U.S. Racia Divide
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Blacks and whites in the United States remain geographically divided despite population shifts for both groups during the 1990s, new analyses of the 2000 census data showed on Monday.
At the same time, the reports showed that children were most likely to report a multi-racial heritage, in a development a census bureau official said reflected increasing although still small numbers of interracial marriages.
From the figures which will have broad political and economic implications in the coming decade, the bureau found that whites, whose proportion of the total U.S. population dipped to 77 percent in 2000 from 80 percent in 1990, were most concentrated in counties in the northern half of the country.
But while whites made up no less than 59.5 percent of the population of any state except Hawaii, they made up the lowest proportion of the total population in counties from east Texas through the southern states as far as Delaware.
The white population figures included white Latinos and Hispanics and included both those who said they were white only and those who reported more than one race.
By contrast, blacks were highly concentrated in the southern states, comprising 50 percent or more of the total population in 95 southern counties but 6 percent or less of the population in 64 percent of counties nationwide.
Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at Washington D.C.'s Urban Institute, said the data raised but did not answer the question of whether the black population had become more concentrated in the South over the decade.
But William Frey, a demographer at Santa Monica's Milken Institute, said the figures confirmed a trend toward regionalization he had noted in his own studies.
"Blacks left the South for most of the previous century but in the 1990s, there's a huge gain in black population back to the South," he said, pointing to an absolute increase in the South's black population over the decade which he said the birth rate alone could not account for.
"Much as we like to talk of ourselves as a melting pot with the new foreign-born immigrants coming to the states and spreading out a little more, really a good part of the country is predominantly white," he added.
Census data already released showed that only a very small percentage of both blacks and whites indicated a multiracial heritage, data the census collected for the first time in 2000, but the new analyses showed children were more likely to do so.
"There is some evidence to suggest an increase in the number of interracial unions and an increase in the number of children from those unions," said Claudette Bennett of the Census Bureau's population division. "Parents of those children may be identifying their children with more than one race."