Demographics are about the size of a population and how it is composed. What I have not thought about before is misunderstandings around the concept of minority. This means a group consists less than half of the population. The opposite is majority which means more than half. Too many believe minority to mean lower social status. To the opposite there are many countries where a statistical minority has higher social status. Their dominance has decreased over time.
Different countries’ legislation may contribute to this misunderstanding. In the US women are counted as a minority despite consisting half the population. This fools people to believe statistical minorities are closer to 50% too. Moreover, an unrepresentative sample plays a part. People of noticeably recent African origin on average believe themselves to be in majority. In fact such people only consist 12% of the population. They are the largest visible minority the US has. Oftentimes they don’t dare to leave places where they themselves are in majority. Such things perpetual an unrepresentative sample and upholds myths.
Unfortunately, one does not need to be an American to overestimate the size of minorities. It is enough to be unaware of people noticing more if something diverges from the norm. In Europe the unquestionably white are still in great majority. Denmark, Italy, Portugal and Spain have more than 90% white. Belgium, Germany, Norway and Sweden have about 90%. The Netherlands have 87% and Britain 85%. I think France is also comparable to these two. We don’t know exactly since this is not allowed to be registered. In other European countries the fraction is over 95%. Then I count Greeks as white. If I understand it correctly the majority is unquestionably light-skinned.
Africa has neither that many belonging to visible minorities. In South Africa blacks consist about 80% of the population. Namibia has 85% and Angola at least 96%. In the rest of Africa visible minorities consist a negligibly small part of the population. The same pattern recurs in Asia. Indonesia has less than 2% not belonging to the native population. The exceptions are Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Malaysia has 70% natives and Singapore just 14%. But then Singapore is a city-state which developed through immigration. Chinese has settled around a British trading station. Now their descendants consist 74% of the population. Taiwan can in principle be considered a former Chinese colony. There the natives consist as little as 2%.
Minorities are as such much smaller than what some imagine. They can be in majority in certain specific places. This does not mean they are on the way of taking over entire countries. When a new culture has taken over this has not at all happened as those fearing it imagine. Areas people have immigrated to usually already have a population. It has gradually adopted a culture resembling the later immigrated people’s. This process has taken several hundred and sometimes over a thousand years. So a new culture has arisen as the immigrant’s cultural descendants. This is easily misunderstood as their descent being biological. Something it does not have to be to a particularly high degree. To the opposite the mixing increases the farther a culture spreads.
A minority of a few percent can as such not take over during a human lifetime. Then orders of magnitude higher immigration is needed than really is the case. I mean something comparable to when Jews moved to Israel. During the British colonial period nearly 500,000 moved there. In 1948 the population was 2 million, 32% of which was Jews. The first five years after this more than 700,000 immigrated. Then immigration slowed down and some left the country. (I think they had become disappointed of how it was to live there.) During the following 20 years came up to 400,000 from the Arab world. Moreover, a couple of hundred thousand came from the communist-ruled Romania. Other immigration waves to Israel have been in the thousands or tens of thousands. However, they together have made Jews into majority in the country. Today they consist 74% of Israel’s population.
Neither is there so many which die in modern wars. At least not in relation to the affected country’s population. Vietnam had at time of the Vietnam War a population of tens of millions. The number of deaths in the war was less than 3.5 million. Then we still talk about a war lasting for 20 years. Wars lasting shorter than that have proportionally fewer deaths. Modern wars as such can’t make ethnic groups being eradicated although some have tried.
In contrast long-lasting slave trade can affect a national population. Present-day Egyptians consist an intermediate between Berbers and Cushitic peoples. There is a statistically significant difference to the Egyptians of Antiquity. The later had more similarity to Syriacs and Druze. Egyptians from before the Muslim conquest likely resembled the Arabs now inhabiting the Gulf States. Now they are more ambiguously brown. The explanation lies in their conquerors having a particular view of slavery. According to Islam you could not be born a slave. Instead, slave owning families had to buy new ones each generation. Slaves imported to Egypt primarily came from the Horn of Africa. The import of such continued for 1,200 years. This was long enough to change the genetic composition.
On the American continents non-natives has taken over. This was possible because the natives were wiped out by epidemics. Something not preventing the natives from surviving as minority. In some places they are in local or regional majority. But I don’t think they are in majority in any whole countries. Where Europeans has coped with the environmental conditions whites are frequently in majority. Otherwise the population there is more or less mixed. The exceptions are found in the Caribbean. Haiti and Jamaica both has black majority. Strangely, it is whites which are in majority on Cuba. I suspect some of the descendants of slaves have chosen to move from there.
Australia and New Zealand has more than half whites too. In both cases this can be explained by a small pre-colonial population. The Aborigines were never more than a few hundred thousand people. Moreover, most died from starvation and diseases. The crops the ancestors of the Maori had were not adapted to the climate. Areas where a small number survived limited their number. I think they still survived better due to partially Southeast Asian ancestry. Presumably there were more shooting each other to death after having bought guns. Not because they were aggressive but in struggle over limited resources.
People build ideas on right to land on they would have descended biologically from the area’s first inhabitants. Never is it as simple as claiming “we were here first”. This is moreover oftentimes incorrect. To me biological descent does not matter for such rights. In contrast cultural descent may matter in this context. Who has the right to live where is otherwise determined by other things. These are things like residence permit, citizenship, registered ownership and rental agreement. Such are juridically binding but have nothing with descent to do.
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