By: Jeff Kunerth and Victor Manuel Ramos–staff writers
Source: Orlando Sentinel
Photograph by: Roberto Gonzalez/Orlando Sentinel
Orange County is now among the hundreds of counties nationwide where no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority, according to census estimates released today.Whites dipped to 49.96 percent of the population in Orange, nudging it into the ranks of “majority-minority” counties in 2008.
The shift, for now, is largely symbolic. Political power, economic clout and social influence trail — sometimes by decades — changes in race and ethnicity. Whites may now account for fewer than half of the nearly 1.1 million people in Orange, but nothing else has really changed and won’t for some time, said University of Central Florida sociologist James Wright.
