June 5, 2025
Article highlights:
- A truth that shocked me
- How it felt in me
- Where it led
I start today with a simple but confronting fact: as of 2024, the estimated percentage of white or Caucasian people in the world is around 16%. That’s right. Out of a global population of more than 8 billion (2024), white people are a clear minority.
Pause for a moment. Really take that in. It is a small number with the power to rock our world.
When I first tried to get a handle on this number, in the early ’80s I went to the library—where I struck out. I looked in encyclopedias and couldn’t find anything solid. I asked professors at the local university. No one seemed to know.
Twenty years ago, with a burgeoning World Wide Web at hand, I searched again. Figures were all over the place, ranging from 60% to 80% or more. There were no reliable sources, no consistent surveys, no conclusive percentages. Isn’t that odd? Isn’t it noticeable that there was no truth about this to be found?!!! Doesn’t that speak volumes in itself?
It’s only recently that I’ve found trustworthy estimates, and the figure hovers quite consistently between 15% and 17%. Some surveys suggest even lower.
How did I get started down this path in the first place? It was in fifth or sixth grade, in geography class. I’d look at maps of the world, learning about Asia, Africa, Latin America. So many places. So many people. And I clearly recall thinking: How can white people possibly believe we are the most? Just look! Most of the world is clearly not white. I said it out loud. Adults looked at me like I was two-headed.
The truth that white people are fewer in number—and always have been—runs counter to what many of us have absorbed unconsciously. We were often taught the opposite, directly or indirectly. Regardless of the color of our skin, we were steeped in a cultural narrative that presented whiteness as dominant and central by default. This was translated to include numbers.
When you’ve lived inside a story like that for generations, it can be destabilizing to realize it was never numerically true. Not even close.
Is that part of the fear at the root of racism? A root we all share? Is that the unspoken anxiety—an old karmic concern stemming from certain white people—that we might be “disappearing” because we are, and always have been, just a small portion of the human family?
Why do I bring this here, into our shared space of spiritual musings? Because this truth has spiritual weight. We who walk a spiritual path often speak of unity, oneness, shared humanity. But we must also reckon with the centuries—thousands of years, even—during which people who looked like me upheld the opposite of that truth. Dominance. Superiority. Extraction. Control. These are not imagined dynamics; they have shaped the world we live in.
What does it mean to face this? Why should we? To me it is sacred work. What does it mean to really feel ourselves to be among a 15% minority—not just to understand it with our intellect, but to feel it in our bones?
My reaction took me by surprise. Seeing it hit strangely hard. I’d been searching for over 40 years. I sincerely wanted to know. I’ve suspected as much since I was young. So why did I feel so struck? It landed hard in my body, in my nervous system, in the quiet rooms where ancestral memory hums and unexamined fears linger.
I noticed subtle fears in my body—not because I fear white people are endangered, but because of something older, deeper. There was a kind of kinetic reaction—a bracing, a shrinking—that seemed epigenetic in nature, not aligned with how my conscious mind works.
My response didn’t show up as consciously conflicting beliefs. It came as conflicting sensations. And that’s what makes it important to notice. The things we inherit unconsciously often run the deepest.
I had a sensation—and it shocked me to find this there—of being less powerful. An instinct of being at risk. Not in a rational or mental way, but in the way old identities flicker when exposed to new light. There were sensations of exposure, discomfort, nervousness.
Now? Now I sit with it. Not to wallow or dramatize, but to see. To allow. To cleanse.
Because if I believe in participating in the healing of the world—and I do—then I must, as usual, begin with me. That is the most effective place to start, always. Not by fixing or changing the external first. That comes next. This work is always best begun by shining light into the unexamined corners of my own lineage, my own conditioning, my own inherited roles. This isn’t about blame. It’s about spiritual integrity. It’s about telling myself the truth. It is the work of intent, of willingness, of opening to change.
When I—and we—can name what arises, welcome it, breathe with it, speak it aloud, then the patterns that limit our humanity start to move. As I said: deeply spiritual work.
What we all find there, regardless of the color of our skin, is our own experience of being dishonored, discriminated against, and shamed in whatever ways we have. And of doing this to others. Some find loss and anger of such proportions that the fear is being capsized by it. We all claim there the truth of human interaction and history. And release our shared pain.
Fifteen percent. A small number to ponder and open to realizations. By seeing clearly what has always been true: that whiteness is not the center of the world. This world was not given to the white of skin. That certainly was never meant to be.
In that realization lies the beginning of something cleaner, more honest, more whole. It is a vital opening on the true path to Integrated Oneness.
May we all know the truth about where we are and how we came to be here.
May we all know the truth about the color of our skin.
May we all know the truth of the Integrated Oneness of our soul.
That is my prayer.
With an open heart,
HuLiLi Leilani
After Notes, for those interested in More:
The percentage of the world population considered Caucasian or white depends on how the terms are defined, which can vary by context (racial, ethnic, anthropological, or cultural). Here’s a general, modern estimate based on “white” or “European descent” as typically used in demographic contexts:
🌍 Estimated Global Percentage of White/Caucasian People (2024):
≈ 15% of the world population
This includes populations primarily in:
- Europe (entire continent)
- North America (white populations in the U.S. and Canada)
- Australia and New Zealand
- Parts of Latin America with large European-descended populations (e.g., Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil)
- South Africa (white minority population)
Important Notes:
- The global population is over 8 billion as of 2024.
- “White” is not a scientifically rigid term; it varies culturally and nationally.
- The term Caucasian was originally an anthropological classification and is largely outdated in current science, though still used informally in some countries (especially the U.S.)
