Photo: getty
Minority communities have fueled the United States' population growth over the last decade, while the number of people who identify as white fell below 60 percent for the first time in the country’s history, data from the2020 U.S. Censusreveals.
Non-Hispanic whites now make up 58 percent of the country’s population, compared to 63.7 percent in 2010. It is the country’s lowest percentage of non-Hispanic whites since its founding, according to theAP.
Additionally, the results show there was a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as multiracial (that’s two or more races). In 2010, the Census reported 9 million people as multiracial. That number exploded to 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276 percent increase.
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“As the country has grown, we have continued to evolve in how we measure the race and ethnicity of the people who live here,” Nicholas Jones, director and senior advisor for race and ethnicity research and outreach at the Census Bureau, said in astatement.
“Today’s release of 2020 Census redistricting data provides a new snapshot of the racial and ethnic composition and diversity of the country,” he added.
Jones said improvement made in last year’s Census helped to create a “more accurate” portrait of how people self-identify.
He highlighted the Bureau’s decision to include two separate questions on Hispanic origin and race, which he says helped reveal the U.S. population as “much more multiracial and more diverse than what we measured in the past.”
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In 2020, there was a 61.1 percent chance that two people chosen at random will be of different racial or ethnic groups, the Census Bureau said. This percentage, called the Diversity Index (DI), was 54.9 percent in 2010.
The states with the highest DI scores are located in the West and include Hawaii, California and Nevada.
source: people.com
