For years now, affluent (mostly white) Americans have been moving back into our nation's "inner cities," those once-scary locations populated only by forgotten minorities and a distinct lack of quality condo development. And poor people, in turn, have been decamping for the suburbs, those once-deluxe bastions of white flight. Slumburbia is no longer our future. It is our present.
The complete and total collapse of the global economy had at least one upside for Americans: it briefly stopped them from moving to brand new housing developments in hellish southwestern desert exurbs. Only for a few years though, alas. The great migration of Americans towards hot places their children will come to loathe is back on!
You can never be too rich or too thin or have enough portmanteaus for your post-adolescent generation. It's Twixters, now. Who is a Twixter? Everyone, probably. Any woman who has ever listened to music while wearing a hat is a Twixter. Any man who has ever looked at a picture of Mila Kunis is a Twixter. You are, just for having read the word. Welcome to the Twixter generation. Here is your knit cap and sense of purposelessness. Characteristics include "ESPN" and over-employment.
If there is one thing that brings joy to my heart, it is charting the growth of newly invented genres. You can argue over whether trend pieces about "new adult" fiction or "baby boomer" literature are describing truly original developments or ginned-up marketing terms with no relation to measurable changes in book-buying practices (in fact, our very own Katie Baker has already done so in a very neat analysis). But at a certain point the distinction becomes meaningless; talk about "new adult" fiction long enough and Amazon will eventually dedicate a department to it.
The US Census Bureau, a government department whose primary function now is to scare elderly white people, has taken a look into the future, decades hence, and determined—using the science of mathematical projection—exactly when white folks will lose America.
As my colleague Cord Jefferson notes, the 2012 election returns have been widely interpreted as the ratification of an ethno-political realignment that first occurred in 2008: Black, Latino, and Asian voters are firmly in the Democratic column, and they will remain so in ever greater numbers. The white population is shrinking relative to its brown counterparts, and demography is destiny. Brown people are Democrats, white people are Republicans, and brown people are having more babies. Good luck, GOP!
When we hear about unmarried young couples living together in sin, we're like "Sure, kids these days are living in sin, rejecting god, and fornicating nightly in Lucifer's glory, what else is new?" But now we hear that older couples are also living together in sin. Aren't you older couples old enough to know the teachings of Jesus, about not living in sin?
Here's a novel trend: white people in America are losing relative to non-white people in America, in some way. What?? Yes, of course, this trend involves poor and/ or undereducated white people, but still. You don't see that too often. So—why are the white high school dropouts dying younger now?
All you need to know about the very latest trends here in the American Dream of USA of America™ is this: love is dead, marriage is an anachronism, the family has disintegrated, and all is chaos. But we're making good racial progress!
It is not hard to explain the prevailing demographic trends in America over the past decade or so: the inflating bubble caused Americans to rush further and further out into the far-flung suburbs in order to purchase homes, to live the American dream; construction and lending skyrocketed along the way; when the bubble burst, our nation was left with millions of homeowners stranded far, far out in the lonely exurbs, with homes they can't really afford, as the wealthy flee back into the cities. And now, we simply wait for the Slumburbs to flower, in all of their awful glory.
The internet portal with the most embarrassing name, Yahoo!, has launched a web app for visualizing its most popular headlines for various reader demographics. A recent survey of Yahoo's most popular stories for various age groups turned into a chilling tableau of American anxieties at every juncture of life.
What an age we live in! Whereas America sprung full-formed from the breast of Jesus as a white Christian nation in 1776, now we have all types of weird foreign people here. And we welcome them, now that they've gotten in despite our considerable national spirit of xenophobia! Middle America is no longer as white as it's always been (since we killed the natives!).
If you have to be alive in America today, you really want to be a wealthy middle-aged white male ensconced in an exurban hideaway surrounded by high walls and mile upon mile of coiled razor. What you don't want to be is... anything other than that. Until the revolution comes, at least.
In the "olden days" of this great nation—when we still had that pioneering spirit—young Americans, upon turning 14 or whatever, would immediately get married, have a bunch of kids, and settle into a life of poverty, scratching a living from the harsh and pitiless soil. Things change! Now we're all too fat to scratch anything from the soil. We scratch our poverty-level subsistence from Wal-Mart. And we're free to marry people of different races! But we're all still poor.
We're going to come right out and say it: our urban neighborhoods are being overrun by minorities, and they're ruining everything. Bushwick? Full of minorities. Bed-Stuy? Infested. Even Harlem. All ruined by hordes of minorities. (White people.)
