ometime in the next three years, California will
become the third state in which whites are a minority. But today, just
20 percent of the state's voters are nonwhite. They are younger,
politically disorganized and more likely not to be citizens. As such,
nonwhites-- blacks, Latinos, Asians--have yet to exert political power
that matches their numbers. White voters, meanwhile, keep passing
ballot measures aimed at holding onto public resources for
themselves.
This is the volatile starting point for Dale Maharidge's engrossing story of contemporary California, The Coming White Minority: California's Eruptions and the Nation's Future (Times Books, 1996; $25). Maharidge, a journalism lecturer at Stanford, brings the state's conflicts and growing pains to life through the eyes of four Californians: Martha Escutia, a Latina assemblywoman from Los Angeles; Bill Shepherd, the white owner of a small business in Orange county; Don Northcross, a black police officer from Sacramento County; and Maria Ha, a Vietnamese student of Chinese descent at UC-Berkeley.
Maharidge has purposely chosen this quartet for its mainstream values and centrist politics. All are immigrants to California and all have internalized the California dream. They believe in individual responsibility and hard work. Ha, the student, summarizes the ethic: "You work hard, you don't cheat, you do everything right, get a good education," she says. "I hope I keep some of that stuff."
If these four moderates shared a common race, they might agree on most political issues. But through their own ethnic prisms, each sees a very different California. "I don't mind that we have Mexicans here," says Shepherd, the businessman. "But whites are being taken over by a culture that is not assimilating. The dominant culture does not want graffiti everywhere. . . . It does not want laundry hanging out windows."
Assemblywoman Escutia has another perspective. "You've got to realize that the only way whites will come into the picture is if they see an economic self-interest with blacks and Latinos and Chinese working together," she says. "The security of the country is at risk if you do not train a viable segment of the labor pool who's going to be the bulk of the labor force in the future."
The different perceptions of what California is--and what it should become--arise as much from the state's past as from its high-tech, sprawling present. The virtue of this book lies in showing that each of these views is valid.
Maharidge makes the portrait richer through interviews with academics and political activists. He lays bare the conflicting brands of "multiculturalism" emerging from Latino, Asian-American and black groups, and he dissects the complexities of white politics. He includes a description of the "nationalist" visions growing in each minority community, from Aztl