Two maps illustrate the demographic distinctiveness of the white South. The
first shows the close correlation of evangelical Protestantism with the states
of the former Confederacy. The second map is even more revealing.  It
shows the concentration of individuals who identified themselves to census
takers as non-hyphenated “Americans.”

It is clear from the map that most self-described unhyphenated
“Americans” are, in fact, whites of British descent — many if not most of them
descendants of the Scots-Irish diaspora that emigrated from Ulster to the
British colonies in the 1700s.  The point is that many white Southerners
do not think of themselves as having any “ethnicity” at all. Others —
German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans,
Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans — are hyphenated Americans. White
Southerners tend to see themselves as “pure” Americans, “real” Americans,
“normal” Americans. Long after Mayflower descendants were submerged by waves of
 European migration in New England, large regions of the white South
remain the last places in the country where local majorities can trace their
family ancestry back to before 1776 in British America.

As difficult as it may be, outsiders should try to imagine the world as
viewed by conservative white Southerners, who think they are the real Americans
— that is, old-stock British-Americans — and the adherents of the true
religion, evangelical Protestantism. In this perspective, the rest of the
country was taken over by invading hordes of Germans, Irish and other European
tribes in the first half of the 19th century, leaving the South, largely
unaffected by European immigration, as the last besieged pocket of old-stock
British-Americans, sharing parts of their territory with subjugated and
segregated African-Americans.

This local British-American ethno-racial hegemony in the South was
eroded somewhat by the migration of Northeasterners and Midwesterners to the
Sun Belt following World War II and the advent of air-conditioning. And now,
predominantly nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia threatens to
make white Southerners of British Protestant descent a minority in their own
region. Texas and Florida are already majority-minority states. It is only a
matter of time before the same is true of every state in the South. Southern
whites will go from being a minority in the nation as a whole to a minority in
the South itself.

E;mso-bidi-language:
AR-SA”>If Southern culture had a tradition of assimilating immigrants, then
cultural “Southernness” could be detached from any particular ethnicity or
race. One could be an assimilated Chinese-American good old boy or  a Mexican-American redneck.  To some degree, that is happening. And
Southern whites and Southern blacks have always shared many elements of a
common regional culture.

But it is difficult, if not impossible, for many white Southerners to
disentangle regional culture (Southern) from race (white) and ethnicity
(British Protestant). The historical memory of white Southerners is not of
ethnic coexistence and melting-pot pluralism but of ethnic homogeneity and
racial privilege. Small wonder that going from the status of local Herrenvolk
to local minority in only a generation or two is causing much of the white
South to freak out.

The demographic demise of the white South is going to be traumatic for
the nation as a whole. A century ago, when European immigration made old-stock
Yankee Protestants a minority in much of the Northeast and Midwest, one
response was hysterical Anglo-American nativism. In a 1921 essay in Good
Housekeeping titled “Whose Country Is This?,” then Vice President Calvin
Coolidge, an old-stock Yankee from Vermont, explained:  “Biological laws
tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics
propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows
deterioration on both sides.” Patrician Yankees promoted immigration
restriction to prevent “inferior” European races from further contaminating
America. Some eminent Americans of New England descent, including Henry James,
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, all of them nasty anti-Semites, took the extreme
step of expatriating themselves. James and Eliot became British subjects and
Pound made anti-American broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II.

Just as white Southerners today are gerrymandering congressional
districts and contemplating gerrymandering the Electoral College to compensate
for their dwindling numbers, so the outnumbered Yankees of the North sought to
dilute the political influence of European “ethnics” in the early 1900s.  When
the 1920 census revealed that largely European urbanites outnumbered mostly
old-stock Anglo-American rural voters, Congress failed to reapportion itself
for a decade, because of the determination of small-town Anglo-Americans to
minimize the power of “white ethnics.”

By the 1970s, the social divisions among old-stock Anglo-Americans and
the “white ethnics” had faded to the point that most white Americans in the
North had ancestors from several Western European nationalities. Similarly, the
trans-racial melting pot in the U.S. will probably blur or erase many of
today’s racial differences by the middle of the 21st century.

E;mso-bidi-language:
AR-SA”>But the old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest did not accept
their diminished status in their own regions without decades of hysteria and
aggression and political gerrymandering. The third and final defeat of the
white South, its demographic defeat, is likely to be equally prolonged and
turbulent. Fasten your seat belts.