The Demographics of Heaven
About 100,825,272,791 people have died over the course of human history. This is how data editor Mona Chalabi decided to answer a reader’s question of what the demographics of heaven would be ”assuming that all who expire are promoted to a peaceful afterlife.” Chalabi didn’t include a breakdown along current definitions of racial categories. Rather, she focused on the demographic basics of “age, location and sex.” Most folks who’ve ever died did so when they were young and in a more rural setting. Both urbanization and longer life spans are new developments for homo sapiens. Although “more boy babies are born than girl babies” today worldwide, Chalabi didn’t have enough data to make a guess at what the ratio would be inside the pearly gates.
Americans are taught from day one that we, and everyone else, are born into a specific racial category. So why did Chalabi not dig into what those racial percentages would look like across over 50,000 years of human history? If race categories are concrete and biologically defined, then demographers could theoretically try to arrive at loose proportions of people who were white, Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander, Mulatto, Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, European, free colored, free whites, all other free persons, white-Asian or white-some other race. Surely.
Those are all race categories that have appeared on different U.S. censuses since the first one taken in 1790 up to today. Race, as it turns out, is a political creation. It is a fluid demographic measure that changes over time based on the political desires of the moment. Race is an excellent political tool to differentiate certain groups of homo sapiens from other groups of homo sapiens. One group can claim superiority over the other and create political systems and structures to enable and enforce that claim. A convenient and destructive myth of inherent difference, over time, becomes accepted as fact. Even when The Human Genome Project revealed that, as former President Bill Clinton stated, “human beings, regardless of race, are 99.9 percent the same,” people, including politicians, don’t believe in our shared human sameness.
Believing in the myth of racial hierarchies makes sense if you “see black and brown people doing most of the menial jobs, dying younger from most diseases, and filling most of the prison cells,” explains Dorothy Roberts in Fatal Invention — “it is easy for many to see race and believe it must be part of nature.” The unholy, un-heavenly and un-Christian truth is that American policies enable one group of humans and oppress other groups of humans. Structural inequality is our society’s norm not because of race, but because of power.
Yet, the tides are changing.
Tsunamis of supremacist chaos
In the United States, we are experiencing accelerated changes in society due to globalization, technology, environment and demographics. While all areas are important and interact with each other, we will focus on the dramatic demographic shift that is occurring. It is a change that — if we don’t proactively plan for it — will wreak havoc on our society.
America is set to become a majority minority nation by 2045. Meaning the white majority will become a minority group. Some parts of the U.S. are already living in this future situation. Clark County in Nevada “is the county that most looks like the U.S. of 2060 in terms of race, Hispanic ethnicity, age and gender,” writes Niraj Chokshi and Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. However, some parts of the country are living in the nation’s demographic past. Tooele County in Utah is an eight hour drive from Clark County yet “most closely resembles the younger, less diverse national population of 1971.”
This demographic shift is not inherently dangerous — race is a political construct and people labeled as non-white are not more violent than folks labeled as white people. However, because our society’s structural power dynamics are based on the myth of race, we have a tsunami of danger heading our way. Whites have traditionally been in control of both material wealth and political power in the U.S. However, as minorities grow in numbers and start to exert their newfound social, political, and economic power this causes tension and conflict throughout the white power establishment. When whites feel their dominance is threatened, they become more and more radicalized.
In 2021, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that the top domestic violent extremist threat is from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.” The Department of Homeland Security had warned Congress and the public about the white supremacist threat in their October 2020 report, but the President at the time, Donald Trump, pressured the agency to “downplay the threat” writes W.J. Hennigan for TIME. A few months later, on January 6, 2021, “a largely white crowd, many of them armed with bats, shields and chemical spray” invaded the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to keep president elect Joe Biden from entering his new role explains Sabrina Tavernise and Matthew Rosenberg in The New York Times. Five people died during the riot. Tragically, this wasn’t an isolated incident. “Since 9/11, white supremacists and other far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic terrorists,” reports Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan for TIME. The coming tsunami of chaos and violence from whites who are losing their political power is just beginning.
The issue is not only that whites do not want to share power, it’s that they fear they will be entirely excluded from power, explains Monica Duffy Toft in Foreign Policy. Whites do not want the system they are currently using to be used against them. Toft draws parallels between the U.S.’s current conflict between racialized groups and what contributed to the Soviet Union’s fall. Male, orthodox Russian Slavs were mythologized as the superior group based on their “sex, national origin, and faith.” However, their birth rates declined while ethnic minority birth rates increased and minority groups protested their lack of political power. This resentment contributed to the fraying of Soviet society. Toft says we can learn from the Soviet experience and work to prevent the same outcome from happening in the U.S. The Republican Party is shifting their policies to appeal to a smaller and more extremist base in an attempt to delay the inevitable power-sharing to come. Toft explains that although this “waning in-group” fears their exclusion, that is not what usually happens. “…[R]ising identity groups rarely vote as a bloc…[and] they are relatively unlikely to enact violence against the fading majority. Rather, violence often goes the other way around.”
We still have the opportunity to heed the warnings coming from within the highest levels of government. We know this demographic shift will continue to take place and we can take proactive action to reconcile old ways of thinking with the reality of the U.S.’s modern, diverse face. “One-in-ten babies living with two parents were multiracial in 2013, up from just 1% in 1970” reports Gretchen Livingston for Pew Research Center. This multi-racial reality is a problem for our nation’s collective identity — but it doesn’t have to be. White Christian dominance is fading and that is terrifying for people who believe that whiteness is superior. Yet, that old superiority myth can be unlearned. We have a choice to continue the downward spiral of an “us versus them” narrative. Or we can create bridges across our differences — both perceived and real — and become a nation united in creating abundance for all of its citizens.
