Thanks to all who have posted interesting facts and figures from the new census. This forum is a great place to get Chicago-specific analysis.
I usually just lurk, but I wanted to note that it's important to compare Illinois/Chicagoland to the nation, since national trends are powerful and often swamp local factors. The number of people in the US who marked themselves as white alone actually decreased between 2010-2020 (
https://news.yahoo.com/2020-census-f...194341557.html )
Some of this is due to more people marking mixed race/ethnicity options, as noted by other posters, but a lot is also due to declining fertility rates and the existing age structure of the white population (e.g. echo effects from the baby boom). If you do simple demographic projections based on birth, death, and fertility rates, you'll get that white population in the US is expected to
fall by 10% between 2015-2060. Over the same time period, black population is projected to grow by 37% and Hispanic population by 96%. These national trends will continue to have a major effect on what we see in Chicago.
Note: I'm pulling the demographic projections above from William Frey's excellent book Diversity Explosion, which you can see a preview of here:
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en...ersity&f=false