Richard Alba on The Thought Project - Episode 86

CUNY Graduate Center

This episode of The Thought Project features Graduate Center Distinguished Professor Richard Alba (Sociology), whose latest book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream, is out this week. Alba’s voluminous research for the book began in 2015, represented by a New York Times opinion-editorial, “The Myth of a White Minority,” in which he argued that the American mainstream was being redefined by increasing numbers of people with mixed-race family backgrounds. The looming “white minority” alleged by polarized voices in American politics is short-sighted according to Alba, who reveals a fluid multi-ethnic and multi-racial American society and mainstream. Alba’s book crystallizes the question of how Americans self-identify, which is constrained by census categories that don’t acknowledge people of mixed heritages. Alba asserts that racism continues to plague America and offers policy options to ameliorate and address these challenges to the expansion of America’s mainstream.