Much is being made about this country’s current political divide and a brewing war of cultures. Much of it is wrong. You might say it is fake news.
Voters in last week’s mid-term election elected the most diverse membership ever to the U.S. Congress. While the 435 members of the House of Representatives are still overwhelmingly white and male, a record 100 women also were elected. Also elected were two Native Americans, 39 Latinos, 50 African-Americans, 15 Asian-Americans and other minority representatives.
The political makeup is very close to 50-50, with a near equal split of gun rights advocates and gun control proponents. There are 31 conservative Freedom Caucus (Tea Party) members and a near equal number of new freshmen left-liberals. There is also a record number of LGBTQ members in the newest U.S. Congress.
Since the seating of the first Congress in 1789, which consisted of 59 white men, our government and this country has been transforming into a nation of more and more diversity. All current population and cultural trends now suggest that pace of diversity will quicken.
Building a wall on the Mexican border or trying to deny entry to foreign-born people with American dreams will not stop this trend. California has had a minority-majority population since 2000, and the entire United States is projected to have a non-white majority by year 2044 — with or without a wall built by Trump.
The makeup of the House of Representative should tell us a lot about our country. It should live up to the ideal of being the “people’s government” — of, by and for all of us and not just the few.
This year’s youngest member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, age 29, from New York City. The oldest member is Sam Johnson, 88, of Texas. The average age is 57. Another younger member is Ilhan Omar, 36, a refugee from Somalia, who grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S. in 1995 at age 14. Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first female Muslims elected to Congress.
Two female Native Americans were elected this year to Congress. One is Sharice Davids, a lesbian from Kansas. The other is Deb Haaland, a single mom from a military family, from New Mexico.
It wasn’t until 1916 that the first non-male was elected to Congress. Jeanette Pickery Rankin was elected from Wyoming, the first state that granted women the right to vote. It was 50 years later, in 1968, when the first black woman was elected: Shirley Chisholm from New York. The very first blacks elected to Congress took place in 1870, during the Reconstruction period following the U.S. Civil War. Hiram Revels was the first Native American elected, also in 1870. The first elected representative to announce he was gay was Massachusetts’ Barney Frank in 1987, after already having served in Congress for seven years.
Through the long history of our U.S. Congress, the 2018 mid-term elections included more “firsts” than perhaps any other time. But we must admit, while we grow more diverse on the whole, there are great regional and political divides. The country’s urban areas are the most racially mixed, while wide rural expanses are mostly white and conservative. Pending final mid-term outcomes, Oklahoma, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Arkansas have all Republican members of Congress. All of New England is Democratic, except for one congressman.
What is happening here? Looking out from our blue and green northern California, we may be color blind to the redder, whiter and Trumpier parts of America.
No matter the shades of politics or skin color, our nation has been growing in diversity since its founding. It has been a history not without violence, intolerance or political upheaval. But our U.S. Constitution and majority rule have won out, and the doors to our Congress keep opening wider, first to ex-slaves, then women and now Muslims, LGBTQ and all others.
We do not see a culture war. We only see a culture, our American one.
Rollie Atkinson is the publisher of The Windsor Times.
