In April of this year, AEI held an event to discuss City University of New York Professor Richard Alba’s book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream. He was joined by other experts on the Census. Revisiting the discussion is especially useful given the release of the 2020 Census data last week.

Alba began
his presentation suggesting that the popular “majority-minority” theme so
common in the media divides us by suggesting our society is split in two, “with
one side gaining and one losing.” This, he believes, does not accurately describe
the American demographic landscape. By adding new lines to the Census form, and
also making improvements in data processing and coding, the Census has improved
our understanding, and the new reality is becoming clearer.

Alba
argues that the majority-minority narrative collides with a trend that hasn’t
gotten as much attention. It is the rising frequency of families that span the
major ethno-racial divide between whites and people of color. He cited the Pew
Research Center’s work on intermarriage that provides one indication of the
mixing in families. One-fifth of new marriages unite partners of different
ethno-racial categories. As a result, a new group is emerging and growing; that
is, young Americans who come from mixed ethno-racial families. We can learn a lot
about this group from data on birth certificates where parents can indicate
multiracial identities for their children. In 2017, Alba says, mixed infants made
up 14 percent of all births. He also points out that new racial identities are
much more fluid with people describing their identity in different ways on
different forms, for example. This could lead, he
believes, not to the disappearance of distinctions, but rather to their
decline, remaking the American mainstream.

An indication of the big change in the overall demographic picture came from the Census releases last week. In 2020, “the percentage of people who reported multiple races changed more than all of the race alone groups, increasing from 2.9 percent of the population (9 million people) in 2010 to 10.2 percent of the population (33.8 million people) in 2020.” That’s a 276 percent increase. We’re learning a lot more about who we are from the work Alba and others have done. While the number of states with majority minority populations has grown since 2010, it isn’t a full picture of America’s complex demography.

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