Census takers snap our collective picture

WASHINGTON -- Piece by piece, over the next three years, the U.S. Census Bureau plans to release a detailed analysis of what we look like as nation.

As those reports come out, the U.S. population will continue to grow, probably reaching 285 million by 2004 -- the year when reporting of the 2000 survey is complete and the census folks turn their attention to crafting their 2010 questionnaires.

The glimpses of ourselves are fascinating.

Out of every 1,000 people who now live on the planet, 45 live in the United States. But depending on how you measure, Americans hold about a quarter of the world's wealth.

The per-capita income of the Swiss is higher, and Norway, Denmark and Japan come close. But when it comes to TV sets, radios and telephones, Americans remain well ahead of the pack. Only Germans and Italians have more cars, on a per-person basis, than we do, as anybody who has been stuck in a Rome traffic jam knows.

No doubt marketers will chew on the new census figures as they seek to divine trends that can help them sell goods and services. Anybody hooked to the Internet -- nowadays some 125 million Americans are on line -- can go to the official census Web site and glean raw data that's often repackaged and sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

But census figures usually fail to turn on most editors. Possibly that's because, as with a telephone book, its not easy to make those numbers leap off the page or out of the tube in ways that can mesmerize readers and viewers.

Still, there are stories there aplenty. The census takers provide a tip to one by releasing their summaries in English and Spanish. That reflects the fact that 35.3 million Americans, or about 12.5 percent of the total population, are of Hispanic origin.

Unlike a sizable number of Hispanics, the enumerators do not view the fast-growing ethnic group as a "race."

Some 48 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as being white, while about 42 percent checked a box that made them out to be "some other race." All in all, Hispanics accounted for 97 percent of those who reported themselves as belonging to "some other race."

While the 2000 census portrayed a racially diverse America, whites still made up just over 75 percent of the population. African- Americans made up 12.3 percent, and Americans of Asian origin 3.6 percent.

The census questions on race used last year were quite different from the race questions used a decade ago, thus making direct comparisons between the two counts difficult.

One major difference: respondents for the first time could belong to "one or more races" if they chose. Nearly 7 million Americans reported that they were of multiple racial stock.

That number, census takers predict, is likely to grow quite a bit over the next decade, thereby adding to both our perceived and actual diversity as a nation.

Andrew J. Glass is a Washington-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is aglass

2001Copyright
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.