U.S. Census Bureau

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The U.S. Census Bureau’s decennial race categories and population projections are referenced across the commons’ Race & Ethnicity chapter. The Bureau is not an equity-language guide and is not part of the commons corpus — it appears here as a reference source for four facts the syntheses rely on:

• “Negro” remained on the census form through 2010 — the 2010 category read “Black, African Am., or Negro”; the term was removed for 2020. (Census Bureau, Aug 2021)
• “Two or More Races” is the Bureau’s multiracial reporting category. The 2020 count was 33.8 million (10.2% of the population), up from 9.0 million (2.9%) in 2010 — a 276% increase. The Bureau itself attributes much of that jump to improved question design and coding rather than demographic change alone, a caveat any use of the 276% figure should carry. (Census Bureau, Aug 2021)
• The ~2045 “majority-minority” crossover comes from the Bureau’s 2018-vintage projections (non-Hispanic White share falling below 50% around 2045). The Bureau’s 2023-vintage projections — the first based on the 2020 Census — do not name a specific crossover year. The commons hedges this as “projections from the late 2010s.” (Brookings analysis of the 2018 series)

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Host posture is link-out-only: Census Bureau publications are public domain at stable census.gov URLs, linked directly. No archive is held.