Majority minority


A majority-minority or minority-majority area is a term used to refer to a subdivision in which one or more racial and/or ethnic minorities make up a majority of the local population.

United States

In the United States of America, majority-minority area or minority-majority area is a term describing a U.S. state or jurisdiction whose population is composed of less than 50% non-Hispanic whites. Racial data is derived from self-identification questions on the U.S. Census and on U.S. Census Bureau estimates.. The term is often used in voting rights law to designate voting districts which are altered under the Voting Rights Act to enable ethnic or language minorities "the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice." In that context, the term is first used by the Supreme Court in 1977. The Court had previously used the term in employment discrimination and labor relations cases.
From colonial times to the early-twentieth century, much of the Lower South had a Black majority. Three Southern states had populations that were majority Black: Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi. In the same period, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida had populations that were nearly 50% Black, while Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia had Black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' Black population reached 30%.
The demographics of these states changed markedly from the 1890s through the 1950s, as two waves of the Great Migration led more than 6,500,000 African-Americans to abandon the economically depressed, segregated Deep South in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions, first in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and later west to California. One-fifth of Florida's Black population had left the state by 1940, for instance. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, scholars have documented a reverse New Great Migration of Blacks back to southern states, but typically to destinations in the New South, which have the best jobs and developing economies.
The District of Columbia, one of the magnets for Great Migration Blacks, was long the sole majority-minority federal jurisdiction in the continental U.S. The Black proportion has declined since the 1990s due to gentrification and expanding opportunities, with many Blacks moving to Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Maryland and others migrating to jobs in states of the New South in a reverse of the Great Migration. In 2018, the Black population represented only 44.4% of the D.C. population — a considerable decline from 75% in the late-1970s. At the same time, Asian and Hispanic populations have increased in the District, keeping it a majority-minority area.
Since 1965, immigration has spurred increases in the number of majority-minority areas, most notably in California. Its legal resident population was 89.5% 'non-Hispanic white' in the 1940s, but in 2019 was estimated at 36.5% 'non-Hispanic white'.

Cities

Many cities in the United States became majority-minority by 2010. Out of the top 15 cities by population, Jacksonville, Florida and Fort Worth, Texas are the only ones not classified as majority-minority.

Data collection

The first data for New Mexico was a 5% sample in 1940 which estimated non-Hispanic whites at 50.9%. Hispanics do not constitute a race but an ethnic and cultural group: of respondents who listed Hispanic origin, some listed White race, roughly half gave responses tabulated under "Some other race", and much smaller numbers listed Black, Native American, or Asian race.
In U.S. censuses since 1990, self-identification has been the primary way to identify race. Presumption of race based on countries or regions given in the ancestry question is used only when a respondent has answered the ancestry question but not the race question. The U.S. Census currently defines "White people" very broadly as "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa, i.e. Caucasoids. This definition has changed through the years.
Although the census attempts to enumerate both citizens and non-citizens, the undocumented immigrant population of the United States has proven hard to quantify; the census uses a 12 million base estimate nationally. However, current estimates based on national surveys, administrative data and other sources of information indicate that the current population may range as high as 20–30 million.

Maps and graphs

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020

Other uses

Normally, a state is considered to be majority-minority because of its ethnic/racial makeup, but other criteria are occasionally used, such as religion, disability, or age. For example, the majority of Utah residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Christian denomination that is a religious minority throughout the rest of the United States. In addition to Utah, Rhode Island and Louisiana, which have Roman Catholic majorities, are the only states in the U.S. where a single denomination constitutes a majority of the population. However, no U.S. state has a majority composed of any non-Christian group, except for Hawaii, where 51.1% of the population follow religions that would be non-mainstream in the rest of the United States. Hawaii is classified as religious majority of Unaffiliated, including agnostics, atheists, humanists, the irreligious, and Secularists.

Criticism

In January 2016, CUNY sociologist Richard Alba wrote an article in the American Prospect arguing that the way in which majority-minority calculations are made by the Census are misleading. Anyone with any Hispanic, Asian, or Black ancestry is seen as non-white, even if they also have white ancestry. Alba argues that the incomes, marriage patterns, and identities of people of who are mixed Hispanic-white and Asian-white are closer to those of white people than monoracial Hispanics or Asians. Thus, when the Census says that non-Hispanic whites are projected to be less than 50% of the population by the 2040s, people of mixed-race ancestry are improperly excluded from that category.

International applications

While the concept exists in other nations, the exact term differs from place to place and language to language.
In many large, contiguous countries like China, there are many autonomous regions where a minority population is the majority. These regions are generally the result of historical population distributions, not because of recent immigration or recent differences in birth and fertility rates between various groups.

English-speaking countries

Australia

It is estimated that Europeans first outnumbered Indigenous Australians in Australia in the 1840s. There are still a number of rural and regional towns and communities where Indigenous Australians outnumber Europeans. Anglo-Celtic Australians, who as of 2019 make up 74% of Australia's population, have become a minority in some of Sydney's western suburbs in the late-twentieth century. Fairfield and Cabramatta in Fairfield City Council, Lakemba and Bankstown in the City of Canterbury-Bankstown, and Auburn in Cumberland Council, are one of the largest non-Anglo-Celtic suburbs in Australia.
Non-Anglo-Celtic ethnic groups are the majority in these suburbs of Sydney's metropolitan area:
Visible minority majorities in different Canadian municipalities:
British Columbia
Ontario
Brazil has become a majority "non-White" country as of the 2010 census, together with the federative units of Espírito Santo, the Federal District, Goiás, and Minas Gerais.
Those identifying as White declined to 47.7% in the 2010 census from 52.9% in 2000 in the entire country. However, in Brazil, this is not simply a matter of origin and birthrate, but identity changes as well. The Black minority did not enlarge its representation in the population to more than 1.5% in the period, while it was mostly the growth in the number of pardo people that caused the demographic plurality of Brazil.

Bulgaria

make up roughly about 10–12% of country's overall population, but make up a majority in many areas in the Colombia's Pacific region, especially in Chocó Department, where they make up 80–90% of the population.

East Timor

Abkhazia (Georgia)

Russia

Former Yugoslavia

Bosnia and Herzegovina