The Census Bureau on Thursday will release critical data on how the racial and ethnic makeup of the U.S. has changed over the last decade — data that will be used to redraw legislative district lines across the country in the coming years.
Experts believe the new data will show that the U.S. is shifting to become a more diverse country.
The Washington Post reports that experts believe that the data will show that for the first time in the history of the Census Bureau, the non-Hispanic white population in the U.S. declined over a 10-year span.
The data will also show that all of the population growth in the last 10 years has come from people of color, The Associated Press reports.
Earlier this year, the Census Bureau reported that the population in the U.S. is currently growing at its lowest rate since the Great Depression. Thursday's data will offer more details on the demographic makeup of neighborhoods and communities across the country.
The release of the data has been delayed nearly five months, mostly due to complications from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic wreaked havoc with the 2020 Census — the virus arrived in the U.S. just as the count was getting underway.
The Census Bureau initially announced that the deadline for the 2020 count would be pushed from the end of July to the end of October due to the pandemic. However, Trump administration officials later succeeded in ending the count a month early at the end of September.
The 2020 Census was also the center of several high-profile court cases.
In 2019, the Supreme Court denied a Trump administration request to include a question regarding citizenship on the 2020 Census — a question that experts said would suppress responses from minority neighborhoods. The Supreme Court also threw out a Trump administration request in 2020 that would have excluded undocumented immigrants from the population count.
The Census Bureau will release the key data on Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. ET.
