US demography ‘changing dramatically’: New census data

US, (rt.com), 12 Aug, 2021 -  Newly released data from the US Census Bureau show the percentage of white Americans declining sooner than demographers expected, while Asian, Hispanic, and Other categories are on the rise. Most Covid-19 deaths weren’t counted.  

“The country is changing dramatically,” William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post earlier this week, in anticipation of the official numbers. Estimates showed the white population decline happening eight years earlier than demographers anticipated, due to “the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birth rates among millennials after the Great Recession,” he added.   

Whites are expected to fall below 50% nationally by 2045, Frey said. For now, there are 204.3 million of them, or 57.8% of the total – a decline of 8.6% since 2010. Another 31.1 million people identified as white in combination with another group.  

Population that identifies as black or African American went up from 38.9 million in 2010 to 46.9 million now, but its share of the total went down from 13% to 12.1%. It was actually outnumbered by the Some Other Race category, alone or in combination, which stood at 49.9 million and increased by 129%.  

Hispanic or Latino population, which can be of any race, grew to 62.1 million or 18.6% of the total US population, which stands at 331.4 million.