Majority-minority state

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US states and districts in which non-Hispanic whites are a plurality/minority.

Majority-minority state is a term used to describe a U.S. state in which a majority of the state's population differs from the national majority population, in this case defined as whites excluding citizens who self-identify as of Hispanic ethnicity and white race, but not excluding other groups sometimes termed as minority groups, such as religious groups, the disabled, or the elderly. Hawaii has long been such a state, and is the only state that has never had a white majority. More recently, New Mexico, California, and Texas^[1] have entered the category. The District of Columbia has long had a majority African-American population. Also, all of America's major territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas Islands, and American Samoa) are majority-minority areas.

Throughout most of the 19th century and into the 20th century a number of Southern states had populations that were majority African-American. They were Louisiana (until about 1900^[2]), South Carolina (until some time after 1920^[3]) and Mississippi (until some time after 1940^[4]). In the same period, Georgia, Alabama and Florida had African American populations close to but just below the 50% level.^[5] In reference to contemporary "majority-minority" states, it is important to note that Hispanics do not constitute a race but rather an ethnicity. Individuals who marked white and Hispanic were therefore not counted as being multi-racial but rather only as White. The U.S. Census currently defines "white people" as "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.^[6] This definition includes Hispanics because it presumes that they generally descend from European colonists. However, this classification of Hispanics - as well as Mediterranean peoples, and those originating in the Middle East - has not been without controversy.

Although the Census attempts to enumerate both citizens and non-citizens, the illegal immigrant population of the United States has proven hard to quantify, and is therefore not reflected in the table below. Current estimates based on national surveys, administrative data and other sources of information provide inaccurate measures of the size of the illegal immigrant population, but indicate that the current population may range from 7 million to 20 million. An often used number (in 2006-2007) is 12 million illegal immigrants, but this is only an estimate.^[7]

State	White (all)	Non-Hispanic White	Asian	African American	Hispanic or Latino	Native American	Native Hawaiian	Two or more races
California^[8]	77.0%	43.8%	12.2%	6.7%	35.2%	1.2%	0.4%	2.4%
Hawaii^[9]	26.8%	23.5%	41.5%	2.3%	8.0%	0.3%	9.0%	20.1%
New Mexico^[10]	84.5%	43.1%	1.3%	2.4%	43.4%	10.2%	0.1%	1.5%
Texas^[11]	83.2%	49.2%	3.3%	11.7%	35.1%	0.7%	0.1%	1.1%
District of Columbia^[12]	38.0%	31.1%	3.1%	57.0%	6.8%	0.3%	0.1%	1.6%
United States^[13]	80.2%	66.9%	4.3%	12.8%	14.4%	1.0%	0.2%	1.5%

SOURCE: US Census Bureau, 2005

In August of 2006, news reports said the United States Census reported that the percentage of non-Hispanic white residents had fallen below 60% in Maryland, Georgia and Nevada.^[14]

A majority-minority state may be classified in that way by a criteria other than race. For example, the majority of Utah residents are Mormons, a religious minority throughout the rest of the United States. However, no state has a majority composed of any non-Christian group.