The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and Its Implications for Racial Self-Identification

Abstract

Estimates of the size of the multiracial population in the United States depend on what prompts people to report multiple races on censuses and surveys. We use data from the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults to explore how racial self-identification is shaped by the generational locus of an individual’s multiracial ancestry—that is, the place in one’s family tree where the earliest interracial union appears. We develop the theoretical rationale for considering generational heterogeneity and provide its first empirical demonstration for U.S. adults, by estimating what shares of the population identify multiracial ancestry in their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, or further back in their family tree. We find that multiracial generation is related to—and likely confounded with—the ancestry combinations that individuals report (e.g., white-Asian, black–American Indian). Finally, we show that later generations are less likely than their first-generation counterparts to select multiple races when they self-identify. Consequently, we argue that generational locus of multiracial ancestry should be taken into account by demographers and researchers who study outcomes for multiracial Americans.

How Policies Can Address Multiracial Stigma

“…For example, approximately 46% of Multiracial people are below 18 years old (Parker et al, 2015), and recent birth data suggests that one in seven U.S. infants born in 2015 were of a Multiracial background (i.e., had parents who were either of two different races, at least one Multiracial parent, or had one parent of Latinx/Hispanic descent and one parent who was not of Latinx/Hispanic descent; Livingston, 2017). While not all of these children will grow up to identify specifically as Multiracial (Townsend et al, 2012), youth today are even more likely to adopt a Multiracial identity than adults of mixed-race backgrounds (Morning & Saperstein, 2018). Thus, the United States has experienced rapid Multiracial population growth and this growth is likely to continue in the decades to come, highlighting the need for policies to reflect this new demographic norm.…”

Challenging the ‘Swedish’ and ‘Immigrant’ Dichotomy: How do Multiracial and Multi-ethnic Swedes Identify Themselves?

“…As Brubaker argues, the fractional logic of identification based on parental country of origin becomes less socially meaningful as the generations of mixedness advances from the first generation multiracial specifically identifying as half somethingwith a strong cultural sense and often with transnational tiesto multigenerational mixed persons with a more symbolic association and further ties to culture and ethnicity. As Brubaker (2016) argues their identification then becomes selective, more as an ethnic option, with one retaining some socially meaningful identifications but discarding others (Morning and Saperstein 2018). Tova, Hugo and Lucia's choice of identification infers this process in which the identification as Swedish outweighs any identification based on parental country of origin.…”

Rethinking minority status and ‘visibility’

“…Another significant, yet understudied dimension to the growing heterogeneity of the multiracial population concerns the growth of multigeneration multiracial peoplepeople who are the children or grandchildren of a multiracial person (Song, 2017b;Morning & Saperstein 2018). Most studies have focused on 1st generation multiracial peoplethat is, someone who has parents of two racially distinct backgrounds (e.g.…”