineteenth century and, with few exceptions, gloss over the many people of color who were trampled along the way. The next chapter of Texas history, by contrast, will be dominated by the rise of Hispanic, Black, and Asian Texans, rendering the history of Anglo dominance a historical moment that is receding in the rearview mirror. And that scares the hell out of some people.
. . . But if we’re going to move into our majority-minority present and future together, it might make sense to recast that history as a story that belongs to all of us and rid ourselves of the damaging notion that our forebears were freer than we are. In recent years a number of scholars, such as Monica Muñoz Martinez, have reclaimed the stories of Mexicans and Mexican Americans killed along the border by vigilantes, including many Texas Rangers. Annette Gordon-Reed has brought new attention to Juneteenth’s complicated legacy. Hispanic historians and intellectuals have long challenged the myths constructed about the Alamo’s Anglo combatants, and in response you can now hear a very different version of those stories when you visit the Alamo.
