Diversity from the Bottom Up: Minority Youth Are Becoming a Majority

Integrated inner-city public schools were the first to see this phenomenon more than 20 years ago -- classrooms that were predominately children of color. This was attributed to White Flight: the abandoning of the inner city by middle class Caucasians. Not only are minority youth populations the majority of the public school enrollments throughout the country, they are also now a majority of several United States cities and counties.

1 minute read

August 8, 2008, 6:00 AM PDT

By will


"Foreshadowing the nation's changing makeup, one in four American counties have passed or are approaching the tipping point where black, Hispanic and Asian children constitute a majority of the under-20 population, according to analyses of census figures released Thursday.

Racial and ethnic minorities now account for 43 percent of Americans under 20. Among people of all ages, minorities make up at least 40 percent of the population in more than one in six of the nation's 3,141 counties.

The latest population changes by race, ethnicity and age, as of July 1, 2007, were generally marginal compared with the year before. But they confirm the breadth of the nation's diversity, and suggest that minorities - now about a third of the population - might constitute a majority of all Americans even sooner than projected by census demographers, in 2050."

Thursday, August 7, 2008 in The New York Times

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