The United States is becoming more diverse more quickly than anticipated as minority communities grow while white populations shrink for the first time, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday as it released a new trove of data from the decennial count it conducted last year.
The data, which will be used to redraw political boundaries and administer hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state and local programs over the coming decade, shed new light on a population that is growing both more slowly and more dramatically than anticipated.
Here are five takeaways from Thursday’s release:
The white population is shrinking
The number of white Americans is lower today than it was when the 2010 census was conducted. Today, whites account for about 57.8 percent of the population, the first time their share has ever dropped below 60 percent.
Whites have made up a progressively smaller share of the population in almost every census since the first one was conducted in 1790, but the raw number of white residents has never actually dropped in any prior 10-year period.
“The U.S. population is much more multiracial and more […]
There is something so racist about this constant reporting of racial percentages and categories. Race is a made up thing, a cultural artifact, an unscientific story used for and against our fellow human beings. When I grew up in the south in the 50s and 60s I was taught that just because someone “looked white” didn’t mean they were. “You know her grandmother was a light skinned ….”.
We do not need these labels in our modern world, we are better than that, we are one human species on planet Earth who need to learn how to see that fact. Really in modern times some of the most destructive conflicts have been between white people who called themselves, Germans, Brits, French, Americans, Russians….
We are all one race: the Human Race!