Multiracial boom in 2020 census was mostly an illusion, researchers say [View all]

Source: AP

Updated 12:06 AM EST, January 14, 2025


When the 2020 census results were released, they showed a boom in the number of people classified as multiracial in the United States since 2010. Two Princeton sociologists now say that jump was mostly an illusion.

The 276% increase largely happened because of a change in how people were classified by the U.S. Census Bureau rather than strong shifts in racial or ethnic identity or major growth, according to a paper published last month by Paul Starr and Christina Pao. The Census Bureau for the first time provided space on the census form for people to write-in their families’ origins, which guided how the statistical agency categorized them.

People who were classified as being two or more races rose from 2.9% to 10.2% of the U.S. population from 2010 to 2020, and the increase was most noticeable among Hispanic people. The share of the white alone population dropped from 72.4% to 61.6%, provoking handwringing among some conservative commentators about what they called a loss of white power.

The Princeton researchers argued that anyone who marked themselves as Black or as white on the 2020 census form but then wrote that they were of Latin American origin was reclassified by a computerized algorithm as multiracial even though they had marked themselves as a single race. The same multiracial reclassification appeared to have been made for people who self-identified as white only but then wrote that their origins were from an African country, according to the researchers.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/2020-census-bureau-race-ethnicity-91376f5a672b698e4875fbee952aac46