California history
The Chronicle or the Examiner (am I the only person who still can't tell them apart readily?) had a strange juxtaposition pretty recently. At the bottom of one page was an article which proclaimed that, "for the first time", whites were not a majority in the state of California. At the top of the same page was an article about a research result that the San Francisco Bay is the saltiest that it's been "in 400 years".
This is a little bizarre, I thought. Clearly, the top article is admitting that California history does extend at least 400 years (OK, it wasn't a state then...), because there was this San Francisco Bay here then and it had a certain salinity and that salinity 400 years ago is a part of California history. And it's interesting! All this time all of these other things were happening, and you know, San Francisco Bay kept on having a salinity! The Bay continued having various amounts of salt in it all that while, and there's this amazing sense of continuity over four centuries of San Francisco Bay saline history. But the bottom article is saying that California history is much shorter, really, because this year is "the first time" that whites haven't been a majority of the people in California. But 400 years ago, whites weren't a majority in California.
I'm sure that the Associated Press would say that they just meant "since California has been a U.S. state" and that of course whites haven't always been a majority in California, the place. This still raises a question, though: why are racial demographics only interesting since California became part of the U.S., but environmental factors, geophysical factors, are interesting before that too?
