Regional Patterns

Census Racial and Ethnic Definitions

The OMB has mandated specific definitions for the racial and ethnic categories recognized for the U.S. census and other federal statistics. The six official racial categories are White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawai'ian or Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race. (At the time of writing, the 2010 Census Brief containing Some Other Race data had not been released. Therefore, the numbers and percentages reported for this group are approximations calculated from the data found in the other Census Briefs reporting racial and ethnic group data.)

The OMB also recognizes a seventh category, Two or More Races, which represents people who select more than one racial category to describe their racial background. With an exception of the Two or More Races data, the data for the other six racial categories is reported in three categories: Alone, In Combination, or Alone or In Combination.

The data used to explore regional patterns in this article is the racial category Alone data, as the In Combination data also is reported in the Two or More Races statistics. Ethnicity is considered to be a separate concept from race, and is qualified by whether or not a person has Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin. As this is a separate category from race, there is an overlap in racial and ethnic data because a person who indicates Hispanic origin also indicates one or more of the racial categories on the separate race question.

In the regional analyses below, the racial data will be outlined, followed by the ethnic data, for the purposes of clarity. However, the major focus will be on the racial data, as the Hispanic data is ultimately subsumed into the racial data because of the separate questions used in the 2010 census.

Northeast Region

The northeast is comprised of nine states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, [Page 79]New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is the smallest region of the four and had 55.32 million people counted in 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the northeast had the slowest regional growth, increasing 3.2 percent by approximately 1.72 million people.

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