Choosing race: Multiracial ancestry and identification

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new “check all that apply” method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social science research 2011-03, Vol.40 (2), p.498-512
Main Authors: Gullickson, Aaron, Morning, Ann
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancestry
Biraciality
Censuses
Children
Choices
Federal Government
Genealogy
Identification
Immigration
Minority & ethnic groups
Multiracial people
Multiracial studies
Multiraciality
Parents
Race
Racial attitudes
Racial classification
Racial differentiation
Racial identification
Racial identity
Social history
Social sciences
U.S.A
United States of America
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Summary:Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new “check all that apply” method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the “biracial” children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the US Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple-race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.
ISSN:0049-089X
1096-0317
DOI:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.12.010