For a country that fancies itself as a melting pot, America has a curiously narrow way of breaking down its demographics.

Oh, we can take hyphenated ethnicity to endless extremes, but what it all boils down to is this: Either you’re white or you aren’t.

A report this week from the U.S. Census Bureau provides an updated breakdown of how America looks when viewed through a cultural lens. The disclosure that captured the most attention? White Anglo-Saxons are a shrinking portion of the U.S. population.

No surprise there. But as the U.S. population closes in on 300 million – which by Census Bureau estimates it will reach in a couple of months – those White Anglo-Saxons’ remaining time as a majority of Americans is shrinking.

Even though this country has long been one of the most culturally diverse in the world, the demographic tipping point just mentioned has pushed some observers to conclude that white Americans are about to become a minority. In several states, whites account for less than 60 percent of the population. In Hawaii, less than 50 percent. The number of immigrants in American households, of whatever race, is up 16 percent since the 2000 census.

Using figures like those to deduce that white Americans will be a minority has the uneasy feel of an us-them division. The flaw in the approach is, of course, that “non-white” defines people only by what they aren’t rather than what they are.

Indeed, there are a host of ethnic, cultural and racial classifications whose members differ from each other as much as they differ from whites. For that matter, the white population has significant divisions of its own, a substantial influx of Russian and other Eastern European immigrants. Historically, Germans, Irish, Italians and other European transplants have taken turns feeling the sting of discrimination and prejudice targeted at minorities.

The challenge facing Americans of all backgrounds is how to get beyond the fixation on racial division, especially as tallied in raw numbers. Census reports should not be a call to action.

Most important, we need to measure our success as a melting pot by more meaningful achievements – community leadership, economic prosperity, political participation, civic engagement.

A good place to start might be by redefining what we mean by “minority.” We might well find out that all of us are minorities. Or, better yet, that none of us is.