An American ethnic group means those in America from the same country: Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc. But there are some odd cases: Jews, Puerto Ricans, African Americans and people in the South who say they are just American (counted here as British American).
The ten largest ethnic groups in 2010:
Thomas Jefferson
72.1 million: British Americans = Britain x 1.16 - Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Graham Bell, James Dean, John Wayne, Robert Redford, Sigourney Weaver – English, Welsh, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, “just American”. Sometimes called Wasps. In 1790 they were three-fourth of the country, now they are less than a fourth. Pretty much ran things till the late 1900s.
Sandra Bullock
50.8 million: German Americans = Germany x 0.62 – Herbert Hoover, John Steinbeck, Dwight Eisenhower, Donald Trump, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep – Most came as farmers in the 1700s and 1800s to the North and Midwest.
Malcolm X
42.0 million: African Americans = Africa x 0.04 - Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Oprah, Beyonce, Michael Jordan – Most came from West Africa in the 1600s and 1700s, sold as slaves to work in the South. Freed in the late 1800s but then lived under Jim Crow for almost a hundred years. Millions came North in the 1900s.
Robert Kennedy
36.3 million: Irish Americans = Ireland x 7.91 - John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, William F. Buckley, Joe McCarthy, Patrick Moynihan, Eugene O’Neill – fled famine and poverty in Ireland in the middle and late 1800s. Mostly settled in the big cities of the north-east. Largely working class till the late 1900s.
Dolores Huerta
31.8 million: Mexican Americans = Mexico x 0.28 – Cesar Chavez, Carlos Santana, Dolores Huerta, Eva Longoria, Selena – Also known as Chicanos. Mainly in the south-west, which was part of Mexico till the middle 1800s.
Al Pacino
17.3 million: Italian Americans = Italy x 0.29 - Madonna, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Frank Sinatra, Rudy Giuliani – Came mainly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, settling especially in New York.
Johnny Depp
10.0 million: French Americans = France x 0.15 - Thoreau, Audubon, Jack Kerouac, Johnny Depp, Steve Martin – No one thinks of them as “French Americans” but as Cajuns, Creoles, French Canadians, etc. Mainly from Louisiana, which was once French.
Steve Wozniak
10.0 million: Polish Americans = Poland x 0.26 - Steve Wozniak, Loretta Young, Martha Stewart – Came in the late 1800s and early 1900s, particularly to Chicago.
Sonia Sotomayor
8.2 million: Puerto Ricans = Puerto Rico x 2.21 - Jennifer Lopez, Sonia Sotomayor, Tito Puente, Alfonso Schomburg – Most no longer live in Puerto Rico itself. Many came to New York – Nuyoricans – in the 1940s and afterwards. America took over Puerto Rico in 1898.
Susan Sontag
6.5 million: Jewish Americans = Israel x 0.82 - Bob Dylan, Steven Spielberg, Jerry Seinfeld, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Susan Sontag, Rod Serling, Henry Kissinger, Leonard Nimoy – Most came to New York from Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, mostly speaking Yiddish. America now has almost half the world’s Jews.
Chinese Americans are the largest Asian American ethnic group at 3.1 million.
Cherokees are the largest Native American ethnic group at 0.7 million.
Ethnic map of America in 1755. African Americans are the dark blue along the coast.
See also:
Nice post Abagond.
This is good stuff! What about the ‘blended’ folks, or are these groups by what’s listed on census reports?
I have read that those that label themselves as ethnically “American” also includes some people that might be labelled as “black” or something else other than white. But, many of those people might be partially of British descent, like the white ethnic “Americans”.
I love the way you frame or position your blog posts — this one in conjunction with the two about Arizona’s ban on “ethnic studies” really connects the dots and paints a more complete picture to explain the issue. Despite that, there will still be people who just don’t get it. Thank you for keeping me thinking.
In California Japanese Americans are another large group. Many were farmers or gardeners back when the discrimination of European Americans prevented them from holding other jobs. Some still own farms in California. There is a Japan Town in San Francisco, San Jose and in Los Angeles (in LA it’s called Little Tokyo).
The next group that is growing in California are Vietnamese. San Jose, CA has Little Saigon with about 100,000 residents, about 10.6% of the San Jose population.
The most recent group that is growing in California is Indian from India. The towns of Fremont, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara have fast growing populations along with many new Indian restaurants, grocery stores and clothing stores.
[...] An American ethnic group in most cases means those in America from the same country. Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc. There are a few groups that do not quite fit that pattern: Jews, Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Another odd case are those who call themselves “Americans”. They mostly live in the upper South. I will count them as British since that seems to be what most are. The top ten ethnic groups by size in 2010… [...]
@ Oyan
If you add up all the ethnic groups in America it comes to like 350 million, which means about 42 million are counting themselves as part of more than one group. I pulled my numbers from the Wikipedia.
@ Glenn
I was surprised that no Asian American group made the top ten. But, as it turns out, there are more Italian Americans, for example, than Asian Americans of any kind.
Shatner is Jewish-Canadian.
I recall reading somewhere that East Asians are intentionally kept to a small percentage of the US population.
@ Alan Smithee
Thanks.
@Alan Smithee. Shatner has an American citizenship, so he can be listed as Jewish American. He’s not a devoted Jew as Leonard Nimoy.
But, I am glad African-American is listed as an ethnic group. It put things into perspective.
It says much that the groups seem to be broken down into nationalities (like Polish, Italian), continents (African or Asian), and race/religion (Jews).
For some reason I had mistakenly thought that the Germans made up the single, biggest ethnicity in the US. Now I’m slightly confused.
Even among the so-called British Americans, it’s a mosaic, or a grouping of nationalities. Scots are not Welsh. English are not Northern Irish. Break them up (blended families or not), and it might mean the Germans may have the largest, single ancestral line. That clear “majority” based on ethnicity alone, is not as obvious and clear cut as I thought…
Yet, despite having an outright ancestral majority based on nationality alone, the US as a unified nation is older than Italy or Germany.
http://www.adweek.com/sa-article/largest-us-ethnic-group-it-s-germans-138988
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There seems to be at least 2 factors involved:
1) Severe Immigration exclusion from the 1880s to the 1940s, and to some extent to the 1960s (when it was relaxed further).
Asian-American numbers in some cases actually decreased from the 1880s to the 1940s. This is in direct contrast to the European immigrant groups. Had immigration continued unabated, we might have been seeing more ethnic Chinese and Filipino-Americans than Italian-Americans.
2) Immigrant visas still related to country quotas.
Which means, visas to persons from China and India (and maybe from Philippines) fill up very quickly, while plenty of unfilled slots still remain for those from Denmark, Sweden, etc. If I were from one of those Asian countries keen about settling in the USA, I might have to go through an intermediate country first.
China and India make up 35-40% of the world just by themselves. Would it make sense to subject them on the same quota scale as those from Finland and Netherlands?
Other factors? Unspoken USA policy?
Good question.
It’s been nearly 50 years since the Bhagat Singh Thind ruling, a ruling that was probably fairly useful to the Asiatic Exclusion League at one time, and as a racist ruling, it stopped the immigration of Indians into the US up until the 1960s. I’d really like to know more about this “unspoken” policy….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind
@ Bulanik
If you want to drill down the different British groups you’d have to do the same with the Germans. Contrary to popular belief, the Germans as a whole nation have never been truly homogeneous, definitely not as homogeneous as the Scandinavian countries.
Especially going back pre-WWII where you had many Germans from Eastern Europe emigrating, Silesians, Sorbians, Bohemians etc. They would be historically Slavic, not Germanic. Or the Baltic Germans from Lithiuania and Kaliningrad, which is now a Russian exclave are a group of their own.