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Racial demographics

Main article: Racial demographics of the United States

The United States is a diverse country racially. It has a majority of persons of White/European ancestry spread throughout the country. Racial and ethnic minorities are concentrated in coastal and metropolitan areas. The black or African American population is concentrated in the South with 60 percent of blacks living there, making up 20 percent of the population of the region. Asian Americans are concentrated mainly in the Western coastal areas. Hispanics or Latinos, an ethnic group with a membership that cuts across all the races, are concentrated in the Southwest, making up 25 percent of the region's population. Most common ancestries in the United States (as of 2000) The United States has a core of persons of White/European ancestry concentrated throughout the country. ... Diversity is the presence of a wide range of variation in the qualities or attributes under discussion. ... The term race serves to distinguish between populations or groups of people based on different sets of characteristics which are commonly determined through social conventions. ... It has been suggested that Caucasian race be merged into this article or section. ... This article is 150 kilobytes or more in size. ... A Masai man in Kenya Black people or blacks is a political, social or cultural classification of people. ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... Historic Southern United States. ... An Asian American is a person of Asian ancestry or origin who was born in or is an immigrant to the United States. ... Regional definitions vary from source to source. ... Hispanic, as used in the United States, is one of several terms used to categorize US citizens, permanent residents and temporary immigrants, whose background hail either from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America or relating to a Spanish-speaking culture. ... // The term Latino is a linguistic identity that refers to an individual that has significant ancestry from a nation-state where a Latin derived language is spoken or is the offical language of the government. ... Regional definitions vary from source to source. ...

As of 2005, four states — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas — have "minority-majorities," where non-Hispanic whites are not a majority of their state populations. Ten other states have minority groups at over a quarter of their state populations, and 15 states where non-Hispanic whites are over 70 percent of their state populations. Official language(s) English Capital  Sacramento Largest city  Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Capital Santa Fe Largest city Albuquerque Area  Ranked 5th  - Total 121,665 sq mi (315,194 km²)  - Width 342 miles (550 km)  - Length 370 miles (595 km)  - % water 0. ... Official language(s) No Official Language See languages of Texas Capital Austin Largest city Houston Area  Ranked 2nd  - Total 261,797 sq mi (678,051 km²)  - Width 773 miles (1,244 km)  - Length 790 miles (1,270 km)  - % water 2. ...

In 2006, the United States became the third nation in world history to reach 300 million people, behind China and India, each of which has over a billion people.^[1][2]

The spectacular growth of the Hispanic population through immigration and higher birth rates are noted as a partial factor for the US’ population gains in the last quarter-century. The 2000 census also found Native Americans at their highest population ever, 4.5 million, since the U.S was founded in 1776.^[3] 2000 US Census logo The Twenty-Second United States Census, known as Census 2000 and conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, to be 281,421,906, an increase of 13. ... Native Americans are the indigenous peoples from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska. ...

Social definitions of race

See also: African American#Who is African American? and White American#Historical and present definitions

In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person’s appearance, his fraction of known non-White ancestry, and his social circle.^[4] But the criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During Reconstruction, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" to be Black.^[5] By the early 20th century, this notion of invisible blackness was made statutory in many states and widely adopted nationwide.^[6] In contrast, Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called blood quantum) due in large part to American slavery ethics. Finally, for the past century or so, to be White one had to have "pure" White ancestry. (Utterly European-looking Americans of Hispanic or Arab ancestry are exceptions in being seen as White by most Americans despite traces of known Native American or African ancestry in many of them.) An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... The origins from which white Americans may come. ... The one-drop theory (or one-drop rule) is a historical colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however small or invisible) can not be considered white[1] and so unless said person has an alternative non-white ancestry... A Sioux in traditional dress including war bonnet, circa 1908. ... Blood Quantum Laws is an umbrella term that describes legislation enacted to define membership in Native American groups. ...

Efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into discrete categories generated many difficulties (Spickard 1992). By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of children born in the United States have belonged to a different race than have one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories such as "mulatto" and "octoroon" and "blood quantum" distinctions that became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. A person's racial identity can change over time, and self-ascribed race can differ from assigned race (Kressin et al. 2003). Until the 2000 census, Latinos, like all Americans, were required to identify with a single race, despite the long history of mixing in Latin America; partly as a result of the confusion generated by the distinction, 42.2% of Latino respondents in the 2000 census ignored the specified racial categories and checked "some other race".^[7]

The difference between how Native American and Black identities are defined today (blood quantum versus one-drop) has demanded explanation. According to anthropologists such as Gerald Sider, the goal of such racial designations was to concentrate power, wealth, privilege and land in the hands of Whites in a society of White hegemony and White privilege (Sider 1996; see also Fields 1990). The differences have little to do with biology and far more to do with the history of racism and specific forms of White supremacy (the social, geopolitical and economic agendas of dominant Whites vis-à-vis subordinate Blacks and Native Americans) especially the different roles Blacks and Amerindians occupied in White-dominated nineteenth-century America. The theory suggests that the blood quantum definition of Native American identity enabled Whites to acquire Amerindian lands, while the one-drop rule of Black identity enabled Whites to preserve their agricultural labor force. The contrast presumably emerged because as peoples transported far from their land and kinship ties on another continent, Black labor was relatively easy to control, thus reducing Blacks to valuable commodities as agricultural laborers. In contrast, Amerindian labor was more difficult to control; moreover, Amerindians occupied large territories that became valuable as agricultural lands, especially with the invention of new technologies such as railroads; thus, the blood quantum definition enhanced White acquisition of Amerindian lands in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny that subjected them to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination. Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Pedophobia · Ephebiphobia Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights Gays/Transsexes/Intersexes rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Feminism Mens/Fathers rights... White supremacy is a racist ideology which holds the belief that white people are superior to other races. ... Commodity is a term with distinct meanings in both business and in Marxian political economy. ... This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. ...

The political economy of race had different consequences for the descendants of aboriginal Americans and African slaves. The 19th-century blood quantum rule meant that it was relatively easier for a person of mixed Euro-Amerindian ancestry to be accepted as White. The offspring of only a few generations of intermarriage between Amerindians and Whites likely would not have been considered Amerindian at all—at least not in a legal sense. Amerindians could have treaty rights to land, but because an individual with one Amerindian great-grandparent no longer was classified as Amerindian, they lost any legal claim to Amerindian land. According to the theory, this enabled Whites to acquire Amerindian lands. The irony is that the same individuals who could be denied legal standing because they were "too White" to claim property rights, might still be Amerindian enough to be considered as "breeds," stigmatized for their Native American ancestry.

The 20th-century one-drop rule, on the other hand, made it relatively difficult for anyone of known Black ancestry to be accepted as White. The child of an African-American sharecropper and a White person was considered Black. And, significant in terms of the economics of sharecropping, such a person also would likely be a sharecropper as well, thus adding to the employer's labor force.

In short, this theory suggests that in a 20th-century economy that benefited from sharecropping, it was useful to have as many Blacks as possible. Conversely, in a 19th-century nation bent on westward expansion, it was advantageous to diminish the numbers of those who could claim title to Amerindian lands by simply defining them out of existence.

It must be mentioned, however, that although some scholars of the Jim Crow period agree that the 20th-century notion of invisible Blackness shifted the color line in the direction of paleness, thereby swelling the labor force in response to Southern Blacks' great migration northwards, others (Joel Williamson, C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, Stetson Kennedy)^[8] see the one-drop rule as a simple consequence of the need to define Whiteness as being pure, thus justifying White-on-Black oppression. In any event, over the centuries when Whites wielded power over both Blacks and Amerindians and widely believed in their inherent superiority over people of color, it is no coincidence that the hardest racial group in which to prove membership was the White one.

The term "Hispanic" as an ethnonym emerged in the twentieth century with the rise of migration of laborers from Spanish-speaking countries to the United States; it thus includes people who had been considered racially distinct (Black, White, Amerindian, Mestizo, etc) in their home countries. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". In contrast to "Latino," "Anglo" is now used in a similar way to refer to the descendants of British and other colonists, or non-Hispanic European Americans in general, and values and practices derived from British culture. Mestizo (Portuguese, Mestiço; French, Métis: from Late Latin mixticius, from Latin mixtus, past participle of miscere, to mix) is a term of Spanish origin used to designate people of mixed European and indigenous non-European ancestry. ... European American is a term for an American of European descent, who are usually referred as White or Caucasian. ...

Official race definitions in the United States

Main article: Race (United States Census)

The United States government has provided definitions regarding race (see the main article).^[9] Racial classification in the U.S. 2000 census was based solely on self-identification and did not pre-suppose disjointedness. The category "Hispanic" is considered an ethnicity, rather than a race, by the U.S. Census.^[10][3] The concept of race as used by the Census Bureau reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.^[9] They change from one census to another, and the racial categories include both racial and national-origin groups.^[11][12] It has been suggested that Ethnicity (United States Census) be merged into this article or section. ... 2000 US Census logo The Twenty-Second United States Census, known as Census 2000 and conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, to be 281,421,906, an increase of 13. ... In philosophy, identity is the quality of being the same as. It is of particular interest to logicians and metaphysicians. ... In mathematics, two sets are said to be disjoint if they have no element in common. ... This article or section should be merged with ethnic group Ethnicity is the cultural characteristics that connect a particular group or groups of people to each other. ... 1880 US Census of Hoboken, New Jersey The United States Census is mandated by the United States Constitution[1]. The population is enumerated every 10 years and the results are used to allocate Congressional seats (congressional apportionment), electoral votes, and government program funding. ...

Genetic studies

Genetic clustering

A recent American study indicates that "ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population."^[13]. Using 326 genetic markers, Tang et al. (2005) identified four genetic clusters among 3,636 individuals sampled from 15 locations in the United States. After recruiting people identifying as white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic, they were able to assign individuals to the "correct" groups, based on their DNA alone, for all but five individuals (an error rate of 0.14%). A genetic marker is a known DNA sequences (e. ... Clustering is the classification of objects into different groups, or more precisely, the partitioning of a data set into subsets (clusters), so that the data in each subset (ideally) share some common trait - often proximity according to some defined distance measure. ... Sampling is that part of statistical practice concerned with the selection of individual observations intended to yield some knowledge about a population of concern, especially for the purposes of statistical inference. ...

The authors of this study also concluded that Hispanics' genes "generally represent a differential mixture of European, Native American, and African ancestry, with the proportionate mix typically depending on country of origin." The sample used in the study was composed of Mexican Americans, and was from a single location in Texas.^[14]

While critics of the study acknowledge that biological genetic variation among humans exists, they "argue that the bulk of human variation is continuously distributed and, as a result, any categorization schema attempting to meaningfully partition that variation will necessarily create artificial truncations."^[15] Because of this, they say, similar studies that have tried to allocate individuals into ancestry groups based on their DNA "have yielded varying results that are highly dependent on methodological design." ^[15] The first statistician to consider a methodology for the design of experiments was Sir Ronald A. Fisher. ...

Admixture studies

"In a survey of college students who self-identified as 'white' in a northeastern U.S. university, around 30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry."^[16] Many recent studies in genetics and molecular anthropology have shown that there is a surprisingly small degree of genetic overlap between members of the U.S. black and white endogamous groups.^[17] One such study found 0.7% African genetic admixture in a sample of White Americans in State College, Pennsylvania.^[18] For a non-technical introduction to the topic, please see Introduction to genetics. ... “State College” redirects here. ...

Many African Americans have European admixture in their DNA. Proportions of European admixture in African American DNA have been found in studies to be 17 %^[19] and between 10.6% and 22.5%.^[20]

The Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute notes that "although genetic analyses of large numbers of loci can produce estimates of the percentage of a person’s ancestors coming from various continental populations, these estimates may assume a false distinctiveness of the parental populations, since human groups have exchanged mates from local to continental scales throughout history.^[21] The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is a division of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland. ...

Racism

Main article: Racism in the United States

Racism in the United States has been a major issue in the country since before its founding. Historically dominated by a settler society of religiously and ethnically diverse whites, race in the United States as a concept became significant in relation to other groups. Traditionally, racist attitudes in the country have been most onerously applied to Native Americans, African Americans and some "foreign-seeming" immigrant groups and their descendants and or ancestors. An African-American drinks out of a water cooler designated for use by colored patrons in 1939 at a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City. ... A family of Russian settlers in the Caucasus region, ca. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... The term race serves to distinguish between populations or groups of people based on different sets of characteristics which are commonly determined through social conventions. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Pedophobia · Ephebiphobia Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights Gays/Transsexes/Intersexes rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Feminism Mens/Fathers rights... Native Americans are the indigenous peoples from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska. ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... Look up xenophobia in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article is becoming very long. ...

References

2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the Anno Domini (common) era. ... April 5 is the 95th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (96th in leap years). ... The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is a division of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland. ... The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is a division of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland. ...

See also

• White American
• African American
• Native American
• Asian American
• Hispanics in the United States