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Out of mischief or stupidity, federal demographers have taken to predicting that Hispanics are destined to replace African Americans as “Americas largest minority.” The Census Bureau manages both to trivialize the significance of Hispanics to our national life, and to insult African Americans by describing Hispanics as supplanters. To date, the nation's Hispanic political leadership has remained silent about the Census Bureau’s grammar.

  The notion of African Americans as a minority is one born of a distinct and terrible history of exclusion --the sin of slavery, later decades of segregation, and every conceivable humiliation visited upon a people, lasting through generations. To say, today, that Hispanics are becoming America's largest minority is to mock history, to pervert language, to dilute the noun "minority"until it means little more than a population segment.