RACIAL DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE UNITED STATES

The 'United States' is a diverse country racially. It has a majority of persons of White ancestry spread throughout the country. Racial and ethnic minorities are concentrated in coastal and metropolitan areas. The black or African American population is concentrated in the South with 70 percent of blacks living there, making up 20 percent of the population of the region. Asian Americans are concentrated mainly in the Western coastal areas. Hispanics or Latinos, an ethnic group with a membership that cuts across all the races, are concentrated in the Southwest, making up 25 percent of the region's population.
As of 2005, four states — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas — have "minority-majorities," where non-Hispanic whites are not a majority of their state populations. Ten other states have minority groups at over a quarter of their state populations, and 15 states where non-Hispanic whites are over 70 percent of their state populations.
In 2006, the United States became the third nation in world history to reach 300 million people, behind China and India, each of which has over a billion people.^[1][2]
The spectacular growth of the Hispanic population through immigration and higher birth rates are noted as a partial factor for the US’ population gains in the last quarter-century. The 2000 census also found Native Americans at their highest population ever, 4.5 million, since the U.S was founded in 1776.^[3]

Contents

Racial groups

Ethnicity

Racial identity and categorization pros and cons

Racial makeup of U.S. population

Majority group

Minority groups

Hispanics or Latinos

Black Americans

Asian Americans

Two or more races

Native Americans

Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander

Some other race

See also

References

Racial groups

Americans, in part due to categories outlined by the U.S. government,^[4] generally are described as belonging to these racial groups:

★ 'White': those having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa

★ 'Black or African American': those having origins in any of the black racial groups of the Ivory Coast and Sub-Saharan Africa.

★ 'American Indian or Alaska Native', also called Native Americans: those having origins in any of the original peoples of North, Central and South America, and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment

★ 'Asian', also called Asian American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent; frequently specified as Chinese American, Filipino American, etc

★ 'Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander': those having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands

★ 'Some other race': those who, whatever their racial origins or heritage, don't feel comfortable choosing any of the foregoing categories. Respondents must write in their "race", but they usually just enter their ancestral nationality: Mexican, Puerto Rico, Sri Lankan, etc. This category has been especially popular with Hispanics and people who are bi-racial and multi-racial, mostly due to the absence of the Mestizo and Mulatto categories from the Census form

★ 'Two or more races', also known as the multiracial category: those who check off and/or write in more than one race. Any number, up to all six, of the racial categories can be reported by any respondent

Ethnicity

The government and the Census Bureau consider race to be separate from ethnicity. They count two ethnicities: 'Hispanic or Latino' and 'not Hispanic or Latino'. Although respondents were explicitly allowed to select multiple racial categories in Census 2000, selecting both ethnic categories was neither allowed nor prohibited explicitly. Hispanics do not constitute a separate race in the census; rather, they belong to the same racial categories as the rest of the US population, with Hispanic heritage viewed as the differentiating factor.^[5] The main ''racial'' difference is quantitative: a larger percentage of the Hispanic or Latino population is not white than is the case for the non-Hispanic or Latino population. (See the section on Hispanics or Latinos in this article)

Racial identity and categorization pros and cons

There has been interest by some, including the U.S. government, president George W. Bush and private individuals, in the elimination of racial and ethnic categories and new constitutional laws to prohibit the sampling of race in government practices. This concept was practiced in California by Proposition 209, passed in 1996 to prohibit the state's use of race in decisions on employment and college admissions. Proposition 54 in 2003 failed to pass; it would have made California the first state to officially abandon racial designation but allow the US census to collect racial data.
It should be pointed out that most statistics from government agencies other than the Census Bureau (for example: the Center for Disease Control's data on vital statistics, or the FBI's crime statistics) omit "Some other race" and include the people in this group in the white population. In such cases, the statistics will also include the vast majority of Hispanics in the white population. For an example of this, see the CIA Factbook^[6]; see also the section "Hispanics or Latinos," below.
Although "Asian American" also includes South Asian Americans — those whose ancestry originates in the countries of the Indian subcontinent: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives — the category is more popularly identified with East Asian Americans. The term ''Black'' is popularly associated with centuries-long black residents, but the Census does not make distinctions between them and, say, recent Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica or refugees from Somalia. Furthermore, before the decision to allow multiple racial choices, the categories disregarded the multiracial heritage of many Americans. For these and other reasons, the broad categories which have traditionally been used to define race in America have come under much criticism.
Many Americans believe the subject of race is very sensitive and potentially offensive. They claim that to categorize people by their race instead of their character is divisive. This thinking is especially associated with political correctness. Others respond that there are legitimate reasons why race is used by state and federal governments, such as to ensure equality of treatment and opportunities for each race in hiring, in pay for similar work, in housing, in education, in treatment by law enforcement, and to monitor other civil rights compliance, as mandated since the 1960s.
Many African Americans, Native Americans, whites and multi-racial persons have protested census methods of racial classification because, in the past, to have non-white "blood" had a social stigma, until racial discrimination was outlawed in the 1960s. Conversely, today some critics decry what they perceive as preferential treatment for racial and ethnic minorities, who these critics say unfairly receive employment programs, student loans, college admissions and other awards by affirmative action policy. The critics call it reverse racism, and some states lifted or changed the policies in the 1990s as the debate over racial preferences continues.
A few critics even compared the practice of racial designation to historic uses in other countries, most notably in Apartheid South Africa until 1990, when it repealed its tough racial exclusion laws. They also compare it to the Nuremberg Laws of 1930s Nazi Germany, which classified Jewish Germans as a "race" by their religion or if they had one Jewish parent. This practice made German Jews suffer discrimination and ultimately end up as victims in the Holocaust. This is inflammable criticism on the potential dangers of using race to decide who gets more or less, or who's free or not. The U.S. constitution and civil rights laws prohibit racial oppression, but Americans worry that racism and discrimination continues to have adverse socioeconomic effects on millions of their fellow citizens such as women, people of color and lower-income persons.

Racial makeup of U.S. population

Majority group

Top ancestry in each U.S. county in 2000.

The majority of the 300 million people currently living in the United States descend from European immigrants who arrived since the establishment of the first colonies, but especially after Reconstruction. This majority, 68.1% in 2000, tends to decrease every year, and whites are expected to become a plurality by 2050. Properly speaking, the official white ratio was 75.1% in 2000, a figure that includes the 6% of the total population that self-identified as white Hispanic. 68.1% is the ''non-Hispanic White'' portion of the US population, which comprises European Americans, Americans of Middle Eastern origins, and Americans of North African origins.
In the 2000 Census, Americans were able to state their ancestries.
The most frequently stated European-derived ancestries were:

★ German - (15.2%),

★ Irish - (10.8%) (Large percentage is actually of Scots-Irish descent particularly in the southern states),

★ English - (8.7%),

★ American - (7.2%) (Mostly of British Ancestry)

★ Italian - (5.6%)

★ Polish - (3.2%)

★ French - (3.0%)

★ Scottish - (1.7%)

★ Dutch - (1.6%)

★ Norwegian - (1.6%)

★

Flag of Ulster

Scots-Irish - (1.5%)

★ Swedish - (1.4%)

★ Russian - (0.9%)

★ French Canadian - (0.8%)
reveals that the areas with the largest "American" ancestry populations were mostly settled by Scots-Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh people. Even though a high proportion of the population has two or more ancestries, only slightly more than one ancestry was stated per person. This means that the percentages listed are significantly dependent on subjective perception of which of several ancestry lines is relevant. Many citizens listed themselves simply as "American" on the census (7.2%).
Dutch and Hanoverians, whose countries were non-simultaneously in personal union with the British monarchy, settled in the British colonies, but more often retroactively seek identity in their respective countries today (Netherlands and Germany). This helps colonial diasporas fit in more with current nations. (See British American).
The largest Central European ancestry was Polish (both Catholic Poles and Ashkenazi Jews), and the largest Eastern European ancestry was Russian (includes a recent influx of Ashkenazi Jews). There were other significant ancestries from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as from French Canada. Most who registered as French American are descended from colonists of Catholic New France — exiled Huguenots quickly assimilated into the relevant British population of the Thirteen Colonies and were immediately seen and self-regarded as subjects of the Crown under the old Plantagenet claim.
Other ethnic European origins included are Dutch/Belgian, Lithuanian, Latvian, former Yugoslavs, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Czech, Slovak, Australian, New Zealander and Spanish. A comparatively small fraction of recent immigrants are non-Hispanic whites, but the largest numbers come from Canada, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
According to the 2000 Census, Middle Easterns account for 0.42% of the American population. The largest was by far Lebanese, who made up 0.2% of the American population. Over 1/4 of all Arabs claimed two ancestries, having not only Arab blood but also non-Arab blood. Among them, 14.7% reported Irish, 13.6% reported Italian, and 13.5% reported German.

Minority groups

Hispanics or Latinos

Top ancestries in 2000.

Americans of Latin American origin are known as Hispanics or Latinos and are the largest minority group in the country, composing 12.5% of the population in 2000. (Smaller numbers of Americans with origin in Spain and not by way of Latin America may also identify as Hispanic in the US census.) This has brought increasing use of the Spanish language in the United States. People of Mexican descent made up 6.5% of the US population in the 2000 census, and this proportion is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades. The Hispanic category is based on national origin, language and culture, not race, and is defined by the Census as anybody from or with ancestry from Spain or Spanish-speaking Latin America, so a Hispanic may be of any race.
In Census 2000, Hispanics identified as follows: 47.9% White; 42.2% "Some other race"; 6.3% Two or more races; 2% Black or African American; 1.2% American Indian and Alaska Native; 0.3% Asian; and 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. The "Some other race" respondents usually identify by their national origin only (e.g. "Mexican", "Salvadoran", "Colombian"); most are thought to be Mestizo, followed by unmixed American Indians and Mulattoes. In Census 2000 data, the "some other race" category overlaps by 95% with the Hispanic/Latino category, suggesting that this group is virtually the only one using the category.^[7]
More than half of U.S. Hispanics are thought to be multiracial (Mestizo and Mulatto, especially), in which case the "Two or more races" category should be the largest one for them. This category is selected by checking off two or more of the others — i.e., the census form does not actually contain a "Two or more races" or "Multiracial" box; the category is formed ''after'' the census, by grouping all who selected more than one racial category. Thus, Mestizo Hispanics should check off "White" and "American Indian or Alaska Native", while Mulatto Hispanics should check off White and Black or African American. However, it appears that many Mulatto and Mestizo Hispanics are unaware of this or reluctant to do it, likely because they assume that "White" refers strictly to ''non-Hispanic'' White; that "Black" refers strictly to ''non-Hispanic'' Black; and similarly that Native American refers strictly to ''non-Hispanic'' Native American. Indeed, the OMB definition of the latter group, which specifically requires "tribal affiliation or community attachment," seems designed to exclude the several millions of Native American Hispanics. Some claim that the overuse of the "Some other race" category could be avoided by putting "Mestizo" and "Mulatto" directly on the census form. (Respondents in these two categories could even be assigned/imputed to the "Two or more races" category.) It is mostly due to the absence of these two options that a very large ratio (42%) of Hispanics report "Some other race" instead.

Black Americans

About 12.3% (2000 census) of the American people are Black, mainly African American, most of whom are descendants of the enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. between 1619 and 1808 and emancipated during the American Civil War. Starting in the 1970s, the black population has been bolstered by immigration from the Caribbean, especially Jamaica and Haiti. More recently, starting in the 1990s, there has been an influx of African immigrants to the United States, due to the instability in political and economic opportunities in various nations in Africa. Historically, most African Americans lived in the Southeast and South Central states of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Since World War I there occurred the Great Migration of rural black Americans to the industrial Northeast, urban Midwest and, in a smaller wave, to the West Coast that lasted until 1960. Today, most African Americans (over 70%) live in the Southern US and in urban areas, but are increasingly moving to the suburbs. In US history, any person with black or African American ancestry, even if they were mostly white, were designated and classified as "black", according to the now-defunct "one drop theory," by which any black/African blood made the person "black" in legal sense. Today, the US census in law and practice does not declare any person to belong in any race or ethnicity without the prior consent of that person.

Asian Americans

A third significant minority is the Asian American population (7.1% in 2000), most of whom are concentrated on the West Coast, with California home to 4.5 million Asian Americans, and Hawaii, where they compose the majority at 70% of the islands' people. Asian Americans live across the country as well as in New York, Chicago, Boston, Houston, and other urban centers. It is by no means a monolithic group. The largest groups are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Philippines, China, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea and Japan. While the Asian-American population is generally a fairly recent addition to the nation's ethnic mix, relatively large waves of Chinese, Filipino and Japanese immigration happened in the mid to late 1800s.

Two or more races

Multiracial Americans numbered 6.8 million in 2000, or 2.4% of the population. They can be any combination of races (White, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, "Some other race") and ethnicities. The growing multiracial identity movement wants the US to recognize that there are millions of Americans who desire to identify by the full complement of their ancestry, if they happen to be biracial or multiracial. Miscegenation or inter-racial marriage, most notably between whites and African Americans, was deemed immoral and illegal in most states in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. California and the western US had similar laws to prohibit White-Asian American marriages until the 1950s. As society and laws change to accept inter-racial marriage, these marriages and their mixed-race children are possibly changing the demographic fabric of America. However, demographers state that the American people are mostly multi-ethnic descendants of various immigrant nationalities culturally distinct until assimilation and integration took place in the mid 20th century. The "Americanization" of foreign ethnic groups and the inter-racial diversity of millions of Americans isn't a new phenomenon.

Native Americans

Indigenous peoples of the Americas, such as American Indians and Inuit, made up .9% of the population in 2000. An additional 1.6 million declared part-Native American or American Indian ancestry. The legal and official designation of who is Native American by descent aroused controversy by demographers, tribal nations and government officials for many decades. The blood quantum laws are complex and contradictory in admittance of new tribal members, or for census takers to accept any respondents' claims without official documents from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. Genetic scientists estimated that over 15 million other Americans may be one quarter or less of American Indian descent. Once thought to face extinction in race or culture, there has been a remarkable revival of Native American identity and tribal sovereignty in the 20th century. The largest tribal group are the Navajo, who call themselves "Na'Dene" and live on a 16-million acre Indian reservation covering northeast Arizona, northwest New Mexico and southeast Utah. It is home to half of the 450,000 Navajo Nation members. The Cherokee are twice the size at 800,000 in full or part-blood degrees. 70,000 live in Oklahoma in the Cherokee Nation, and 15,000 in North Carolina on remnants of their ancestral homelands.

Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander

Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders numbered 398,835 in 2000, or 0.1% of the population. Like Native Americans, especially most Native Hawaiians on the island chain of Hawaii are highly mixed with Asian, European and other ancestries. Only 1 out of 50 Native Hawaiians can be legally defined as "full blood" and some demographers believe that by the year 2025, the last full-blooded Native Hawaiian will die off, leaving a culturally distinct, but racially-mixed population. However, there is more individual self-designation of what is Native Hawaiian than before the US annexed the islands in 1898. Native Hawiians are receiving ancestral land reparations. Throughout Hawaii, the preservation and universal adaptation of Native Hawaiian customs, Hawaiian language, cultural schools solely for legally Native Hawaiian students, and historical awareness has gained momentum for Native Hawaiians as a people who are here to stay and grow.

Some other race

In the 2000 census, 5.5% of the population, 97% of whom were Hispanic, checked off this category. This is not a standard OMB race category, as it includes people from diverse racial, geographic, ethnic and other origins. The US census has about 165 ethnic group designations alone. Some census respondents label themselves in various ways, but do not constitute a race, ethnicity or actual country in legal terms, e.g. "Jewish" if by descent (the census does not ask questions on religious membership), "Palestinian American", "Basque" (an ethnic group from France and Spain), "Confederate Southern" from the Southeast US, "Chicano", "Boricua", "Nisei" or Japanese American, "Desi" or Indian-American, "Quebecois" or French Canadian, or "Cherokee American".

See also

★ Race (United States Census)

★ Immigration to the United States

★ Demographics of the United States

★ Maps of American ancestries

★ Ethnicity (United States Census)

References

1. U.S. Population Tops 300 Million
2. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html CIA - The World Factbook -- Rank Order - Population
3. Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000
4. Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity Office of Management and Budget
5. U.S. Census Bureau Guidance on the Presentation and Comparison of Race and Hispanic Origin Data
6. CIA - The World Factbook -- United States
7. Rodriguez, Clara E. 2000. ''Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States''. New York: New York University Press.