Populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian have surged and the number of people who say they’re more than one race has more than doubled in the past decade, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.
Overall population growth has slowed substantially over the past decade, and the growth that has taken place — an increase of about 23 million people — has been made up entirely of people who identify as Hispanic, Asian, Black and more than one race, according to the first racial and ethnic breakdown from the 2020 census.
The white population has decreased for the first time in history. The number of people who identify themselves as white on the census form has been decreasing as a share of the country’s population since the 1960s, when the United States lifted ethnic quotas aimed at keeping the country Northern and Western European.
That drop, 2.6 percent, has been in part a result of the aging of the white population — the median age was 44 in 2019, compared with 30 for Hispanics — and a long-running decline in the birthrate. Some social scientists theorize that another potential reason for the decrease is that more Americans who previously identified as white on the census form now are choosing more than one race.
The single biggest population increase has been among people who identify as more than one race, a category that first appeared on census forms 20 years ago and now is the fastest-growing racial and ethnic category.
People who identify as white now make up 58 percent of the population, down from 64 percent in 2010 and 69 percent in 2000.
“We are in a weird time demographically,” says Tomás Jiménez, a sociologist at Stanford University who writes about immigrants, assimilation and social mobility. “There’s more choice about our individual identities and how we present them than there has ever been. We can presume far less about who somebody is based on the boxes they check compared to previous periods.”
The jump in the multirace category is partly to do with the Census Bureau collecting more detailed data, Alba says, and analyzing answers more deeply. He says he believes that part of the decrease in the white population is people switching from the category of white to the category of more than one race.
“The census is doing a much better job at reflecting the growing complexity of the population,” he says. “They are really trying to acknowledge that the world is changing out there.”
Despite the slowdown in immigration at the end of the decade, the proportion of U.S. residents born in foreign countries still is at its highest level since the last big immigration wave around the turn of the 20th century.
While race may be socially constructed, the understanding of it has important political effects, says The New York Times. One change that's been politically resonant has been the shrinking share of the white population, with the right seeing the shift as a threat and the left celebrating it as a kind of demographic destiny in which growing numbers of people of color will vote for Democrats, the Times says.
Redistricting:
The once-a-decade battle over redistricting that follows the census is set to be a showdown over the suburbs, as the new census data released Thursday show rapid growth around some of the nation’s largest cities and shrinking population in many rural counties, says The Associated Press.
From Texas to Florida, some of the biggest gains have come in states where Republicans will control the redistricting process, but often in and around cities where Democrats have been doing well in recent elections, says AP.
"But many Republicans and Democrats also will be trying to ensure the new lines divide and combine voters in ways that make it more likely for their party’s candidates to win future elections, a process called gerrymandering,” says AP. "The parties’ successes in that effort could determine whether taxes and spending grow, climate-change polices are approved or access to abortion is expanded or curtailed."
Texas had been among several states that needed advance approval from the federal Justice Department for its redistricting plans because of a history of racial discrimination. But the Supreme Court overturned that requirement in 2013 and, in a separate ruling in 2019, said it wouldn't get involved in disputes over alleged political gerrymandering, leaving that to state courts to decide. Lawsuits are expected to challenge redistricting efforts in many states.
Republicans will control redistricting in 20 states accounting for 187 U.S. House seats, including the growing states of Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.
Democrats will control redistricting in eight states accounting for 75 seats, including New York and Illinois, where the loss of a seat in each gives them a chance to squeeze out Republican incumbents.
After the 2010 census, Republicans who controlled redistricting in many more states than Democrats drew redistricting maps that gave them a greater political advantage in more states than either party had in the past 50 years, according to a new AP analysis.
But Republicans won’t have as much power as they did last time in some key states, says AP. Republican-led legislatures will be paired with Democratic governors in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which both had full Republican control after the 2010 census. In Michigan, a voter-approved citizens commission will be in charge of redistricting instead of lawmakers and the governor. And in Ohio, voter-approved redistricting overhauls will require majority Republicans to get the support of minority Democrats for the new districts to last a full decade.
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