San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Multiracial count soars in new tally
For the 2010 census, Rene Flores, a Mexican American college professor, marked his race as “white.”
Since then, a genealogy test revealed he has 43% Native American ancestry. He is among millions more people who now identify as having two or more races, or being multiracial.
“I hesitated before because I did not have the cultural upbringing when I was growing up. There are many millions of Americans that are feeling the same way,” Flores said.
The growth in the number of people who identified as multiracial on 2020 census responses soared over the last decade, rising from under 3% to more than 10% of the U.S. population from 2010 and 2020.
The multiracial boom reflects the complex racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. It also may be the result of changes the U.S. Census Bureau made in processing responses that better capture diversity and how it asked about race and ethnicity in order to better reflect the nation’s changing mosaic, experts say.
In an age of easily accessible DNA testing kits, the growth reflects a deepening of the way Americans think about themselves when it comes to racial identity, experts say.
Juan Manuel Pedroza, an assistant professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz, said the 2020 results should be regarded with some caution considering the hurdles the Census Bureau faced in getting responses and a history of undercounts in communities of color. Still, the increase in the percentage of people who identified as multiracial is significant and indicative of how the country is changing, Pedroza said.
Yes, the country is diversifying. But also, there’s much less stigma attached to being multiracial,
Posters encourage people to participate in the 2020 census in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in April 2020. A boom in people identifying as multiracial reflects the nation’s complex racial and ethnic diversity.
and there’s more conversation about it. So someone who marked themselves as strictly white in 2010 may have chosen two or more races this time around in part because of societal changes, Pedroza said.
“As we talk more about multiracial identity, the boundaries around what it means to be of a single race, or just one race, I think those boundaries are changing,” Pedroza said.
Flores, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said younger people might also be more open to identifying as multiracial.
“Of course, it’s not an easy conversation,” Flores said. But being multiracial “is part of my heritage as well.”
According to 2020 census data, the number of people who identify as multiracial went from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8
million in 2020, if Latinos are included. If Latinos are taken out of the calculation, the multiracial numbers went from 5.9 million to 13.5 million people.
The largest combination of people identifying as multiracial was white and some other race, followed by white and American Indian and Alaska Native; white and Black; and white and Asian.
Since the first census
in 1790, the U.S. government has collected data on race and started gathering information on Latino ethnic background during the 1970 census. Respondents have only been given the option of putting more than a single race on the census form since 2000, and further changes are likely in the 2030 census.