According to an analysis of Census data recently published by the Brookings Institution, Generation Z will be the last generation of Americans with a white majority.
Typically defined as those born between 1995 and 2012 (and thus between the ages of 11 and 28), Gen Z or “Zoomers” were recorded as being roughly just above 50% white. Identifying direct comparisons in the data presented in the report is difficult, since the age cohorts recorded by the Census Bureau don’t perfectly line up with the informal “Generation” definitions.
Among the younger age cohorts, the Latino population steadily increases as well as those identifying with two or more races, while the Black population stays about the same and the Asian population decreases slightly.
For the moment, however, the white population remains in a firm majority, with the 2020 census reporting that 71% of the country self-identified as white or part-white, while 61.6% self-identified as only white.
Still, even those numbers are down significantly from the 2010 census, when over 72% of the population described themselves a white alone.
The report also highlights how the US population is steadily aging, with the median age being 38.9 years old - the highest it’s ever been. Meanwhile, the birth rate has continued to decline at 1.64 births per mother. Much of the nation’s population growth has been through immigration, particularly by younger immigrants from Latin America. Among the US Hispanic population, the median age is just 31, while for non-Hispanic white people it is 43, according to the Census Bureau.
The shift is likely to have major impacts on the nation’s self-image as well as how it reckons with its past. Nationwide demonstrations in 2020 that were initially sparked by fury over police violence by white officers against black citizens also grew to include demands for the removal of statues and honorary names for social institutions that critics said glorified the Confederacy, a separatist movement from the mid-19th century that attempted to declare independence in order to preserve the enslavement of black people to work on white-owned plantations. The Confederacy failed and slavery was abolished, but decades of racist “Jim Crow” laws nonetheless followed, only being discarded after mass demonstrations rocked the country a century later, in the 1950s and 60s.