Ron Brownstein’s aptly named “The Next America” is a tale of increasingly rapid White dispossession. Key quotes:
From every angle, the results showed that the nation’s transformation into a “majority-minority” nation is proceeding even faster than expected. Nationally, the overall share of the non-Hispanic white population dropped from 69.1 percent in 2000 to 63.7 in 2010, a greater decline than most analysts anticipated. In a mirror image, the minority population grew from 30.9 percent in 2000 to 36.3 percent in 2010.
Given that the White percentage includes Jews and Middle Eastern people who do not identify as White (or vote like most Whites), the White population of European descent is likely below 60%.
The change over the past decade was especially dramatic among young people. In the new census, 46.5 percent of people under 18 were minority, a dramatic jump from 39.1 percent in 2000. As recently as last summer, demographers projected that minorities would make up a majority of the under-18 population sometime after 2020. At the current rate of growth, however, nonwhites will comprise a majority of children in the United States by 2015. And because of the explosive minority growth in the youth population—the people who will form families and become parents in the coming years—the nonwhite share of the overall population is likely to grow even faster over the next decade, says Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.
