The Hill: 'Generation Z Will Be The Last Generation of Americans With a White Majority'

Generation Z will be the last generation of Americans with a white majority, according to census data. The nation’s so-called majority minority arrived with Generation Alpha, those born since about 2010.

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— The Hill (@thehill) August 7, 2023

Generation Z will be the last generation of Americans with a white majority, according to census data. The nation's so-called majority minority arrived with Generation Alpha, those born since about 2010.

Barely two decades from now, around 2045, non-Hispanic white people will fall below half as a share of the overall U.S. population.

[...] America's white majority, and its numbered days, is a lightning-rod topic, given the nation's history of slavery and enduring patterns of discrimination against minorities and immigrants.

Demographers and economists celebrate the nation's growing diversity as vital to a prosperous future. Other voices vilify racial change as a threat to the nation's white heritage.

[...] Generational data from the 2020 census shows the upward march of racial diversity by age group. Non-Hispanic white people make up 77 percent of the over age 75 population, 67 percent of the age 55-64 population, 55 percent of the 35-44 cohort, and barely half of the 18-24 age group. America's children are only 47 percent non-Hispanic white, according to an analysis released this week by William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In the decades to come, that wave of diversity will wash across the generations, yielding an America with no single racial group that can claim a numerical majority.

By 2045, according to census projections, non-Hispanic white people will fall below 50 percent as a share of the American population. By 2050, non-Hispanic white people will represent less than 40 percent of the under-18 population.

Writing in The Atlantic in 2021, Alba, Myers and Morris Levy reasoned that the "myth" of a coming majority-minority America was both false and divisive.

"In the minds of many Americans," they wrote, "this ethno-racial transition betokens political, cultural, and social upheaval, because a white majority has dominated the nation since its founding."

White nationalists have seized on "replacement theory," which holds that liberal elites are promoting immigration and interracial marriage to "replace" non-Hispanic white people with people of color, all to disempower whites.

When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, some of them chanted, "You will not replace us."