EDITORIAL THE MINORITY MAJORITY OUR SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHICS ARE PROOF OF THEIR INSIGNIFICANCE.

WELL, it's official. Minorities are minorities no more.

Or perhaps more aptly put, whites no longer are the majority.

However you phrase it, statewide, nonwhites outnumber whites, who now constitute 49.8 percent of the state population.

And the significance of that little datum is ... nothing.

Such diversity is nothing new for Los Angeles County, where minorities became the majority a decade ago and non-Latino whites now account for only 33.1 percent of the population, compared with 41.6 percent for Latinos, 13.4 percent for Asians, and 11.2 percent for African-Americans.

And so here, where the majority of the population has long been nonwhite, we see how meaningless the diversifying trend really is.

The economy continues to hum along, wages are up, unemployment is down and schools are showing small signs of improvement.

In short, fears that steep demographic shifts would devastate the culture and the economy have proved false.

Racial diversity enriches a community; failure to deal with the challenges people face impoverishes it.

Even as our demographics change, the same old problems persist. Our local governments are corrupt, incompetent or both. Our schools still underperform. The sidewalks continue to crumble, without a policy or a plan.

Different racial statistics, same old California, same old Los Angeles.

That should serve as a lesson that racial statistics really don't have the value some assign to them. Maybe it's time to stop counting and recounting the number of this or that ethnic group on every college campus, or putting racial-designation boxes on every government form.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate diversity is to stop obsessing over it and get down to the hard work of solving people's problems.