Hope Yen of the Associated Press [Twitter] has a story on what she calls "race laws" that is so bad that John Rosenberg at the Discriminations blog thought it read like an April Fool's joke. See Hope For Change: Minorities Will Remain A Minority Even When They’re A Majority, April 1, 2013

Roderick Harrison, [Email him] a demographer who is black, says he felt pride in Obama's re-election, which to him reaffirmed a historic achievement not only for black Americans but also a broader coalition of racially diverse groups. Still, he worries that demographic change and Obama's success may lead to a tipping point in the opposite direction, where people in the United States are led to assume racial equality has fully arrived.

The strength of minority support behind Obama was aided by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other protections, he said.

The term "minority" often refers to an unequal or disadvantaged status and isn't always about numbers or counts, said Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. The District of Columbia, Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas already have populations of racial and ethnic minorities that collectively add up to more than 50 percent. Across the U.S., more than 11 percent of counties have tipped to "majority-minority" status.

"Minority status is a matter of exclusion from full participation in society, remaining long after a nation becomes 'majority minority,'" Harrison said.

A post-racial US? Court poised to change race laws,April 1, 2013.

So apparently this is how you qualify as a minority: you fail standardized tests at a greater rate than the white population, you commit crimes at a greater rate than the white population, and you earn and save at a lower rate than the white population. That's how you remain a "minority" even when you're in the majority.

That's why Princeton graduate Roderick Harrison is a member of minority group, though he's young enough that   he's been in a position to benefite from affirmative action his whole life, while Hope Yen, who may be the child of immigrants, is not.