Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population. [1] At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States census recognized five racial categories (White, Black, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander), as well as people who belong to two or more of the racial categories.
Race and ethnicity are considered separate and distinct identities, with a person's origins considered in the census. Thus, in addition to their race or races, all respondents are categorized by membership in one of two ethnic categories, which are "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or Latino."
Racial and ethnic demographics of the United States in percentage of the population. The United States census enumerated Whites and Blacks since 1790, Asians and Native Americans since 1860 (though all Native Americans in the U.S. were not enumerated until 1890), "some other race" since 1950, and "two or more races" since 2000. [2]
The term Hispanic has in recent years in the United States been given racial value with the perception of a racial Hispanic look being that of Native American race or of the mixed races, usually mestizo or mulatto, as the majority of the people who immigrate from Spanish-speaking countries to the United States are of that racial origin.
They form the second largest group in the United States, comprising 62,080,044 people or 18.7% of the population according to the 2020 United States census. [b] [59] [60] Hispanic and Latino Americans are not considered a race in the United States census, instead forming an ethnic category. [61] [62] [63] [64]
Under federal law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, [41] the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States has increased, [42] from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. [43] Around a million people legally immigrated to the United States per year in the 1990s, up from 250,000 per year in the 1950s. [44]
Furthermore, the United States Census Bureau proposed but then withdrew plans to add a new category to classify Middle Eastern and North African peoples in the 2020 U.S. census, due to a dispute over whether this classification should be considered a white ethnicity or a separate race.
The United States is seeing an unprecedented increase in intermarriage between the various racial and ethnic groups. In 2008, a record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another. 9% of non-Latino whites who married in 2008 married either a non-White or Latino.