OOPS….The chart on the right, courtesy of this morning’s Washington Post, certainly seems alarming for the future of black America, doesn’t it? As Andrew Sullivan says, “only 4 percent of the under-fives are African-American….That’s a potentially huge future drop in the black presence in American life.”

Luckily for the future health of the NAACP, what seems at first like a woefully underreported demographic bombshell turns out to be a mere mistake from the Post’s chartmaker, who reversed the numbers for Blacks and Asians in the right hand column. Ethnically speaking, it turns out that about 15% of under-fives are black, and 4% are Asian.

This kind of thing reminds me of mistakes that change, say, millions into billions. I mean, anyone can screw up, but you’d think that something of this magnitude would catch someone’s attention.

The Census Bureau press release is here. The table with the relevant data is here.