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75“eat on the run”? Do you use a knife and fork, perhaps chopsticks, or even your hands? And, if you use a knife and fork, do you cut a piece of meat and then transfer the fork back to your right hand or leave it in your left hand? These patterns are all influenced by culture, and it, of course, influences what we eat as well, as evidenced by the many ethnic restaurants around our country.Ethnicity, a person’s ancestry and the way people identify themselves with the nation from which they or their ancestors came, is an important part of culture. Members of an ethnic group share an identity defined by their history, language (although sometimes not spoken), customs, and traditions. Experts esti-mate that nearly three hundred distinct ethnic groups currently reside in the United States (Gollnick & Chinn, 2013).As we said above, the cultural diversity in our country is rapidly increasing. Census estimates indicate that members of cultural minorities now make up over a third of our nation’s population, and projections suggest that this figure will be more than half by 2021 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013d). In the one hundred largest cities in our country, minorities—Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans—already are in the majority, with over 60 percent of the population. And the 2000 census found, for the first time, that the Hispanic surnames Garcia and Rodriguez were among the ten most common in our country (S. Roberts, 2007).This trend is reflected in our classrooms. One recent survey revealed that white students currently comprise 52 percent of the P-12 student population (National Center for Education Stistics, 2014c), but the 2010 census revealed that for the first time in history less than half of three year olds in our country were white (Frey, 2011). And more recent census figures suggested that the overall number of Latino, African American, and Asian students had surpassed the number of non-Hispanic whites (Maxwell, 2014e). White students are no longer a majority in our public schools.These trends help us understand why the backgrounds of Carla’s students are so diverse (see Figure 3.2).By the year 2050, the total population in our country will go through many more changes (see Figure 3.3). Experts predict considerable increases in the percentages of all groups of people except non-Hispanic white. During this time, the percentage of the total population that is white will decrease from 65 percent to less than half of the total population (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2010b). By 2050, no single group will be a majority among adults.