The first race and ethnicity breakdowns from the 2020 U.S. Census were announced on Thursday, part of a larger dataset that will guide the redrawing of Congressional and legislative districts in Colorado and around the country. Click here to download the files and dig through the data yourself.
We haven’t had a chance to explore the numbers in Colorado, but there are a few things we know from a broader perspective. As The Washington Post reports:
The report marks the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790. The White population fell from 223.6 million in 2010 to 204.3 million in 2020, a decrease of 8.6 percent.
The country also passed another milestone on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in the coming decades: For the first time, the portion of White people dipped below 60 percent, slipping from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020.
As The New York Times explains, the Greeley metro area is the fourth-fastest growing metropolitan area, behind The Villages (Florida); Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown (Texas); and St. George (Utah). Denver is among the 10 cities with the largest population increase over the previous decade.
We’ll update here as more Colorado-specific information becomes available.
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I'm white and, I have to say, the sooner we get the percentage of white Americans below 50%, the better off the nation will be.
I suspect there is enough make-up in existence at this point to just make us all a hazy-shade of gray. Maybe then we could stop making race the way we color the rest of our world.
Centuries of pretending “race” exists as a way to justify, for example, slavery, can’t be undone with gray makeup. Props on the Lathe of Heaven reference, though, Dano!
Racial categories have always been fluid and have more to do with social purposes than skin color. Vox has a fascinating explainer.
I didn’t know that Irish, eastern European, and other immigrants were not considered fully “white” in young America…because cheap labor with terrible working conditions had to be justified somehow.
My granddaughter, with white mother and black father, is copper skinned with dark, curly hair. My grandson is creamy complected, with red hair. Both beautiful children. Same parents. Different “races”? I don’t think so. But they will have to decide which boxes to check.
My mother’s family came from generations of Jews in Austria. But the Nazis thought that Judaism was a “race”, and a “taint in the blood”- so they had to flee their country to save their lives, even though half of them had converted to Christianity in a vain effort to escape persecution.
The ones who didn’t flee mostly died in the camps.
Even Lauren Boebert at one time claimed to be multiracial. Her mother had a Latino ancestor. What’s weird is how important that may be to some of her racist associates.
“Race”is an excuse to treat people unequally. But it is also a way that people find their “tribe”- the complex mix of language, history, culture, family, beliefs and social status / class that comprise an identity. As long as people need to belong to a group, “race” will exist, inconsistent and illogical as it is.
I did know that about "whiteness", Kwtree. You might find this interesting:https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/white-u-s-immigration-policy
Interesting article, cook. It does reinforce the idea that “whiteness” was always an excuse to keep a permanent large, cheap labor force with limited social mobility.
The Right will decry this as the end of civilization as we know it, when in reality it’s just the beginning of the end of American Apartheid.
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