U.S. Racial Groups

In professional sports, African Americans comprise 80 % of all players in basketball; 67 % in football; 18 % in baseball. Only 29 % of poor in the USA are black; yet in national news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, 62 % of the pictures associated with stories about poverty feature black people; and on TV evening news, it is 65 %. On average, for every $1.00 whites spend on lottery tickets, blacks spend $5.00. [Source: Harper's Index]

Source: Census of Population, Money Income in the United States: 2000. Optional: get more 2000 census data.

Assimilation of Racial Groups

Immigrants have always taken time to move into the mainstream, both geographically and culturally. And assimilation has always been a two-way process, with each new wave of immigrants contributing something to what it means to be American, from Jewish humor to German beer. The proper measure of assimilation is not whether racial groups have cut their ties to their homeland completely, but whether they have put down roots in the United States.

Gregory Rodriguez at the New American Foundation argues that if you look at the four most important measures of "roots" -- 1) citizenship, 2) home ownership, 3) language-acquisition, and 4) intermarriage -- then assimilation is going on much as it always has.
1) American citizenship has never been an automatic choice for immigrants: only about half of the people who arrived in the United States at the turn of the century chose to become citizens. In 1990, 40% of immigrants were naturalized. But this proportion is likely to rise. The longer immigrants stay in the United States, the more likely they are to become citizens: only 23% of those who arrived in the early 1980s were naturalized by 1990, compared with 41% of those who arrived in the late 1970s. And the recent anti-immigrant campaigns in California and Congress have, paradoxically, inspired the greatest rush to naturalization in the history of the country. In 1996, there was a 212% increase over the previous year in the number of Mexican immigrants who became citizens.
2) Home ownership is another powerful symbol of attachment to American life. Half of all immigrant homes were owner-occupied in 1990. This is a much lower figure than the one for native-born Americans. But the longer immigrants stay in the country, the more likely they are to join the home-owning classes. In 1996, 75% of immigrants who had been in the United States for at least 25 years owned their own homes, compared with 70% of native-born Americans.
3) The figures for intermarriage and language-acquisition are equally heartening from an assimilationist point of view. By the third generation, a third or more of Latino and Asian women are marrying outside their racial groups (see chart above).
4) In 1900, a quarter of immigrants could not speak English; in 1990, the figure was only 8%. More than three-quarters (76%) of immigrants spoke English "with high proficiency" within ten years of arriving; and almost all their children spoke English either well or exclusively. Almost half the children of Asian immigrants can speak only English.

Source: "From Newcomers to Americans: The Successful Integration of Immigrants into American Society" (National Immigration Forum, 220 I St NE, Washington, DC, 20002) cited in The Economist, 3 July 1999. p. 24.