I came across an interesting statistic last week on blood donations.  Of the 400,000 donors last year 78% were White, 16% Black, 2% Hispanic, and 2% Asian.  Whites and Blacks contributed more than their census populations would suggest: Whites are 60% of the U.S. population and Blacks are 12%.  Hispanics, who are 18.5% of the population, and Asians, 7%, did not.

As an aside, this category of “Asians” has yet to be subdivided logically.  If White and Black are clearly racial identities, Asians are a mixed bag usually divided as East and South Asians.  We used to describe East Asians as Orientals or Mongoloid, but those terms are now verboten.  South Asians – Indians, Afghans, Pakistani, etc – are technically Caucasians but rarely categorized as that.  Hispanic is even more confusing.  It’s actually a cultural term (aka “Latino”) meaning they derive from Spanish-speaking countries.  The jury is still out on whether Brazilians, who speak Portuguese, are “Latino” or Hispanic.  To my mind, “Iberian”, the name of the peninsula encompassing the mother countries of Spain and Portugal, covers all bases.  But this logic doesn’t register with our bureaucracy.

To further digress, most of the millions of “Hispanics” who enter our country are a racial mixture of Spaniards and Indigenous peoples descended from Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas.  A better term for them is the Spanish mestizo (”mixed”).  But no one north of the border uses that label. Nor does the Census Bureau recognize the fact that 20 million “Hispanics” are actually White – pure European.  The Census excludes them by name in the category “Non-Hispanic White”, an insulting exclusion when you think about it.  If you add these “Hispanic” Whites to the White category, our proportion of the U.S. population would rise from 60% to 66% – a larger majority!

Back to the topic of diversity and how the different races contribute to our society.

The ‘melting pot’ was supposed to flatten out diversity, creating a stabilized society where assimilation was the goal.  In theory, each group contributes equally in all fields.  But it hasn’t worked out that way.  Some quickly blame it on White discrimination, others consider it a cultural phenomenon.  Discrimination may explain inequalities in the business world and academia, but not in the grunt work of society.

Serving in the U.S. military also shows Whites and Blacks going the extra mile:  Whites 70%, Blacks 17%.  Hispanics are close with 17%, but Asians are only serving at 5%.

This may be a religious thing.  Joining the military may challenge dietary laws for Hindus, Muslims and even White ultra-Orthodox Jews.  (The latter group even avoids service in the Israeli Army.)  Or it may be cultural.  Without a military draft and no family history of service, Asians may prefer to pursue more lucrative and safer endeavors. 

Similarly, police departments are staffed with Whites, Hispanics and Blacks at numbers closely reflecting their populations but only 3% of police are Asian.  Anecdotally, I would guess that volunteer fire departments are heavy on Whites and low on Asians.

Asians – both East and South – are heavily invested in business, medicine, and academic pursuits.  You don’t need government statistics to prove this.  While Irish and Italian immigrants dug ditches when they arrived, today’s Asians go right into small businesses like convenience shops, food trucks, and Ubers.  Their children rarely go into the trades, law, sports, or the military but become doctors, corporate officers, engineers, and scientists. While Asians have made education the key to their success, someone else has to do the grunt work. 

For all the bad-mouthing Euro-Americans get, they still have an underlying diversity of talent and cultural drive within their population to fill in all the gaps in society.  If there is one thing that history teaches us it is that creativity and boldness count as much, if not more, than academic achievement. They are the reasons our Western culture catapulted humanity into the modern world. That didn’t happen in Asia, Africa, or pre-Columbian Americas.

It would be nice if more people acknowledged this. -JLM