Stop dreaming of a ‘white’ Christmas

I remember Christmas 2005 because of the doubt as to whether it would be called “Christmas” at all. I was twelve and living in Birmingham, and all anyone could talk about at school that year was how Christmas was going to be renamed “Winterval.”

Kids parroted their parents’ misinformed dinner conversations about how the Muslims (and, by extension, all Asians) were taking over Christmas, and the City Council was so scared of ethnic minorities it was happy to be taken over by the PC Brigade. As I underwent a minor identity crisis (I’m mixed Asian/white), I heard a whispered fear accompanying these speculations. This was all happening because the afore-labelled ethnic minorities soon wouldn’t be minorities at all. The fear was that, in Birmingham, white people would no longer be the majority.

The fear of white minoritism pops up every now and again in a sentence like this: “By [insert year], white people will be a minority in [insert city]!” The Daily Mail reported that white children were a minority in schools in Birmingham and Leicester at the start of the 2011-12 academic year “because of immigration” (how insightful). A thoroughly ignorant article in the same publication claimed that Christmas had actually been renamed Winterval in some places. A correction had to be issued, much to the glee of the New Statesman.

Meanwhile, actual research carried out at the University of Leeds suggests that, even by 2051, only 1 in 5 people in Britain will not be white. More research carried out by Professor David Coleman of Oxford University suggests the year of the white minority will be 2066.

A similar story can be heard in the US, where Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly hides his all too obvious regret that African-Americans can vote by saying “the white establishment is now the minority.” He continues: the “Hispanic vote…and women will probably break President Obama’s way” because they “feel they are entitled to things, and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

Fox News also spread propaganda that this white minoritism was the reason for Obama’s win, because black people only voted for him because he is black – as though it would be insane to vote for someone who understood your unique and often overlooked struggles. Much has been made across the Atlantic of the most recent census showing that babies of racial and ethnic minorities now account for more than half of births.

Why exactly are some white people so scared of one day becoming a minority? It’s because they have a guilty awareness that they treat minorities as second-class citizens, and wouldn’t want to be treated that way themselves. There is a very simple solution to this fear, which you should heed if white minoritism keeps you awake at night: just forget this majority/minority nonsense and treat people well. White people don’t own the land to the west of the (Western) map, and they have no innate right to remain a majority there. Humans are nomadic and have always moved around the world.

Traditionally, white people haven’t even done so badly as a minority. They were certainly a minority in many countries they controlled throughout the existence of the Empire. They were a minority on the slave plantations. Arguably, white people have been at their most powerful as a minority, so what’s to be scared of?

White people aren’t anywhere near being a minority, in the UK or the US. The fear isn’t that white people will be a minority; it’s that they won’t be a majority. They believe their land and their country is inherently theirs, and if 50 percent of the passports don’t have white faces on them, their country will change beyond recognition.

Nobody should fear being in a minority, because that is not what dictates how you are treated. Minorities can still be in power, and majorities can still be oppressed. Our society has an unhealthy obsession with numbers and often fails to understand that there are people behind statistics. And people should be treated with respect, regardless of where they lie on the bell curve.