For the 2010 census, René D. Flores, a Mexican-American college professor, described his race as “white”.
Since then, a genealogy test has shown that he has 43% Native American ancestors. He is among millions more people who now identify as two or more races or as multiracial.
“I used to hesitate because I didn’t have the cultural upbringing when I was growing up. There are many millions of Americans who feel the same, ”said Flores.
From McKenzie County, North Dakota to St. Johns County, Florida, the number of people who identified themselves as multiracial in the 2020 census rose from less than 3% to more than 10% in the US over the past decade -Population from 2010 and 2020.
The multiracial boom reflects the complex ethnic and racial diversity of the United States, experts say.
In an age of readily available DNA test kits, the growth reflects a deepening of the way Americans think of themselves when it comes to racial identity, experts say.
Juan Manuel Pedroza, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the 2020 results should be viewed with some caution, given the hurdles the Census Bureau faces in getting answers and one History of enumerations in colored communities. Still, the increase in the percentage of people identified as multiethnic is significant and an indication of how the country is changing, Pedroza said.
Yes, the country is diversifying. But there is also a lot less stigma about being multiethnic and there is more discussion about it. Someone who marked themselves strictly white in 2010 may have picked more than two races this time, in part due to social changes, Pedroza said.
“When we talk more about multiracial identity, the boundaries that it means to be a single race or just one race, I think those boundaries are changing,” said Pedroza.
Pedroza referred to a study by a group of sociologists at Stanford who looked at whether the popularity of parentage tests can change the way Americans respond to survey questions about race and ancestry.
The study looked at 100,000 adults in the United States who were registered as potential bone marrow donors and who, as part of their registration, were asked how much they know and how they learned about their ancestors. Stanford researchers analyzed these responses and found that people who took parentage tests were more likely to identify as multiracial.
Still, it is very unlikely that this alone was responsible for the dramatic increase in numbers.
Flores, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said younger people might also be more open to identifying as multiethnic.
“Of course it’s not an easy conversation,” said Flores. But being multiethnic is also part of my heritage.
According to 2020 census data from the Census Bureau, the number of people who identify as multiracial rose from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020 when Hispanics are included. When Hispanics are removed from the calculation, the number of multiracial people rose from 5.9 million to 13.5 million people.
The largest combination of people who identified as multiracial were whites and some other races, followed by whites and Native Americans and Alaskan people; White and black; and white and asian.
The highest growth rates for people who identified as multiracial over the decade were in states that initially had low multiracial proportions – Arkansas, Alabama, and New Hampshire – which were less than 5% in 2020.
In West Virginia, the mixed race population reached 4%, beating the black population as the second most common group behind the whites.
States that already had large multiracial populations grew much more slowly than the rest of the nation. Among these states, 20% of the population in Hawaii identified themselves as multiracial and just under 10% in Alaska and Oklahoma.
At the local level, the greatest growth rates over the past decade have been in relatively small communities, in places like Mackenzie, North Dakota, which have seen rapid overall population growth. Mackenzie was the fastest growing county in the country over the decade due to an energy boom in North Dakota.
The US government has been collecting data on race since the first census in 1790 and began collecting information on the ethnic background of Hispanics during the 1970 census. Only since 2000 have respondents been able to include more than one race on the census form, and more changes are likely in the 2030 census.
The Census Bureau says it improved the race question in 2020 by adding space for respondents to write more details about their breed. In calculating the numbers, the statisticians at the Census Bureau expanded the numeric codes to better capture a wider range of people’s self-identification in written responses.
“The results we see over time aim to reflect and recognize the changes in both social and political constructs in our nation’s history,” said Nicholas Jones, director and senior advisor of Race and Ethnic Research at the US Census Bureau .
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