Census: Minority Births Outnumber Whites

The U.S. Census Bureau said that as of July of last year, more than 50 percent of the country’s population under the age of 1 were minorities—a first in U.S. history.

The census defined a minority as someone “who is not single-race white and not Hispanic.”

In an estimate on Thursday, the agency said that 50.4 percent of children under 1 were minorities, which is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 census taken in April of that year.

“This is a watershed moment,” Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist with Johns Hopkins University, told the Washington Post. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.”

Minorities make up around 36.6 percent of the entire U.S. population in 2011, rising from 36.1 percent in 2010, the census said.

There are four states with a population of greater than 50 percent minority: California, Hawaii, Texas, and New Mexico.