Study says multiracial identification booming

Princeton University researchers predict more Americans will identify themselves with more than one race in the current census.

   Princeton University researchers predict that between 8 million and 18 million Americans will identify themselves with more than one race in the 2000 census.
   Those figures would be several times greater than previous estimates by the federal government.
   The study found that the vast majority of the likely multiple race respondents chose “white” when faced with the traditional single-response question.
   In a report in today’s online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Joshua Goldstein and Ann Morning of the Princeton University Office of Population Research suggest that such a high degree of multiracial self-identification could complicate the issue of race-based policies such as fairness-in-lending and affirmative action programs.
   “The advantage of the new (census) system is that it more accurately reflects how people see themselves,” said Mr. Goldstein. “The disadvantage is it shifts the burden of assigning single-race labels from individuals to the government. Now the government must decide how to treat multiple responses.”
   The U.S. Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Justice recently announced that they will treat mixed-race people as minorities. When more than two minority races are identified by a respondent, the federal agencies said they will consider the person to belong to the race that makes sense in the particular enforcement context.
   Under the old census system, the government was criticized for pigeonholing people into single-race boxes. Now, said Mr. Goldstein, it may be accused of reinstitutionalizing the “one-drop rule,” the segregation-era notion that a person with any amount of minority ancestry must be a member of that minority.
   “Taken together, the issues raised by multiple-race reporting may fuel criticism not only of race-based policies but also of the rationale for the collection of racial statistics in the first place,” the study concluded.
   The Princeton researchers estimated that between 3.1 and 6.6 percent of the U.S. population — between 8 million and 18 million people — are likely to have marked multiple races. The government estimates that figure at 1.5 percent.
   The researchers emphasized that the number of people identified as multiracial depends not only on how many people actually have mixed race ancestry, but also on how popular it is to identify oneself as multiracial.