White, and in the Minority

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In a country where whites will lose majority status in about a quarter-century, and where research suggests that demographic anxiety is contributing to many of the social fissures polarizing the United States, from immigration policy to welfare reform to the election of President Trump, the story of the coming decades will be, to some degree, the story of how white people adapt to a changing country. It will be the story of people like Heaven Engle and Venson Heim, both of whom were beginning careers on the bottom rung of an industry remade by Latinos, whose population growth is fueling that of America, and were now, in unusually intense circumstances, coming to understand what it means to be outnumbered.

They didn’t know the heavy burden of discrimination familiar to members of historically oppressed minority groups, including biased policing and unequal access to jobs and housing. But some of the everyday experiences that have long challenged millions of black, Latino and immigrant Americans — the struggle to understand and be understood, feeling unseen, fear of rapid judgments — were beginning to challenge them, too.

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Studies have shown how some whites, who are dying faster than they’re being born in 26 states, react when they become aware of a tectonic demographic shift that will, with little historic precedent, reconfigure the racial and ethnic geography of an entire country. They swing to the right, either becoming conservative for the first time, or increasingly conservative — “politically activated,” explained Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, who among others found that white Democrats voted for Trump in higher numbers in places where the Latino population had recently grown the most.

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They feel threatened, even if not directly affected by the change, and adopt positions targeting minorities out of “fears of what America will look like,” said Rachel Wetts of the University of California at Berkeley, who argued in one study that recent calls by whites to cut welfare were born of racial resentment inflamed by demographic anxiety, even though whites benefit from the social safety net as well.

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So much of Lebanon County, population 140,000, was undergoing what local historian Adam Bentz called a “demographic transformation,” but not Fredericksburg, and not its 1,500 residents. Over the past two decades, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans had surged into nearby Lebanon city, either from New York or the Caribbean, attracted by cheap housing, an established Latino community, and food-processing plants that had become increasingly, if not mostly, staffed by Latinos, because, as one former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity put it, “White people didn’t want to work in the stinky chicken shop.” Fredericksburg, meanwhile, home to some plants, was still 95 percent white, still overwhelmingly conservative. Downtown amounted to a library, a bar named the Fredericksburg Eagle Hotel, banners emblazoned with the bald eagle, signs that said, among other things, “NOTICE: This place is politically incorrect,” and houses flying the Confederate flag.

Heaven looked out the window. This was her town. Her people. Was it so wrong to want to be among them? Was it so wrong to want to work with them? Was it so wrong to refuse to learn a new language? She had taken some Spanish in high school, but had dropped it, not because she had any animosity toward the language or the people who spoke it, but because that just wasn’t her — that was other parts of Lebanon County, not Fredericksburg.

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What Heaven didn’t know was that Salvador agreed with her. She thought it was her responsibility to learn English, too. {snip} But when she finally got here in April 2017, all she’d found was a sick mother, who had sponsored her green card but whom she now had to care for, endless household chores and a 45-minute commute from their home in Reading, Pa., to a chicken plant where there was no need to learn English because everyone spoke Spanish. {snip}

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There were days when Venson imagined what might await America. This would be a nation where whites weren’t only a minority, but disadvantaged, punished for their collective crimes, because, as he put it, “we haven’t been the nicest race.” Speaking Spanish wouldn’t just be beneficial, but essential, and people like him would never be able to recover from what they didn’t know. “Screwed for life,” he said.

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But since he’d started at Bell & Evans, and been plunged into another America, this one less familiar, race had been on his mind all of the time. He thought about it when Heaven said she wanted to quit. He thought about it when his mother vented about finding jobs for the immigrants at her temp agency, and when he watched the news on his big-screen television in his room, amid his sports posters, work boots and video games.

He didn’t understand why people said the United States should allow in more immigrants. If a Syrian needed asylum from a murderous regime, then yes, the country should help. But anyone crossing the border seeking jobs, even government assistance — that didn’t seem fair. What about the people already here? What about the homeless? What about him? He was the one, after all, whose career had been shaped by Washington policymakers, who he believed didn’t know what it was like to be an outsider in your own community — a feeling that had become as ordinary to him as the wrench in his back pocket, which he now took out to tinker with a malfunctioning batter machine.

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[Editor’s Note: A very large part of the original story is “human interest” material about the difficulty English-speakers have working in an environment where everyone speaks Spanish.]