Racial and Ancestral Makeup
According to 2011 US Census Bureau estimates, California's population was 39.7% Non-Hispanic White, 6.6% Black or African American, 13.6% Asian, 1.0% American Indian, 0.4% Pacific Islander and 3.6% from two or more races. 74.0% of the total population are White persons and 38.1% of the total population are Hispanics or Latinos of any race.
California has the largest population of White Americans in the U.S., totaling 21,453,934 residents as of the 2010 census. The state has the fifth largest population of African Americans in the U.S., an estimated 2,299,072 residents. California's Asian population is estimated at 4.9 million, approximately one-third of the nation's estimated 15 million Asian Americans. California's Native American population of 362,801 is the most of any state; some estimates place the Native American population at one million.
As of 2006, California has the largest minority population in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites decreased from about 92% of the state's population in 1960 to 43% in 2006. While the population of minorities accounts for 100.7 million of 300 million U.S. residents, 20% of the national total live in California.
New Mexico and Texas have higher percentages of Latinos, but California has the highest total number of Latinos of any U.S. state. Only Hawaii has a higher Asian American percentage than California.
The largest named ancestries in California are Mexican (25%), German (9%), Irish (7.7%), English (7.4%); there are 65 other ethnicities including Albanians, Haitians, Pakistanis, and Somalis. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco have large numbers of residents with French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Scandinavian ancestry.
| By race | White | Black | AIAN* | Asian | NHPI* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 (total population) | 79.75% | 7.65% | 1.99% | 12.39% | 0.69% |
| 2000 (Hispanic only) | 30.79% | 0.61% | 0.85% | 0.45% | 0.13% |
| 2005 (total population) | 79.07% | 7.45% | 1.93% | 13.47% | 0.71% |
| 2005 (Hispanic only) | 33.59% | 0.67% | 0.84% | 0.47% | 0.13% |
| Growth 2000–05 (total population) | 5.76% | 3.90% | 3.58% | 16.01% | 10.13% |
| Growth 2000–05 (non-Hispanic only) | -0.91% | 2.80% | 1.87% | 16.18% | 9.65% |
| Growth 2000–05 (Hispanic only) | 16.36% | 16.48% | 5.87% | 11.68% | 12.29% |
| * AIAN is American Indian or Alaskan Native; NHPI is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander | |||||
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of California
Famous quotes containing the words racial and, racial, ancestral and/or makeup:
“I am convinced that our American society will become more and more vulgarized and that it will be fragmentized into contending economic, racial and religious pressure groups lacking in unity and common will, unless we can arrest the disintegration of the family and of community solidarity.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“Children, behold the Chimpanzee:
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.”
—Oliver Herford (1863–1935)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)