Posted on 06/13/2013 7:41:03 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
WASHINGTON: For the first time, America's racial and ethnic minorities make up about half of the under-5 age group, the US government said on Thursday. It's a historic shift that shows how young people are at the forefront of sweeping changes by race and class.
The new census estimates, a snapshot of the US population as of July 2012, come a year after the Census Bureau reported that whites had fallen to a minority among babies. Fueled by immigration and high rates of birth, particularly among Hispanics, racial and ethnic minorities are now growing more rapidly in numbers than whites.
Based on current rates of growth, whites in the under-5 group are expected to tip to a minority this year or next, said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau's acting director.
The government also projects that in five years, minorities will make up more than half of children under 18. Not long after that, the total US white population will begin a decline in absolute numbers, due to aging baby boomers.
The nation's demographic changes are already stirring discussion as to whether some civil rights-era programs, such as affirmative action in college admissions, should be retooled to focus more on income rather than race and ethnicity. The Supreme Court will rule on the issue this month.
The gap between rich and poor in the US has now stretched to its widest since 1970, making opportunities to reach the middle class increasingly difficult.
Longer-term changes in family structure, such as a decline in marriage, have led to a rise in single-mother households across all racial groups, with the fastest growth now occurring among whites. More than 40 percent of newborns are now born out of wedlock, in families more likely to be low income.
The latest census numbers show:
* The population younger than 5 stood at 49.9 percent minority in 2012.
* For the first time in more than a century, the number of deaths now exceeds births among white Americans. This "natural decrease'' occurred several years before the government's original projection. For now, the white population is still increasing slightly, due to immigration from Europe.
* As a whole, the nonwhite population increased by 1.9 percent to 116 million, or 37 percent of the US The fastest percentage growth is among multiracial Americans, followed by Asians and Hispanics. Non-Hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the US; Hispanics, 17 percent; blacks, 12.3 percent; Asians, 5 percent; and multiracial Americans, 2.4 percent.
* Among the under-5 age group, 22 percent live in poverty. Black toddlers were most likely to be poor, at 41 percent, followed by Hispanics at 32 percent and whites at 13 percent. Asian toddlers had a poverty rate of 11 percent.
"More so than ever, we need to recognize the importance of young minorities for the growth and vitality of our labor force and economy," said William H Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census data.
The gaps in achievement tend to emerge early in childhood, and disparities are especially evident in SAT admission scores. College Board data show that average scores spread as wide as 130-140 points in each of the reading, math and writing sections for a student with family income of less than $20,000, compared with a student with family income exceeding $200,000.
About 40 percent of whites age 25-29 graduate from college, compared with 15 percent for Latinos and 23 percent for blacks.
That’s what I was thinking. A vast majority of Hispanics are Caucasian.
Ask La Raza
And feel free to walk around Los Angeles and try to explain to all the Mexicans how they really are white. Let us know how that goes.
Our country is being destroyed and there's always some idgits who want to argue semantics.
La Raza refers specifically to Mexicans, ie. the mixture of Spanish and Indians. Hispanic and Mexican are not synonamous. Both my daughter in laws are “Hispanic” and neither are Mexican.
People were speaking Spanish in America long before they were speaking English.
La Raza is shorthand for La Raza Hispanica and refers to European Catholics from Spain. Mestizo are European/Amerind mix. Hispanic merely means a person whose native language is Spanish. Mexican is a nationality.
Part of this is that you can be a minority descended from a white, but not a white descended from a minority. My parents have 5 children-— all white. But of the grandchildren, half are Hispanic. Of the great-grandchildren, some ‘claim to be’ black, though they are more white than black. This happens a lot to white parents. Do black parents have white descendants?
agree
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