The U.S. population increased by nearly 23 million over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau, yet the white population dropped by 19 million, and the non-Hispanic white population dropped by 5 million. It’s not that white people are shrinking as a percentage of the population, but the raw number of people counted as “white” has gone down by millions.
What’s going on here?
The Associated Press reports it as the “white population shrinking,” but that’s pretty misleading. If you dig a tiny bit, it’s pretty clear this isn’t really a question of fewer white people so much as it’s a question of changing census questions.
White people are surely decreasing in their majority because of immigration, but the claim that the white population is shrinking in absolute terms is not really true.
If you count births and deaths, the non-Hispanic white population should have held still over the past decade. So, if it fell by 5 million, that suggests millions of people who identified as white in 2010 now identify as mixed-race or some nonwhite race.
It’s tricky to get hard data on all of this, in part because the Census Bureau last decade altered how it accounted for race when counting births. But the Anne Casey Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for children, has annual numbers divided by race and Hispanic origin of the mother. If we combine those numbers with the Census Bureau’s death numbers, we can get a rough estimate of the natural change in non-Hispanic white population in the United States.
About 2 million babies were born to non-Hispanic white mothers every year, according to the Anne Casey Foundation. About 2 million non-Hispanic white people died every year, according to the Census Bureau. Combine all these numbers, and from 2010 to 2019, you had just under 21 million non-Hispanic white births and just under 21 million non-Hispanic white deaths.
That is, non-Hispanic white people in America basically replaced themselves last decade.
Of course, being born to a white mother doesn’t make a baby white. So, maybe the drop in white population is just a matter of old white people dying and young white women having mixed-race babies? The problem with that theory is that the white-alone, non-Hispanic, under-10 population last decade fell by only 1.4 million, meaning that the changing demographics of babies can’t explain most of the decreasing white population.
What’s going on is really that the same individuals who counted as white last census count as “other” or “two or more races” in this census.
The biggest clue is evident in the Hispanic population. In 2010, 26.7 million Hispanics identified as “white alone,” — that was a majority of Hispanics. Ten years later, after the Hispanic population has grown immensely, the Census suggests we have half as many white Hispanics — only 12.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of Hispanics claiming “two or more races” increased from 3.0 million to 20.3 million.
This is obviously not an immigration matter, but an identity matter.
How’d this happen?
Most of the change is probably due to the census forms. The Census Bureau changed the questions on race, ethnicity, and ancestry for the 2020 census. Looking at the new form, it immediately asks those who identify as white to add, in an open-ended field, more detail on their race — are you Irish, Polish, et cetera? It’s very possible that Hispanic people who consider themselves white (which, again, in 2010 was most Hispanics), when prodded this year, wrote in “Mexican” or “Hispanic” or “Latino.” We know that the Census Bureau counted “Hispanic” or “Latino” as “some other race.”
And perhaps there’s a similar explanation for the 5 million-person reduction in non-Hispanic whites: It’s perfectly plausible that millions of people checked off “white” as their race but filled in a more precise race that the Census Bureau tabulated as “some other race.” Or perhaps instantly prodding people to give more detail on their race caused them to call up some small sliver of Native American or Asian heritage, which they then filled in.
Sure enough, if you look at the number of white-plus-another-race, it went up by a few million over the past decade.
So, the line that the Associated Press pedaled, that the “white population is shrinking,” may be true in a few years, but it wasn’t true over the past decade.
