THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: White births in the United States are no longer in the majority, according to new data from the US Census Bureau.
Minority races - Hispanics, blacks and Asians and other mixed races - accounted for 50.4 percent of births over the year to July, accounting for a majority for the first time in US history.
The demographic milestone had been expected for years in a country founded by European whites and that early on relied heavily on the work of enslaved African populations, then went through a civil war and civil rights battle over issues of race.
In recent years, the growth of Hispanic populations immigrating from Latin America has hastened a decline in the majority status of white births, the census data suggested.
"This is an important landmark," said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. "This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders." » | Thursday, May 17, 2012
