White births in the United States are no longer in the majority, according to US Census Bureau data made public on Thursday.
Minorities — Hispanics, blacks and Asians and other mixed races — accounted for 50.4 percent of births over a 12-month period to July 2011, marking a majority for the first time in US history. The demographic milestone had been expected for years in a country founded by European whites and that early on relied heavily on the work of enslaved Africans, then went through a civil war and civil rights battle over issues of race. Whites still maintain the largest single share of the total births, at 49.6 percent, according to the census data, and remain the majority — 63.4 percent — of the population as a whole, according to the Census Bureau in the latest release of data from its 2010 census.