An American ethnic group means those in the United States 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:
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.
50.8 million: German Americans = Germany x 0.62 – Herbert Hoover, John Steinbeck, Dwight Eisenhower, Donald Trump, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep, the Amish – Most came as farmers in the 1700s and 1800s to the North and Midwest.
42.0 million: African Americans = Africa x 0.04 – Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Oprah, Beyonce, Michael Jordan – Mostly came from West Africa, mostly in the 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 – the Great Migration.
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.
31.8 million: Mexican Americans = Mexico x 0.28 – Cesar Chavez, Carlos Santana, Dolores Huerta, Eva Longoria, Selena – Mainly in the south-west, which was part of Mexico till the middle 1800s.
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, later moving to its suburbs.
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.
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.
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. The US took over Puerto Rico in 1898.
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. The US 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.
Waves:
- British, Black, French
- German, Irish
- Jewish, Italian, Polish
- Puerto Rican, Mexican
See also:
- New York Times: Then As Now – New York’s Shifting Ethnic Mosaic (2011) – Cool maps!
- The word “ethnic”
- American ethnic groups: a brief history: 1492 to 2100
- Posts on particular ethnic groups:
- Some numbers on Black Americans
- Jews
- Race in America
- The Third Enlargement of American Whiteness – Jews, Poles, Italians
Nice post Abagond.
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This is good stuff! What about the ‘blended’ folks, or are these groups by what’s listed on census reports?
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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[…] 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… […]
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@ 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.
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@ 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.
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Shatner is Jewish-Canadian.
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I recall reading somewhere that East Asians are intentionally kept to a small percentage of the US population.
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@ Alan Smithee
Thanks.
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@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.
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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?
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@ 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.
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Reblogged this on Black Supremacy Love and Unity.
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Found a map of the United States depicting the percentage of African American in 1850, before the Civil War.
You will notice that the “Black Belt” is in roughly the same region today as it was then, along the coastal plain from southern Maryland to SE Texas and along the Mississippi Delta up to around Memphis.
Appalachia is noted for is lower percentage of blacks, then, as it is now.
Today we have the black islands of the cities in the East Coast and Midwest.
The plantation crops (in 1850) seem to be:
Cotton:
– Mississippi delta region (NE LA, and along the Arkansas and Mississippi borders
– Alabama south of the area between Montgomery and Tuscaloosa
– Along the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina, as well as the South Carolina low country
Sugar: Louisiana gulf coast (maybe Florida panhandle?)
Some rice would have been grown in the areas where we find cotton and sugar.
Tobacco: Some in the North Carolina coastal plain, but concentrated in the Tidewater region west of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Southern Maryland, ie, stretching from Raleigh, NC to the southern hinterlands of Washington, DC and Baltimore.
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Germans and Dutch were part of the first wave (immigration to colonial America)
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