Only 50.2 percent of babies in the U.S. under the age of 1 are white, according to new Census data analyzed by USA Today. A sharp decline from 57.6 percent just 10 years earlier.
“We are almost at a minority-majority infant population,” Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, who analyzed the latest Census data, told USA Today. “We probably have passed it since the Census was taken” in early 2010.
In states like Texas and California, young people of color have been the majority for more than two decades. In Texas, the majority of people under age 47 are minorities, in California, under 52.
New York, Florida, New Jersey and Georgia now join 11 other states in the nation where the white population is a minority.
“These little babies … by the time they get to be in their 20s and 30s, the current racial and ethnic categories … won’t have anything close to the meaning that (they have) today,” Frey says. “When they think about white majority, it’ll be something in the history books.”
New research by Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center, found that in a survey of 2,400 people, the majority of respondents had no feelings one way or the other about the changing face of the U.S. (See graph to the right.) But those who said they were concerned about it were more vocal about their fears than others in the survey.
“The people who are most inclined to contribute their voices to the collective narrative on our national identity are those who are most pessimistic about it.” wrote researcher Dom Apollon of the survey findings.