Melville Cooke

'We are more than sand onthe seashore, we are more than numbers.'

- Bob Marley, Wake Up and Live

It was a very small thing that got me interested in the declining white population somewhere in the mid-1990s. In one of a number of short quotes that Time magazine carried, the mayor of an Italian village said he had tried everything, from subsidising milk to providing diapers and still the population of the area under his jurisdiction was going down.

A few years later, also in Time, I read a story about Russia's development after communism, in which it was mentioned that the projected population (I do not remember up to when) was revised downwards by 20 million, as sufficient children were not being born.

Shortly after I read that, based on current population trends, whites will be a minority in the United States by 2050. And I thought damn, now I have to live until I am 80, just to celebrate.

Funny

I find it enormously funny that a race which has slaughtered, exploited and brutalised darker people from the Incas in what is now Peru to the aborigines in Australia, the Tainos in the Caribbean to the real Indians in India and, of course, the continent of Africa, could be so reduced not by force of arms, but simply not reproducing enough to sustain itself. Of course, it is not a matter of revenge on those who Christianised and colonised, as they are long dead.

And, ironically, the very few white people I come in contact with are decent human beings, on the face of it. Still, I just can't help my sense of humour.

And whites are certainly already a world 'minority', a term thrown about in the U.S. especially, which simply means 'non-white'. The cultural domination of whites, especially in the films pouring out of Hollywood and making a splash on many channels of incessant cable, as well as their dominance in world politics, often makes it seem as if there are a huge number of them. Not so. As we head (no pun intended) up to seven billion people in the world, the notion of the marching Chinese holds true.

Told in many ways, how I first read it was that, theoretically, if all the Chinese people in China were lined up four in a row and marched past a particular point, then they would never stop, as those waiting in line would have children and they would grow up to have children and so on.

Added to the difficulties of the whites is the problem of their own prosperity. The former colonised are moving in droves to the fountains of financial success, hoping to catch even a few droplets.

Brain drain

On this side of the world we call it a brain drain it is a darned good opportunity to get furniture on the cheap, what with all those 'migrating' sales. Miss Lou called it 'colonisation in reverse', though many may have missed the very serious implications behind her poetic treatment of the Windrush generation and their descendants.

One definition of 'minority' in the dictionary I have is 'a relatively small group of people differing from others in the society of which they are a part in race, religion, language, political persuasion, etc.' Of course, when it is slung around in white-dominated societies, it is automatically restricted to race and implies 'does not count for much'.

So, when the whites literally do not count for much in the U.S. by 2050, as currently projected (and who knows, by 2500 they may be very much more than the froth on the waves), shall we refer to them in the press as a minority? Or shall we do as we now do in Jamaica, hold the rare breed in high esteem?

Next week: The white minority continued.