Source: Christian Vierig / Getty
UPDATED: 2:15 p.m. ET, Aug. 12, 2021
Originally published Aug. 10
The number of white people in the United States fell for the first time since 1970, information gathered in the 2020 Census found, showing that it’s a matter of when — not if — they will become the minority.
The Washington Post reported that the new data was released Thursday afternoon.
“The first detailed race and ethnicity breakdown from the 2020 count shows a country that has become more multiracial and racially and ethnically diverse especially among those 18 and under,” the Post wrote.
In the days before being released, demographics experts predicted that in the days before it was released that the data would show white Americans are “shrinking in numbers.”
The drop in the number of white people in America coincided with a sharp rise of Hispanics and Asians, the New York Times reported.
According to the data, the number of white people in the U.S. dropped by nearly 3% in the decade from 2010 to 2020.
The 2.6% decline was eclipsed by the 35% growth shown by Asians in the U.S. and 23% for Hispanics.
The pace with which Black America grew was more than double that of whites with 5.6%.
That means white people now account for 11% less of the U.S. population than they did 10 years ago.
On a granular level, more than one-third of all adults in the U.S. identify as being non-white. That was compared to 25% in 2010. And nearly half of all children in the U.S. are non-white, a demographic that showed a double-digit growth over the last decade.
36 percent of adults are non-white, up from 25 percent a decade ago. Children are now 47 percent non-white, up from 35 percent in 2010.
The data all but confirmed white nationalists’ worst fears.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Census data was “widely expected to show a decline” among white people in the United States.
“Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution who specializes in demographics, told the Post. “The country is changing dramatically.”
The Post said Frey’s predictions are largely based on the toll of the opioid epidemic and “lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession.”
The predictions came a little more than a year after previous Census data found that, for the first time in history, non-white people and Hispanics made up the bulk of those who are age 16 and younger and living in the U.S.
At that time, Frey told the Associated Press that while the birth rate from non-whites exceeded expectations, “White fertility has gone down.” Frey added: “We are browning from bottom up in our age structure.”
According to statistics, the growth rate over the last 10 years among racial backgrounds is led by Asians at 30 percent, followed by Hispanics at 20 percent and Black folks at 12 percent. In that time span, just 4.3 percent of the white population grew.
While we’re a far way off from the possibility of white extinction, one analysis published in 2019 predicted that the U.S. white majority will soon disappear forever. And it’s actually not a novel thought, either.
“The proportion of whites in the U.S. population started to decline in 1950,” college professors wrote in a report published in April 2019 before continuing later. “Although the majority of the U.S. population today is still white, nonwhites account for more than half of the populations of Hawaii, the District of Columbia, California, New Mexico, Texas and Nevada. And, in the next 10 to 15 years, these half dozen ‘majority-minority’ states will likely be joined by as many as eight other states where whites now make up less than 60% of the population.”
With that said, it may be a bit premature to expect that the declining numbers of white people in America will completely disrupt the existing white power structure.
Indeed, this is America.
SEE ALSO:
Here’s What The 2020 Census Results Mean For Black America
The Importance For Black People To Be Counted In The 2020 Census
