Worcester County’s Diversity Explosion - See Where

Monday, March 02, 2015

Kate Nagle, Patrick Sargent and GoLocalWorcester News Team

Worcester County's share of white residents is shrinking with each generation -- and an interactive data map produced by the Brookings Institution's Bill Frey shows by just how much - and where.

In a breakdown by states' counties, Worcester County's white population ages 65 and up for 2013 ranges from 91.5% to over 95% for residents over 80. That number is just over 73% for Worcester residents under the age of 20 -- and less than 70% for ages under four.

SEE INTERACTIVE MAP BELOW

Brookings' Frey, who recently wrote, Diversity Explosion: How New Demographics are Remaking America, spoke with GoLocal about the national, and regional shifts in ethic and racial compositions of populations, based on recent U.S. Census Data.

"The country is undergoing important changes, and the older, middle aged white people of the country, they don't understand how quickly this is changing," said Frey. "A lot of people are still stuck in the [nineteen] sixties, and they think diversity is blacks in the inner cities, and that's most certainly not the case."

National, Local Trends

"Frey highlights the "bottom up" demographic change that is occurring in the United States as today's youth are considerably more racially diverse than previous predominantly white generations," writes Brookings in the book release. "As a result of this demographic structure, the nation faces a "cultural generation gap." Yet these dynamics vary considerably from place to place. The following interactive feature illustrates this point by mapping the racial composition of different age groups at the county and metropolitan area scales."

Frey spoke to who is audience is based on his latest research, and was wide-reaching in his assessment.

"It's for everybody," said Frey. "It's meant to educate people about the demographic graph changes we're undergoing with respect to diversity, with racial groups growing rapidly, the experience we're going to undergo in the first half of this century will have as big an impact as the baby boom. I want everyone to understand this - they think they know, but they don't understand the scope of the change."

Frey spoke to the data as evidence in his research, and elucidated in the interactive infographic map.

"We're becoming more diverse from the younger ages up, especially in those places that used to be the big immigrant gateways, but we're also moving inwards," said Frey of the trends in the country. "Very soon, if you're not living in a place with new minorities, then the black population is increasingly making its presence felt, especially in the south."

Worcester's Population Changing and Growing

"To the extent that Worcester grows at all -- since towns in central [Massachusetts] haven't grown much -- they'll have to attract young minorities, and the main place you see them now is in the schools," said Frey. "White people who are over 50, it's 88% percent in Worcester County, so that minority share is going way up. The challenge here, with Worcester being close to Boston, which has been more used to integrating white ethnic groups than racial groups, is that it will have to embrace these younger people. Like the rest of New England, the large part of the US, we have an older, slow growing, aging white population - the major source of population growth will be young and, and the new minorities, in addition to the black growth."

“Worcester's population is changing. Since 1950, Worcester's non-white population has grown substantially, fueled in part by immigration from South America, Africa, and Asia,” said the Worcester Research Bureau in a press release. “Nearly 20% of Worcester's residents reside in linguistically isolated households, meaning all members of the household age 14 or over have at least some difficulty speaking English. The Worcester Public Schools are even more diverse, with non-whites composing more than 60% of the student population and some 30% unable to perform ordinary classroom work in English."

According to the Brooking's map, the city of Worcester's white population is just over 71%, but it's non-white population is growing faster than the non-white population in the entirety of Worcester County. Worcester's non-white population of children ages 0-4 is nearly 20%.

The Worcester Research Bureau found that in the year 2000, 25,097 Worcester residents were not born in the United States. As part of a larger trend, the Hispanic population in the city has been the fastest growing demographic, representing 21-percent of residents in 2013.

Frey also spoke to another demographic shift in recent years -- blacks to the south.

"Historically, blacks have left the south, but starting around 1970, there's been a trickle back, and in the 1990s and the last 10-15 years, there's been a black migration to the south," said Frey.

"Their parents, or grandparents had moved to the north. Now, when you see migration patterns, blacks are much more likely to choose a southern destination than whites are, and they're going to more prosperous parts of the south, and especially Atlanta, and it's relatively high black educational level," said Frey. "Atlanta is attracting whites and Hispanics as well, but blacks are a huge part of the growth -- the old image of the south as a "black-white" region persists, irregardless of racial groups. Georgia, North Carolina, and all of the south, the blacks are the largest minority, so as we're becoming more diverse as a country, different parts have different mixes, but the south will largely be a black-white culture."