Minorities Under Age Of 5 Now Equal Whites

The demographic shift toward historic racial and ethnic minorities in the United States has now reached a point where minority children under the age of five have reached parity in numbers with white children. 

The Census Bureau said that by July 2012, minority children under five years old comprised 49.9% of that age group nationwide. According to Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau’s acting director, by 2014 or 2015 white children in the age group under five will be a minority. 13 states and the District of Columbia showed that a majority of their under-five age group was non-white; in 25 states and Washington, D.C., those minorities were at least 40% of that age group.

The government stated that by 2018, the majority of those under 18 will be non-white, and that shortly after that the total number of whites will start to fall because of the baby boomer decline. The Census Bureau reported in 2012 that in 2011 the majority of babies born in the United States were not white. The number of whites dying now exceeds the number who are being born for the first time in more than a hundred years.

Minority numbers have now risen to 116 million, 37% of the American population. Multiracial Americans have shown the fastest growth, followed by Asians and Hispanics. Non-Hispanic whites comprise 63% percent of the U.S. population, followed by Hispanics at 17%, blacks at 12.3%,  Asians at 5%; and multiracial Americans at 2.4%. On the local level, 11% of America’s counties have more minorities than whites; six counties joined the list last year: Mecklenburg, N.C.; Cherokee, Okla.; Texas, Okla.; Bell, Texas; Hockley, Texas; and Terrell, Texas.