2010 Census

RECENT POSTS

July 19, 2011 | 10:02 AM | By

The nation’s ethnic-generational divide, illustrated

There’s a generational component to the racial and ethnic shift taking place in the United States population, with minority youths poised to become a majority in the not-too-distant future.

The growing gap between the nation’s aging non-Latino white population and its young non-white population is illustrated in this interactive chart from PolicyLink, an Oakland-based social and economic advocacy nonprofit. While the majority of U.S. youths are of color, the majority of seniors are non-Latino whites, a combination that poses unique policy and political challenges.

The chart is the most recent interactive population graphic based on census data that the organization has released as part of a series titled “America’s Tomorrow.” Another was a U.S. map illustrating the changing racial makeup of counties as projected from 1990 to 2040.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Politics/Justice, 2010 Census, PolicyLink
July 6, 2011 | 10:45 AM | By

More on Latinos and race: The rise of the Latino ‘American Indian’

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

Car sticker seen on an L.A. freeway, February 2011

A recent post highlighted a Migration Policy Institute article that explored the origin of the “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish Origin” category on census forms, and in the 40 years that Latinos have been asked to identify in terms of Spanish origin, the varying ways in which they have also come to identify in terms of race.

The “Hispanic or Latino” category is an ethnic category, not a racial one. In the 2000 census, slightly under half of the 35.2 million Latinos counted reported their race as white. The rest of the racial categories they can choose from may or may not apply. Not surprisingly perhaps, 43 percent of Latinos in 2000 identified themselves as “other race.”

But a fascinating piece in the New York Times this weekend reported a rise in the number of Latinos identifying themselves as “American Indian” in the 2010 census. From the story:

Seventy percent of the 57,000 American Indians living in New York City are of Hispanic origin, according to census figures. That is 40,000 American Indians from Latin America — up 70 percent from a decade ago.

The trend is part of a demographic growth taking place nationwide of Hispanics using “American Indian” to identify their race. The number of Amerindians — a blanket term for indigenous people of the Americas, North and South — who also identify themselves as Hispanic has tripled since 2000, to 1.2 million from 400,000.

A professor of Latin American history interviewed attributed this in part to shifting migration trends, with more recent immigrants having come from regions of Latin America with large indigenous populations, such as southern Mexico and Central America.

But the census shift, if slight, is significant not only in terms of who has settled here, but how Latinos who are already here perceive and identify themselves. A second-generation Mexican American woman, Nancy Perez, explained that her family decided to go with “American Indian” because “if you go back far enough, we are indigenous:”

“We felt that there were very limited options to identify with,” Ms. Perez, 32, said. “So out of the options available, that was the best one.”

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 2010 Census, Hispanic or Latino, Racial identity
June 1, 2011 | 4:35 PM | By

Latinos and population growth: Five interesting tidbits

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Screen shot of U.S. Census Bureau map showing state-by-state 2010 data, including ethnic populations

News about the nation’s growing Latino population has been rolling out almost continuously since the results of the 2010 Census were announced late last year.

First there was the speculation about who was driving population growth in some of the nation’s most politically influential states. When ethnic and racial data was released earlier this year, it was revealed that Latinos in the United States now number more than 50 million.

The last few days have brought a fresh crop of Latino population growth headlines, these stemming from new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week. The gist: The Latino population in the U.S. rose by 15.2 million between 2000 and 2010, growing four times faster than the nation’s overall growth rate and accounting for half the nation’s population increase of 27.3 million since 2000.

Some states have seen more growth than others, particularly in the South and Midwest (though in California, Latinos were outpaced in growth by Asian Americans).

That’s the big picture, but there have been these interesting news tidbits as well:

  • 28 large cities in the United States now have a Latino majority: Fox News Latino reported that Latinos now make up the majority of the population in 28 U.S. cities of more than 100,000 residents. Most of these cities are in California, Texas, Florida and New Jersey. In California, these cities include Santa Ana, Salinas, Oxnard and Pomona, all of which are more than 70 percent Latino.
  • The Latino population percentage of East Los Angeles rivals that of Puerto Rico: It’s not just major cities that have notable Latino majorities. According to the same Fox story, unincorporated East Los Angeles is 97 percent Latino, “a percentage surpassed only by Puerto Rico, where 99 percent of citizens are Hispanic.”
  • Texas has the most Latino-majority counties in the country: Out of 82 Latino-majority counties in the United States, 51 are in Texas, the Houston Chronicle reported. Not surprisingly, the census results have led to redistricting battles in the Lone Star State. A redistricting map proposed by a legislative redistricting committee would add two Latino-majority districts in Central and South Texas.
  • More Latinos could represent more Democratic votes – or not: A former Obama campaign operative referred to the Latino population growth as a potential “huge weapon” in coming elections in a Huffington Post piece. At the same time, Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas told Politico that this could also mean more Republican voters, pointing out the recent victories of Latino GOP candidates from New Mexico, Nevada and Florida, all states with large Latino populations.
  • Latinos aside, Indian Americans are the fastest-growing Asian group: While Chinese Americans still make up the largest Asian demographic in the country, with 22.8% of the country’s Asian population, Indian Americans have had the most population growth, the Wall Street Journal reported. Asian Americans now make up 4.8 of the overall U.S. population.

Latinos account for 16.3 of the overall population. The Pew Hispanic Center has published a chart comparing the nation’s 2000 and 2010 populations by race and ethnicity.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Politics/Justice, 2010 Census, Latino population gorwth, U.S. Census Bureau
May 12, 2011 | 10:58 AM | By

Report: U.S. population growth almost exclusively minority-driven

Art by Eric Fischer/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A color-coded ethnicity map of the L.A. area

We already know that Latinos accounted for more than half the nation’s population growth in the last decade.

Today the Pew Research Center broadened the minority growth picture in its Daily Number feature, distilling this nugget from the 2010 Census: The U.S. population growth between 2000 and 2010 was driven almost exclusively by racial and ethnic minorities.

From the post:

Overall, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 91.7% of the nation’s population growth over the past 10 years.

The non-Hispanic white population has accounted for only the remaining 8.3% of the nation’s growth. Hispanics were responsible for 56% of the nation’s population growth over the past decade. There are now 50.5 million Latinos living in the U.S. according to the 2010 Census, up from 35.3 million in 2000, making Latinos the nation’s largest minority group and 16.3% of the total population. There are 196.8 million whites in the U.S. (accounting for 63.7% of the total population), 37.7 million blacks (12.2%) and 14.5 million Asians (4.7%). Six million non-Hispanics, or 1.9% of the U.S. population, checked more than one race.

An accompanying chart breaks down the 2010 vs. 2000 population for all of these groups, including those identifying as “two or more races.”

Census numbers released earlier this year showed that the United States is on course to become a majority-minority nation, with non-white minority children accounting for 48.6 percent of the children born in this country between July 2008 and July 2009,  an increase from just two years earlier.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 2010 Census, Pew Research Center
April 27, 2011 | 11:11 AM | By

Latino, Asian voters still lag in turnout in spite of numbers

Source: Pew Hispanic Center

A report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center on the Latino electorate in 2010 led to very different headlines as news outlets reported the results, and for good reason.

“Latinos voted in record numbers in 2010 elections,” read the headline in USA Today. The headline in the Washington Post, “Latino and Asian voters mostly sat out 2010 election, report says,” indicated a different story altogether.

But both interpretations are correct. According to the report, more than 6.6 million Latinos voted in last year’s election, setting a record for a midterm election. Latino voters also made up a larger share of the electorate than in any previous midterm election. They represented 6.9 percent of all voters, up from 5.8 percent in 2006.

All that said, Latinos showed poorly at the polls when considering their sheer numbers – more than 50 million of them in the U.S., per the 2010 Census. From a summary of the Pew voter report:

However, even though more Latinos than ever are participating in the nation’s elections, their representation among the electorate remains below their representation in the general population. In 2010, 16.3% of the nation’s population was Latino, but only 10.1% of eligible voters and fewer than 7% of voters were Latino.

This gap is driven by two demographic factors—youth and non-citizenship. More than one third of Latinos (34.9%) are younger than the voting age of 18. And an additional 22.4% are of voting age, but are not U.S. citizens. As a result, the share of the Latino population eligible to vote is smaller than it is among any other group. Just 42.7% of the nation’s Latino population is eligible to vote, while more than three-in-four (77.7%) of whites, two-thirds of blacks (67.2%) and more than half of Asians (52.8%) are eligible to vote.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 2010 Census, Asian voters, Latino voters, Pew Hispanic Center
April 13, 2011 | 4:54 PM | By

Do we live in the nation’s most diverse city? It depends.

Photo by Chelsea Nicole Conner/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The skyline as seen from the Griffith Observatory, August 2010

As it promotes its special quarterly issue highlighting Los Angeles, the magazine GOOD recently posted an interesting short piece that examines how diversity is measured – and where, depending on the metrics, Los Angeles places among other large U.S. cities.

From the piece:

If you look at the total number of minorities in an area, Los Angeles does come out on top. According to county-level data from the 2007 U.S. Census, Los Angeles County has more Hispanic residents (4.7 million), Asian residents (1.4 million), and Native American residents (146,500) than any other in the nation. But that’s largely because Los Angeles County has more people, period. L.A. County has 9.8 million residents, nearly twice that of Cook County, Illinois, the second largest.

Another method is to look at the percentage of minorities in an area. By this measure, according to the online data repository City-Data, New York is the most diverse major city, with only 35 percent of residents identifying as “white only,” followed by Dallas, Chicago, and Houston. However, City-Data’s figures don’t jibe with the 2005 to 2009 U.S. Census American Community Survey, which places the New York figure at 45.4, behind Chicago’s 41.9 percent.

And if you measure diversity by how many residents are foreign-born, the piece continues, then the winner would be Miami.

The post features the census-based map art of Eric Fischer. It also contains a reference to Kogi and the Korean taco, something that seems to be going around lately, with the multi-culti taco emerging as 21st-century L.A. metaphor.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 2010 Census, Diversity, Los Angeles
April 4, 2011 | 1:12 PM | By

Black or mixed race? Obama’s census choice sparks debate over how people identify

Photo by rob.rudloff/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Barack Obama on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, October 2008

More than a hundred comments have been posted so far in reaction to an interesting opinion piece today from the Los Angeles Times’ Gregory Rodriguez on how “the most famous mixed-race person in the world,” President Obama, identified himself racially on his census form last year. He checked off only one race, black. From the piece:

It could have been a historic teaching moment. Instead, President Obama, the most famous mixed-race person in the world, checked off only one race — black — last year on his census form. And in so doing, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country he heads.

The president also bucked a trend. Last month, the Census Bureau announced that the number of Americans who identified themselves as being of more than one race in 2010 grew about 32% over the last decade. The number of people who identified as both white and black jumped an astounding 134%. And nearly 50% more children were identified as multiracial on this census, making that category the fastest-growing youth demographic in the country.

To be sure, the number of people — 9 million, or 2.9% of the population — who identified themselves as of more than one race on their census form is still small. But the trend is clear.

It’s only been since 2000 that Americans have been able to identify themselves on census forms as being of more than one race, and as Rodriguez writes, the increase in those who have since done so on the forms “suggests not only an increase in absolute numbers, but also that people are growing more comfortable with the idea of racial mixing.”

Why did the President, the son of a white mother from the U.S. and black father from Kenya, check only one box? Various explanations are offered in the piece, among them the fact that questions about Obama’s “blackness” have dogged him since before the 2008 campaign. Rodriguez also pointed out the concerns of some black civil rights activists who fear that if more people were to identify as multiracial, the number of those identifying as black, and their corresponding influence, would decrease.

The comments from readers show that there is no clear answer as to why people identify one way or another. One’s particular race – and how one is perceived in society as a result – plays a part. More than anything, the comments, some more polite than others, prove that a multiracial society doesn’t translate into a post-racial one. Here are just a few, unedited save for one typo:

“Importer” wrote:

Let’s do this little test–if you were walking down the street alone at night and Obama was approaching you from the opposite direction, what race would you pick for him on the census form? I think we all know the answer; to pretend otherwise is just foolish. He is black and he knows it.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 2010 Census, Multiracial, President Obama
March 31, 2011 | 11:42 AM | By

Report: Where Latino votes will matter most

Source: Latino Decisions

Screen shot from new report, "Where Latino Votes Will Matter in 2012"

The polling firm Latino Decisions has put together an interesting chart using census data that lists the potential states where Latino voters might have the most influence in the November 2012 presidential and U.S. Senate election outcome. The chart lists the percentage of Latinos among those eligible to vote, along with an estimate of how many Latinos who are eligible to vote aren’t yet registered.

One of the questions to come out of the 2010 Census has been whether or not the dramatic growth of the U.S. Latino population – now more than 50 million strong – translates into near-term political clout, not only in terms of redistricting based on population counts, but in terms of general Latino votes. From the report that accompanies the chart, released today:

By the 2012 election, Latinos will account for over 10% of the citizen adult population – potential voters – in 11 states. In another 13 states, Latino account for 5-10% of the citizen adult population. All told, that’s 24 states where Latinos have the capacity to influence electoral outcomes, given a competitive statewide election.

The report points out that much of the political influence of Latinos in 2012 will depend on voter registration between now and then, as to date, Latinos have lower registration rates than non-Latino black and white voters.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 2010 Census, Latino voters