The United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language is a racially The term race or racial group usually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics. The physical features commonly seen as indicating race are salient visual traits such as skin color, cranial or facial features and hair texture. Conceptions of race, as well diverse Multiculturalism is the acceptance or promotion of multiple ethnic cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations. In this context, multiculturalists advocate extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without country. Modern issues of race, as well as its impact in the political Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in other group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers to and economic Economics is the social science that is concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία from οἶκος (oikos, "house") + νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)". Current development of the nation have been examined by multiple historians and researchers. There are issues and controversies with the self-identification and classification of race within the country, and several trends have emerged in the demographic movements of ethnic groups as discovered by self-reports and genetic testing Genetic Testing : Gene tests , the newest and most sophisticated of the techniques used to test for genetic disorders, involve direct examination of the DNA molecule itself. Other genetic tests include biochemical tests for such gene products as enzymes and other proteins and for microscopic examination of stained or fluorescent chromosomes.

Contents

History

The immigrants Immigration is the introduction of new people into a habitat or population. It is a biological concept and is important in population ecology, differentiated from emigration and migration to the New World The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas. When the term originated in the late 15th century, the Americas were new to the Europeans[note], who previously thought of the world as consisting only of Europe, Asia, and Africa . The term "New World" should not be confused with "modern came largely from widely separated regions of the Old World The Old World consists of those parts of Earth known to Europeans[note], Asians and Africans in the 15th century. It is used in the context of, and contrast with, the "New World". In the Americas, the immigrant populations began to mix Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North, Central, and South America, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as Native Americans, Aboriginals, First Nations , Amerigine[dubious – discuss], and by Christopher Columbus' geographical and. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African American Predominantly Protestant ; some Roman Catholics. Minorities practice Islam and other religions have some European ancestors—in one analysis of genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ∼23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans (Parra et al. 1998). Similarly, many people who identify as European American have some African or Native American ancestors, either through openly interracial marriages or through the gradual inclusion of people with mixed ancestry into the majority population. In a survey of college students who self-identified as white White people is a term which usually refers to human beings characterized, at least in part, by the light pigmentation of their skin. Rather than a straightforward description of skin color, the term white also functions as a color term for race, often referring narrowly to people claiming ancestry exclusively from Europe in a northeastern U.S. university, ∼30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry.[1]

In the United States since its early history, Native Americans Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples from North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska and the island state of Hawaii. They comprise a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact political communities. The terminology used to, African-Americans Predominantly Protestant ; some Roman Catholics. Minorities practice Islam and other religions, and European-Americans A European American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the original peoples of Europe and is the descendant of European immigrants or founding colonists. This includes people via African, North American, Caribbean, Central American or South American nations which have a large European diaspora 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. But the criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During Reconstruction In the history of the United States, the Reconstruction era has two definitions, the first in reference to the entire nation in the period 1865-1877 following the Civil War, and the second to the transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, with the reconstruction of state and society in the former Confederacy and the addition, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" to be Black. By the early 20th century, this notion of invisible blackness was made statutory in many states and widely adopted nationwide. In contrast, Amerindians The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North, Central, and South America, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as Native Americans, Aboriginals, First Nations and by Christopher Columbus' geographical and historical mistake, Indians, now continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called blood quantum Blood Quantum Laws is an umbrella term that describes legislation enacted to define membership in Native American groups. "Blood quantum" refers to attempts to calculate the degree of racial inheritance for a given individual. Any discussion of "blood quantum" must be understood within its metaphorical context. A "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 Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to the ancient Hispania (geographically coinciding with the Iberian Peninsula). During the modern era, it sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, relating to the contemporary nation of Spain or Arab Arab people or Arabs (العرب al-ʿarab) are a panethnicity of peoples of various ancestral origins, religious backgrounds and historic identities, whose members, on an individual basis, identify as such on one or more of linguistic, cultural, political, or genealogical grounds. Those self-identifying as Arab, however, rarely do so with it as ancestry An ancestor is a parent or the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth) are exceptions in being seen as White by most Americans despite of their physical characteristics and traces of known African ancestry.) Similar questions were raised about east Asian Americans Asian Americans are Americans of Asian descent. They include groups such as Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian/Khmer, Pakistani Americans and others whose national origin is from the Asian continent (i.e. of Chinese American Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism and Japanese American Japanese Americans are Americans of Japanese heritage, either born in Japan or their descendants. Japanese Americans have historically been among the three largest Asian American communities, but in recent decades have become the sixth largest group at roughly 1,204,205, including those of mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity. In the 2000 census, the ancestries) who could pass as "white" or were portrayed as more "assimilated" than other racial minorities, regardless of the fact their racial origins are non-Caucasian or outside of Europe.[citation needed]

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 A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include agriculture, business, and traffic. In, 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 Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black ancestry choose to self-identify as mulatto. Some" 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 Hispanic and Latino Americans are Americans with origins in the Hispanic countries of Latin America or in Spain. The group encompasses distinct sub-groups by national origin and race, with ancestries from all continents represented. Some members of the community prefer Hispanic and others Latino, the latter being more common in the western United were required to identify with a single race despite the long history of mixing in Latin America Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin) – particularly Spanish, Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,501 km² (7,880,000 sq mi), almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area. As of 2009, its. Partly as a result of the confusion generated by the distinction, 32.9% (U.S. census records) of Latino respondents in the 2000 census ignored the specified racial categories and checked "some other race". (Mays et al. 2003 claim a figure of 42%)

Racial demographics

Main article: Racial demographics of the United States The United States is a diverse country racially and ethnically. Six races are recognized: White, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and people of Two or more races; a race called "Some other race" is also used in the census and other surveys, but is not

The United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language is a diverse Multiculturalism is the acceptance or promotion of multiple ethnic cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations. In this context, multiculturalists advocate extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without country racially. In 2006, the United States became the third nation in world history to reach 300 million people, behind China b. ^ Simple characterizations of the political structure since the 1980s are no longer possible and India India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with 1.18 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Mainland India is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal on the, each of which has over a billion people.[2][3]

The spectacular growth of the Hispanic population through immigration Immigration is the introduction of new people into a habitat or population. It is a biological concept and is important in population ecology, differentiated from emigration and migration and high birth rates According to the United Nations' World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision Population Database, crude birth rate is the number of births over a given period divided by the person-years lived by the population over that period. It is expressed as number of births per 1,000 population. CBR = are noted as a partial factor for the US’ population gains in the last quarter-century. The 2000 census 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 13.2% over the 248,709,873 persons enumerated during the 1990 Census. This was the twenty-second federal census and was at the time the largest also found Native Americans Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples from North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska and the island state of Hawaii. They comprise a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact political communities. The terminology used to at their highest population ever, 4.5 million, since the U.S was founded in 1776.[4]

Multiracial Americans and admixture

Further information: Multiracial American Multiracial Americans, US residents who identify themselves as of "two or more races", numbered 6.8 million in 2000, or 2.4% of the population
Admixture in European-American population (Schriver et al. 2003, sample size n=187)
% European Admixture Frequency
90-100 68%
80-89.9 22%
70-79.9 8%
60-69.9 < 1%
50-59.9 < 1%
40-49.9 < 1%
0-39.9 0

"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. The study found an average of 0.7% African genetic admixture with a standard error of 0.9% and 3.2% Native American Admixture with a standard error of 1.6%, in a sample of white Americans in State College State College is the largest borough in Centre County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is the principal city of the State College, Pennsylvania Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Centre county. As of the 2000 census, the borough population was 38,420, and roughly double that total lived in the borough plus the surrounding, Pennsylvania Pennsylvania has 51 miles of coastline along Lake Erie and 57 miles (92 km) of shoreline along the Delaware Estuary. However most of the non-white admixture was concentrated in 30% of the sample with African admixture ranging from 2-20% with an average of 2.3%. [1][5]

In 1958 Robert Stuckert produced a statistical analysis using historical census data and immigration statistics. He concluded that the growth in the White population could not be attributed to births in the white population and immigration from Europe alone, but also from a significant contribution from the American black population as well. He concluded that at the time 21 percent of white Americans had some recent African ancestors. He also concluded that the majority of Americans of African descent were actually white and not black.[6]

Many African Americans have European admixture in their DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid ( /diːˌɒksɨˌraɪbɵ.nuːˈkleɪ.ɪk ˈæsɪd/ (help·info)) (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses. The main role of DNA molecules is the long-term storage of information. DNA is often compared to a set of. Proportions of European admixture in African American DNA have been found in studies to be 17 %[7] and between 10.6% and 22.5%.[8] Another recent study found the average to be 21.2%, with a standard error of 1.2%.[1]

The Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute The National Human Genome Research Institute is a division of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland 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.[5]

Social definitions of race

See also: African American#Who is African American? Predominantly Protestant ; some Roman Catholics. Minorities practice Islam and other religions and Definitions of whiteness in the United States

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.

But the difference between how Native American and Black identities are defined today (blood quantum versus one-drop) has demanded explanation. According to anthropologists Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first 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 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 CERD · CEDAW · CDE · ILO C111 · ILO C100 · ILO C169 · Protocol No. 12 ECHR and specific forms of White supremacy Crime of apartheid · CERD · CEDAW · CDE · ILO C111 · ILO C100 · ILO C169 · Protocol No. 12 ECHR (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 19th century America. The theory suggests that the blood quantum definition of Native American identity enabled Pachuco 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 A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is fungible, i.e. equivalent no matter who produces it. Examples are petroleum, notebook paper, milk or copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereo systems, on 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 Manifest Destiny was the 19th century belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid 1850s that subjected them to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.

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 Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land . This should not be confused with a crop fixed rent contract, in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a fixed amount of crop per unit of land (e.g., 1 T/ha). Sharecropping 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) 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.

In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories (Gossett 1997). An example is the "one-drop rule" implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known African American ancestor as black (Davis 2001). The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States also created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into those categories (Nobles 2000). In other countries in the Americas where mixing among groups was overtly more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance (Mörner 1967).

The term "Hispanic" as an ethnonym emerged in the 20th century with the rise of migration of laborers from American Spanish-speaking countries to the United States; it thus includes people who had been considered racially distinct (Black, White, Amerindian or other mixed groups) in their home countries. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". If these categories were, however, early on understood as racial categories, there seem to be presently a shift presenting them as ethno-linguistic categories (regardless of perceived race), something that can also been seen as a strategy by some of the categorized in order to be included in the white dominant group (as the emergence of White Hispanics points to), and at the same time as a rejection of a racial label that many see not only as disciminatory but also as not portraying properly their populational origins. In contrast to "Latino" or "Hispanic", "Anglo" is now used in a similar way to refer to non-Hispanic White Americans or non-Hispanic European Americans, most of whom speak the English language but are not necessarily of English descent.

Official race definitions in the United States

Main articles: Race and ethnicity in the United States Census and Race (EEO)

The United States government has provided definitions regarding race (see the main articles).[9] Racial classification in the U.S. 2000 census and in employment reports for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was based solely on self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify and did not pre-suppose disjointedness. The category "Hispanic" is considered an ethnicity, rather than a race, by the U.S. Census.[10][4] 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]

In 2007 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the US Department of Labor finalized its update of the EEO-1 report format and guidelines to come into an effect on September 30, 2007. In particular, this update concerns the definitions of racial/ethnic categories, see Race (EEO).

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 and is not limited to one racial group's view towards another group.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Mark D. Shriver et al. "Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping." Human Genetics (2003) 112: 387–399.
  2. ^
  3. ^ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html CIA - The World Factbook -- Rank Order - Population
  4. ^ a b Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000
  5. ^ a b Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group, National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research
  6. ^ Robert Stuckert AFRICAN ANCEvSTRY OF THE WHITE AMERICAN POPULATION
  7. ^ Heather E. Collins-Schramm and others, "Markers that Discriminate Between European and African Ancestry Show Limited Variation Within Africa," Human Genetics 111 (2002): 566-69.
  8. ^ Esteban J. Parra, Amy Marcini, Joshua Akey, Jeremy Martinson, Mark A. Batzer, Richard Cooper, Terrence Forrester, David B. Allison, Ranjan Deka, Robert E. Ferrell, Mark D. Shriver, "[http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/ParraAJHG1998.pdf Estimating African American Admixture Proportions by Use of Population- Specific Alleles]," American Journal of Human Genetics 63:1839–1851, 1998.
  9. ^ a b Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity
  10. ^ "U.S. Census Bureau Guidance on the Presentation and Comparison of Race and Hispanic Origin Data". http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/compraceho.html. Retrieved 2007-04-05. "Race and Hispanic origin are two separate concepts in the federal statistical system. People who are Hispanic may be of any race. People in each race group may be either Hispanic or Not Hispanic. Each person has two attributes, their race (or races) and whether or not they are Hispanic."
  11. ^ The American FactFinder
  12. ^ Introduction to Race and Ethnic (Hispanic Origin) Data for the Census 2000 Special EEO File

Categories: Demographics of the United States

 

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