Census shows multiracial boom
Across the nation, 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.
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, said Juan Manuel Pedroza, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 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, 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.
Pedroza pointed to a Stanford study that examined 100,000 adults who were registered as potential bone marrow donors and who, as a part of their registration, had been asked how much they knew about their ancestry, and how they came to learn it. The responses showed that people who have taken ancestry tests are more likely to identify as multiracial.
Still, that’s highly unlikely to account on its own for the dramatic jump in the numbers.
According to 2020 data from the Census Bureau, the number of people who identify as multiracial went from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020.
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.
The highest growth rates over the decade for people identifying as multiracial were in states that had a low multiracial share of the population to start with — Arkansas, Alabama and New Hampshire — which in 2020 was less than 5%.
In West Virginia, the multiracial population reached 4%, surpassing the Black population as the second-most prevalent group behind white people. In states with already a large share of multiracial people, the growth was much slower than the rest of the nation.
The Census Bureau reports it improved the 2020 race question by adding space for respondents to write in further details about their race, so someone who marked “Black” could also write “African American” or “Jamaican.” When crunching the numbers, Census Bureau statisticians expanded numeric codes in order to better capture a wider range of how people self-identify in the write-in answers.