US Census shows white population declined for first time

For the first time in US history, the country experienced a decline in its white population, and the nations continued to grow more rapidly in the South and Southwest, according to data from the 2020 US Census released Thursday.

While the white population remains the largest race or ethnic group in the country, the number of people identifying as white alone fell by 8.6 percent over the last 10 years, according to the first detailed results of the census.

The non-Hispanic white population dropped 2.6 percent between 2010 and 2020, a decline that puts that group's share of the total US population below 60 percent. The number of people who identify as more than one race or ethnicity grew at the fastest rate of any group, partly due to changes that captured more detailed responses.

"These changes reveal that the US population is much more multiracial, and more racially and ethnically diverse, than what we measured in the past," said Nicholas Jones, the director of race, ethnicity, research and outreach for the Census Bureau's Population Division.

He cautioned that some of the changes can be attributed to improvements to the survey. The white, non-Hispanic population is still the largest racial group in the US.

The drop in the white population was driven in part by aging and a sharp drop in the birthrate.

The new data show that Hispanics accounted for about half the country's growth over the past decade, up by about 23 percent. The Asian population grew faster than expected — up by about 36 percent, an increase that made up nearly a fifth of the country's total.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans now identify themselves as either Hispanic or Asian. The black population grew by 6 percent, an increase that represented about a tenth of the country's growth. Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose the fastest, jumping to 13.5 million from 6 million.

The nation's population grew just 7.4 percent during the decade, the second slowest on record for a decennial census. Only the 1930s — the era of the Great Depression — recorded slower growth. Slightly more than half — 51.1 percent — of the total US population growth in the latest period came from increases among Hispanic or Latino residents, the Census Bureau said.

The census shows there was a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as multiracial, defined as two or more races. In 2010, the census reported 9 million people as multiracial. That number rose to 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276 percent increase.

One third of Hispanics reported being more than one race, up from just 6 percent in 2010. That means that Hispanics are now nearly twice as likely to identify as multiracial than as white, Census officials said.

Hispanic origin is counted as an ethnicity and is a distinct category from race. But Hispanics can also check race boxes.

The top five largest cities in the country are now New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. Philadelphia is now the sixth-largest city, bumped from fifth by Phoenix, which was the fastest growing of the top 20 largest cities. The Arizona city's population grew from 1.4 million people in 2010 to 1.6 million in 2020, an increase of 1.2 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. And McKenzie County, North Dakota, was the fastest-growing county over the past decade. Its population more than doubled.

Statistics from the decennial census are used to give hundreds of billions of dollars annually in federal funding and for everything from drawing school district boundaries to measuring the diversity of police forces and corporate boards.