
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 29, 1995                   TAG: 9503300002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ETHNIC DIVERSITY

THOUGH not so profoundly as in states like California, Virginia's population is becoming more ethnically diverse. Such ethnicity-related issues as immigration policy and bilingualism eventually could grow intense here, as they now are in some other places.

Ethnicity in the Old Dominion is still - for now - mostly a matter of non-Hispanic black and non-Hispanic white. In the 1990 Census, according to figures in a booklet published earlier this year by the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, those two groups accounted for 94.6 percent of the state's population.

That, however, is a considerable drop from 30 years earlier. The 1960 Census reported that blacks and whites totaled 99.8 percent of the state's population.

The picture is clouded by the fact that in 1960 the Census Bureau was not yet listing "Hispanic" - in itself a diverse category whose members can be of any race and several nationalities - as an ethnic group. Even so, the main trends are clear.

Counting race only, for example, the nonwhite, nonblack Virginia population went from 0.2 percent of the total in 1960 to 3.8 percent in 1990. Non-Hispanic and nonblack ethnic minorities, mostly people of Asian background, rose from something less than 0.2 percent in 1960 to 2.8 percent in 1990. In the decade before 1990, the Hispanic share of the population rose from 1.5 percent of the population - which suggests that the number of Hispanics in Virginia in 1960 was very small.

But what of the future? While Paul L. Puryear's "The Status of Blacks and Minorities in Virginia 1960-1990" gives no future projections for the state, it does contain national projections that may offer a clue or two.

In 1990, Virginia's population was slightly less white than the national average (77.4 percent vs. 84.1 percent), somewhat more black (18.8 percent vs. 12.4 percent), and a bit more other (3.8 percent vs. 3.5 percent). If the national projections prove accurate, and if the 1990 relationship of the state's population to the national percentages holds steady, then both Virginia's black and nonblack minority populations will continue to grow as a percentage of the total - blacks to more than 20 percent and other minorities to more than 6 percent by 2020, and blacks to 24 percent and other minorities to nearly 10 percent by 2050.

Those are two big if's that get iffier the farther into the future are the projections. But they do suggest that for Virginians to learn to live harmoniously in a multiracial society will become more rather than less valuable. Unless race ceases, as we hope it will one day, to matter at all.

by CNB