BY MALIK MIAH
In mid-March the United States Census Bureau released its official count for the US population. There are 281,421,906 people, as compared to 253,979,140 in 1990. Reflecting a historic trend, non-Hispanic whites declined from 75% to 69.1%. Hispanics (Latinos) are now the largest minority at 12.5%, with African Americans at 12.1%, American Indians/Alaskan natives at 0.7%, Asians and Pacific islanders at 2.8%, and those identified as two or more races at 1.6%.
The latter category is new. Before 2000, this category was under "other". But there has been a demand by people of mixed races to identify their heritages.
According to the March 13 New York Times, the four most common interracial categories were white and black, white and Asian, white and American Indian/Alaska native, and white and "some other race", a box that census officials said was checked mainly by Latinos. Five per cent of blacks, 6% of Hispanics, 14% of Asians and 2.5% of whites identified themselves as multiracial.
According to the data, one in three Americans is a member of a minority, compared with one in five in 1980, with a minority defined as non-Hispanic white. Thirty-five percent of Latinos are younger than 18, compared with 24% of non-Latinos. African Americans 17 and younger are nearly four times as likely as blacks 50 and older to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race.
In California the trend is more pronounced. For the first time in the modern era, non-Hispanic whites are officially a minority in the state, amounting to less than half the population. (That proportion is even smaller if undocumented "illegal" workers are counted.)
There are 33.9 million Californians; nearly one in eight Americans live in the state. Some 15.8 million are non-Hispanic white, 10.9 million are Latino, 2.3 million are black, 2.8 million are Asians or Pacific islanders and nearly 1 million are multiracial.
What is the significance of these numbers, besides showing that minorities are growing more rapidly than whites with Latinos at the greatest clip? It indicates politically that minorities can potentially gain more clout.
But the massive wealth is still mainly in the hands of whites. In fact, there's been a racist backlash among whites to these demographic changes. In California, for example, propositions against affirmative action and bilingual education were passed in the 1990s. Across the country there have been similar legislative and electoral moves to make clear that to be an "American" primarily means accepting white European culture and English-first.
African Americans especially were leery of indicating their belonging to a mixed racial category because it could impact on their place in US society and social programs to deal with institutional racism.
Dowell Myers, an urban demographer at the University of Southern California, praised the new census' ability to capture a more detailed racial and ethnic picture of the country but voiced concern that the process might inadvertently harm efforts to help minorities. "Making the categories hazy makes it hard to track progress of racial groups over time, particularly in the areas of education, occupations and incomes", he told the New York Times.
It's not only African Americans who fear the move to include the multiracial category will have a possible negative impact. Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma, wrote in an op-ed piece in the March 23 New York Times how race is a social notion that has historically evolved. It took until 1890 for Native Americans to be even counted as part of the United States population.
Some 2.6 million people identify themselves as Native Americans in the new census; an additional 1.5 million reported that they were part Indian. But the individual does not decide, Thornton observes, how one is viewed.
"Individuals may choose one identity for themselves, but others in society may make another choice for them," he said. "The black-Indian child may think of himself as Indian, but if no-one around him does, then he has run up against the limit of his own power to choose a racial identity."
How true that is. Racism is so prevalent that when a well-dressed black man drives into an all-white neighbourhood, many residents assume he's there for criminal purposes even if he is a financial analyst or a lawyer. It's called racial profiling.
"A man who looks African American is typically going to be treated as an African American", Thornton adds. "That the man may also be Native American, Asian American and/or white, and may have designated himself accordingly in the 2000 census, may be of no importance to anyone other than himself.
"Americans are now relatively free to decide who they are, in racial terms, when filling out a census. But that is one of the few times when they are free to do so. Race is a social, not private, reality. And the census should not be misused to make racial policies, which have much more to do with how we act toward each other than what we think about ourselves."
This is why most African American of mixed heritage simply decided to identify themselves as "black" on the census.