The Pew Research Center released an analysis today showing that from 2000 to 2013, 78 counties in 19 states “flipped from majority white to counties where no single racial or ethnic group is a majority.”
Of those 78 counties, 11 are in California and two — Contra Costa and San Mateo counties — are in the Bay Area.
The other California counties in which whites have fallen out of the majority are: San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Stanislaus, Sutter, Ventura and Yolo.
Only counties with at least 10,000 people were included in Pew’s analysis of Census Bureau data.
Statewide, white people have not been in the majority since 2001, reflecting increased Latino birthrates and Asian immigration.
Pew said that the decrease in percentage of white residents is, as you might expect, concentrated in urban areas, which account for 31 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Just two U.S. counties with more than 10,000 people went in the opposite direction — from minority white to majority white — over the same time period. They are Calhoun County in South Carolina and West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana, Pew said.
This transformation has been ongoing for some time, of course, and will continue. “In 1960, the population of the United States was 85% white; by 2060, it will be only 43% white,” Pew wrote in a report last year.