OK, I decided, screw this "sense I get" business -- I know how to find things on the web. It's Friday.
So, census data.
The Statistics Canada website gives us a breakdown of ethnocultural data helpfully broken down further into a "visible minorities" table (but not actually turned into percentages).
The moral of that story: using a 20% representative sample, they figured...
a total population of 29,639,035,
of which 3,983,845 were from a "visible minority",
and the vast majority of those were either Chinese (1,029,395 ) or South Asian (917,075).
So, 13% of the population is a "visible minority" (although the role of Native Americans is vexed -- on this table, they're listed at the bottom as "Aboriginal self-reporting", with a population of 952,892. I'm betting there's more than that out there who just don't fill in census forms.)
Because of that, the percentage might be a couple points higher.
Anyway, the US Census site (harder to navigate, but easier to find race as an issue -- typically American) gives us this pdf on "Race and Hispanic Origin" (I think since "White/Hispanic origin" is a category on the census).
Total population: 281,421,906
White: 211,460,626 or 75.1%
Hispanic: 35,305,818 or 12.5%
Black or African-American: 34,658,190 or 12.3%
"Some other race": 15,359,073 or 5.5%
Asian: 10,242,998 or 3.6%
Two or more races: 6,826,228 or 2.4%
American Indian and Alaskan Native: 2,475,956 or .9%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 398,835 or .1%
---
Now, "Hispanic" doesn't count as a race category in the US -- they say Nearly half (48 percent) of Hispanics reported only White, while approximately 42 percent
reported only Some other race, when responding to the question on race." So cut that 12.5% in half, say, to 6.3%.
Still, it seems like percentage-wise, America's top two minority groups alone outweigh Canada's total minorities, possibly including the Aboriginal self-reporting and Aboriginal not-self-reporting. |
