Who is Black in the Bay Area?
A Survey of Community Diversity

During the 2010s, the Bay Area experienced a decrease in the number of Black residents as other communities of color grew in size. However, those figures only account for residents who solely identify as Black. If Black residents who also identify as another race or ethnicity were included, the Bay Area’s Black population actually grew by more than 30,000 during that period. While the displacement of the region’s historical Black communities remains a major concern, Black immigrant communities across the Bay Area have also surged in size in recent years, representing many different parts of the global African diaspora. Understanding the diversity of identities within the region’s Black communities is essential in building a Bay Area where all can thrive.

By Ryan Fukumori, Ezinne Nwankwo, and Alex Balcazar*

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Data and Methods
3. Findings
4. Recommendations
5. Authors
6. Acknowledgments
7. Related Resources

Introduction

The displacement and outmigration of Black residents from historical Black communities in the Bay Area has been ongoing since the 1970s. Rising costs of living and the long-term systemic shortage in affordable housing have compelled many residents to leave for more accommodating areas. Recent news stories, like the threat of school closures in Oakland neighborhoods with declining numbers of Black families, illustrate the impacts of these departures on communities that remain.

However, Black communities in the Bay are not monolithic. A deeper dive into recent demographic changes within the Bay Area’s Black population reveals trends in immigration, ancestry, and multiracial identity. This analysis explores the changing diversity of the region’s Black population between 2010 and 2020. Interwoven into our quantitative analysis are key insights on notions of self-identification and group belonging from local Black community organizers and nonprofit leaders.

This piece builds on our demographic methodology and analysis of the Black population by further expanding our definition of Black residents to include those who also identify as another race or ethnicity. In an increasingly multiracial, yet still racially inequitable society, we recognize the need to revisit how we define and use standard census categories to understand diversity and disparity alike.

Note: We recognize that long-term, widespread phenomena like the displacement of residents from historic Black communities are the result of a myriad of factors and forces, from housing development and workforce equity to policing practices and environmental racism. To address these matters with the space they deserve, we will explore challenges around Black homeownership, displacement, and occupational segregation in future installments of this research series on Black communities in the Bay Area.

The key findings include:

• During the 2010s, multiracial residents were responsible for all net population growth in the Bay Area’s Black communities.

• The Bay Area’s Black immigrant population surged by 55 percent during the 2010s.

• Although African Americans continue to make up a substantial portion of Black residents in the Bay Area, the region is increasingly home to individuals with diverse Black ancestries from across the globe, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Despite the growing diversity within the Black community, Black immigrants often face challenges in finding a sense of belonging and inclusion in established Black community spaces.

Findings

During the 2010s, multiracial residents accounted for all net population growth in the Bay Area’s Black communities.

Between 2010 and 2020, the Bay Area experienced a net loss of 16,000 residents who only identify as Black, a 3 percent decline.¹ However, when accounting for multiracial and Latinx residents who also identify as Black, the region actually experienced a 6 percent gain in its population, or 32,000 additional residents. Multiracial Black residents — who grew by more than 47,000 people during the 2010s — accounted for all population growth in the Bay Area’s Black community.

While residents who only identify as Black still greatly outnumber multiracial and Latinx Black residents, the rise of the latter populations still represents a momentous shift: between 2010 and 2020, the number of Latinx residents in the Bay Area who identify as Black grew by 51 percent, while the number of multiracial Black residents (who do not identify as Latinx) grew by 61 percent. During that period, the share of multiracial residents among all residents who identify as Black rose from 15 percent to 23 percent.

Notably, multiracial residents who are Black make up a large share (26 percent) of all non-Latinx multiracial residents, but a very small share of Bay Area Latinx residents (2 percent). The Bay Area’s Latinx population draws overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America, nations where Afrolatinx communities (Black descendants of people enslaved by the Spanish crown in the Americas) do not make up a large share of the population, and/or places where Black African lineage and heritage are largely subsumed under a national mestizo identity.

While including multiracial residents within Black communities shows a gain in the number of Black residents in the 2010s, the overall percentage of Black residents still fell slightly, from 7.7 percent to 7.4 percent. This is because the growth in non-Black residents still outpaced net population growth among Black residents. As the graph below shows, four of the nine Bay Area counties — Contra Costa, Napa, Santa Clara, and Sonoma — had a growing share of Black residents during the 2010s, when including multiracial residents. Only two counties, Santa Clara and Sonoma, had an increase in the share of residents who only identify as Black; however, both counties have a Black population rate well below the regional average.

As we noted in our previous analysis on regional population change, just a handful of counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, and to a lesser extent San Francisco — are home to an above-average concentration of residents who only identify as Black, with Solano County having the highest share in the region (14 percent in 2020). No other county had a share of (monoracial) Black residents exceeding 3 percent in 2020. These are also all counties with Black communities dating back to the Great Migration, formed under segregationist practices of racially restrictive covenants and mortgage redlining: the eastside of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and Vallejo. By comparison, the distribution of multiracial Black residents, while small, is much more even across all nine Bay Area counties: in 2020, non-Latinx multiracial residents who identify as Black made up between 0.6 percent and 2.2 percent of residents within each county; Black Latinx residents, between 0.2 percent and 0.8 percent.

Notably, the same four counties with historical Black communities (Alameda, San Francisco, Contra Costa, and Solano) have a much smaller share of multiracial residents among their Black population. As we reported in our 2022 regional analysis of residential segregation, these four counties are also home to the 11 neighborhoods with extreme concentrations of low-income Black households. Conversely, multiracial residents make up a larger portion of Black residents in counties with little historical presence and very small Black communities overall, like Sonoma and Napa County.

The table above also reveals shifts in the geographic distribution of Black residents across the Bay Area over the past 60 years. While San Francisco was home to nearly one in three of all Black Bay Area residents in 1960, that share declined to one in 10 by 2020 following decades of outmigration and displacement. Alameda County has had the greatest share of Black residents for this entire timespan, but the county has also lost Black residents over the decades. Meanwhile, Contra Costa, Solano, and Santa Clara Counties had substantial gains in their share of Black residents, especially as rising costs and housing shortages have displaced many Black residents from San Francisco and Oakland to more inland parts of the Bay Area. Conversely, most of the North Bay (Marin, Sonoma, and Napa Counties) and San Mateo County have never been major population hubs for the region’s Black residents.²

The Bay Area’s Black immigrant population surged by 55 percent in the 2010s.

Despite the ongoing outmigration of many Black residents from the Bay Area, during the 2010s the region’s Black immigrant population grew from 36,000 to 55,700, a 55 percent increase. During this same period, the US-born Black population only grew by about 12,000 residents. Immigrants accounted for 62 percent of the Bay Area’s overall Black population growth over the decade. Accordingly, the share of Black residents who are immigrants grew from 7 percent in 2010 to 10 percent in 2020.

This population surge occurred amongst immigrants who only identify as Black (55 percent increase) as well as multiracial Black immigrants (124 percent). By contrast, the number of Black Latinx immigrants only rose by 6 percent, as population growth among Black Latinx residents occurred predominantly amongst US-born residents (a 59 percent increase).

The growth in the region’s Black immigrant population was largely concentrated in 4 counties: Alameda (71 percent), Contra Costa (50 percent), San Francisco (66 percent), and Santa Clara (77 percent). As of 2020, these 4 counties were home to 85 percent of all Black immigrants in the region.

Many Black immigrants in the Bay Area have not resided in the United States as long as the Bay Area’s overall immigrant population. As of 2020, nearly 40 percent of Black immigrants arrived in the US within the last 10 years, compared to 27 percent of all Bay Area immigrants. While immigration from other parts of the world (namely, Latin America and Asia) to the Bay Area has been more sustained over multiple generations. However, not all Black immigrants are recent newcomers: nearly 19 percent of the Bay Area’s Black immigrants have been in the country for at least 30 years, not far behind the 28 percent of all immigrants who have been in the US since 1990.

While a greater share of Black immigrants arrived in the US more recently, naturalization rates among Black immigrants in the Bay Area are comparable to the overall naturalization rate for immigrants regionwide (56 percent in 2020). Only two counties, San Francisco and Sonoma, had Black immigrant populations that were majority noncitizens in 2020.

Despite the rapid growth of the region’s Black immigrant population, Black immigrants still make up a relatively small part of the region’s overall population. As the graph above shows, Black immigrants make up no more than 4 percent of the overall immigrant population in any county. It is also notable that Solano County, which has the highest share of Black residents in the Bay Area, has a much smaller share of Black immigrants (3 percent of Black residents) than any other county in the region. This trend might be in part the result of long-term displacement from historic African American communities in other parts of the Bay Area to inland areas in Northern California.

Ultimately, more research is needed on this recent rise in the Bay Area’s Black immigrant population, its motivating factors, and its local impacts. For instance, the two counties with higher shares of immigrants among their Black residents are Santa Clara (19 percent) and Sonoma (17 percent): the former is the most populated county in the Bay Area and the heart of the region’s tech sector, the latter has the second-lowest population density in the region and is characterized by its agricultural and wine-producing economy. Further exploring these trends can help reveal challenges that more recent Black immigrants face.

Although African Americans make up the majority of Black residents in the Bay Area, the region is also home to a diverse range of African diasporic communities, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa.

As of 2020, the majority of Black residents in the Bay Area (58 percent) noted their primary ancestry as African American on the American Community Survey.³ Indeed, the historic foundations of the Bay Area’s Black population lie in the 20th-century Great Migration of Black families from former slave states in the Jim Crow South. However, as more Black residents identify as multiracial and the number of Black immigrants increases, the share of Black residents who primarily identify as African American will decline. The share of Black residents in the Bay Area who noted African American ancestry was 73 percent in 2010, a 15 percent decrease from the following decade.

As the graph above shows, this decline in the share of the African American population over the 2010s was widespread across all nine Bay Area counties. In four counties (Napa, Santa Clara, Marin, and Sonoma), African Americans comprised less than half of the overall Black population in 2010; these are counties with very small Black populations and/or higher shares of Black immigrants. By contrast, the four counties with substantial Black communities dating back to the Great Migration (Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, and San Francisco) also had the highest shares of Black residents noting African American ancestry in 2020.

Black immigrants in the Bay Area note ancestry from all parts of the world, but a majority (56 percent) cite Sub-Saharan Africa as their ancestral origin. The Bay Area gained 10,275 immigrants from Sub-Saharan African during the 2010s, which accounts for over half (52 percent) of the total net gain in Black immigrants over the decade. The next most common region of ancestry for Black immigrants was the Caribbean and West Indies (10 percent), another historical epicenter in the transatlantic economy of enslaved Africans. By contrast, other regions of the world that are also home to large Black diasporic communities, like Latin America and Europe, account for few of the Bay Area’s Black immigrants (9 percent combined in 2020).

Peculiarly, as the table above shows, an additional 9 percent of Black immigrants in both 2010 and 2020 noted African American as their primary ancestry. This population should not include children born to US-citizen parents who are living abroad, as those children are technically US citizens. It is possible that some immigrant respondents to the American Community Survey opted to write in “African American” given that the survey itself suggests that identity as a possible answer. Unique trends like these illustrate that individual survey responses will capture a variety of different self-definitions of one’s own racial, ethnic, and ancestral identity. These unexpected trends in the data are more likely to emerge when the overall population sizes are small.

While immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa comprise a majority of Black immigrants in the Bay, there is a diversity of African diasporic communities. As the graph below shows, the largest ancestral group (besides African Americans) are Ethiopian/Eritrean residents (both US-born and immigrant), with nearly 16,000 residents in 2020. There are more Black residents in the Bay Area whose primary ancestry is Mexican (6,813) than there are residents from places with large Black diasporic and Afrolatinx populations, like Jamaica (5,922), Great Britain (3,704), and Puerto Rico (2,648).

Despite small population numbers, however, some Black diasporic communities grew substantially during the 2010s: the Nigerian population grew by 83 percent, Jamaican communities by 84 percent, and Ghanaian residents by a staggering 335 percent. Not all of these gains were driven by immigration: for instance, the number of foreign-born and US-born Ethiopians and Eritreans each grew by about 3,000, which suggests that some families had children during the 2010s.

A closer look at the ancestry of multiracial Black residents and residents who only identify as Black, reveals additional trends. As the graph below shows, residents who identify as Black only are overwhelmingly either African American (65 percent) or Sub-Saharan African (14 percent), although a substantial minority of survey respondents did not specify an ancestral group. By comparison, only 36 percent of multiracial Black residents note African American as their primary ancestry, with an additional 19 percent of respondents noting a European nationality as their primary ancestry.

It is also noteworthy that 30 percent of Black Latinx residents also note African American as their primary ancestry. By comparison, just 36 percent of Black Latinx people in the Bay Area cite ancestry from Central America, South America, or Spanish-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic), with Mexico as the most common country of ancestry (16 percent). Black Latinx residents comprised just one-half of 1 percent of Bay Area residents in 2020, but this data suggests that the population encompasses a diverse group of communities: not just Afrolatinx families, but children from mixed African American and Latinx households, African Americans with deeper histories of multiracial families, and more.

As the Bay Area becomes increasingly multiracial, and as immigrants make up an increasingly larger share of Black residents, it will be crucial to delve deeper into these population trends and illuminate the diversity within the region’s many different Black communities.

Despite the increasing diversity within the Black community, Black immigrants often face challenges in finding affinity with or feeling included in Black community spaces.

Black immigrants face unique challenges as a result of their overlapping racial and immigrant identities. Though racialized and treated as Black, Black immigrants may have little historical context or understanding of the legacy of anti-Black racism in the U.S. to process such experiences. At the same time, Black immigrants may perceive experiences of racism as stemming primarily from their immigrant status or the criminalization of immigrant communities in the U.S. Some Black immigrants may not identify as Black but may hold identities that are true to the countries from which they migrate — a source of tension between African American descendants of enslaved people and Black immigrant communities. 

A recent national survey conducted by KFF and The Los Angeles Times found that compared to other immigrant groups, a larger share of Black immigrants are unable to meet their essential needs, including paying for rent, food, health care, and utilities. Black immigrants often face higher levels of detention and deportation than other immigrant communities, when we account for their smaller share of the immigrant population. Compared to US-born Black people, Black immigrants are more likely to be working poor, with their children more likely to be living in poverty.  

Despite these challenges, Black immigrants remain invisible in both Black and immigrant-focused organizing spaces. Organizations that center the issues facing Black communities have not typically focused on Black immigrants in their organizing framework. In the Bay Area, organizations like the Priority Africa Network are working to build bridges between African American and Black immigrant communities through dialogues across the African Diaspora. Such convenings help to deepen understanding of shared and distinctive experiences. Although few organizations serve Black immigrant communities in the Bay Area, formal and informal social groups that gather around religious and social activities play an important role.

Recommendations

As we explore the growing diversity within the Bay Area’s Black communities, we offer the following recommendations to ensure that all members of these communities have the resources and opportunities they need to thrive:

1. For Researchers: explore alternative approaches to disaggregating population data that account for the growing number of people who identify as multiracial. The Bay Area Equity Atlas, along with many other researchers on racial equity, uses a methodology for racial disaggregation that treats racial categories as mutually exclusive: we enumerate an individual as Black, or as Latinx, or as multiracial, but not as more than one of these identities at once. This methodology has its merits: by disaggregating people with no double-counting, we can ensure that the sum of these individual racial categories is equivalent to the total population. However, as the Bay Area (and the entire US) becomes more multiracial and more residents identify with multiple racial groups, the current category of “multiracial” will include a growing number of people across socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Many mixed-race Black people are still subject to anti-Black racism in institutional and interpersonal settings alike. As we show in this study, it will become increasingly necessary to challenge our current data disaggregation practices. Understanding the diversity of residents who identify as Latinx and/or multiracial will help the research community capture the range of experiences within the region’s many communities of color.
2. For Local Governments: ensure that jurisdictions with emerging Black immigrant populations have the necessary resources to meet the needs of these growing communities. While many of the Bay Area’s most populous counties – Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, and Santa Clara – have been losing many African American residents due to gentrification, rising costs of living, and housing scarcity, these counties are new destinations for a growing number of Black immigrants, especially from Sub-Saharan Africa. These immigrant communities are relatively small in number, do not meet the population threshold for language resources, and do not have the same deeply embedded support networks as other local immigrant communities. As such, Black immigrants may have trouble accessing local safety net services. Local governments serving these growing Black immigrant communities must equip themselves with the knowledge and cultural competency necessary to support the needs of these growing populations.
3. For Community Nonprofits and Local Institutions: create spaces for dialogue, collaboration, and community-building between Black immigrants and US-born Black residents. As Priority Africa Network noted, many recent Black immigrants are subject to anti-Black racism, from housing and employment discrimination to over-policing and interpersonal prejudice. However, many immigrant communities are not familiar with the deep legacies of anti-Black exclusion, Black social movements, and cultural contexts that inform this collective experience of racialization. Community spaces that bring together immigrant and US-born residents, especially in places with rising numbers of Black immigrants as well as historic African American neighborhoods, could help to build mutual understanding and common ground while supporting recent immigrants’ inclusion in community life.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful for the invaluable guidance and insights provided by numerous individuals and advisers throughout this research. Our heartfelt thanks go to Nunu Kidane from the Priority Africa Network, Jasmine Williams of the Black Organizing Project, and Nikki Beasley of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, whose expertise and perspectives greatly enriched our understanding. We also extend our sincere appreciation to Alex Balcazar and Edward-Michael Muña at the USC Equity Research Institute, whose exceptional work in data analysis and project management was crucial to the success of this project. Additionally, we are thankful to Jennifer Tran and Gabriel Charles Tyler at PolicyLink for their meticulous editing and thoughtful contributions. Your collective efforts have been instrumental in shaping this research.

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