By Thomas B. Edsall Aug. 30, 2018 The question of whether America will become a majority-minority nation — and when that might happen — is intensely disputed, of enormous political import and extraordinarily complex. This is exactly the same argument as I’ve responded to before. Two articles that appeared in the opinion section of The Times over the past few years made the case that misleading statistical artifacts used by the Census Bureau have increased the fear of a majority-minority America, a fear that played a crucial role in the 2016 election. Both Richard Alba, of CUNY, in “The Myth of the White Minority,” and Herbert Gans, of Columbia, in “The Census and Right Wing Hysteria,” argued that questionable census classifications led to an undercount of America’s white majority. This anxiety over the decline of white hegemony, in turn, helped propel a segment of conservative voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump.