Five years ago, there was a noticeable change in America’s racial and ethnic composition, with a significant decrease in the number of individuals identified as ‘white’.
The 2020 census data from the US Census Bureau revealed a remarkable 276 percent increase in the multiracial population, while the percentage of white individuals decreased from 72.4 percent to 61.6 percent over the span of a decade.
However, it now appears that this shift was primarily influenced by the classification methods employed by government demographers, rather than reflecting any substantial alterations in the demographic makeup of the total population of 331,449,281 individuals recorded in the census.
A pair of Princeton sociologists who studied the ‘multiracial boom’ have found it was ‘mostly an illusion’ that did not reflect any shifts in racial or ethnic identity across the population.
Experts told DailyMail.com that, while there are many ways to measure race and ethnicity, the changes in the 2020 count were likely influenced by a ‘lefty’ effort to undercount white people.
The US Census Bureau for the first time in 2020 provided space on the census form for people to write in their families’ origins, which guided how the agency categorized them.
Defining who is black, white, multiracial, or any other category, is not straightforward
The Census Bureau in 2020 tried out new ways to measure race and ethnicity
People who were classified as being two or more races jumped from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent of the population from 2010 to 2020.
The increase was most noticeable among Hispanics.
The share of the white alone population dropped from 72.4 percent to 61.6 percent, stoking fears about unchecked immigration and the decline of America’s white majority.
But Paul Starr, a top Princeton sociology professor, says the new methods led to incorrect results.
Anyone who marked themselves as black or as white on the 2020 form, but then wrote that they were of Latin American origin was reclassified by a computer algorithm as ‘multiracial,’ he says.
The same went for people who self-identified as white only, but then wrote that their origins were from an African country.
‘When people identify themselves as single-race, the Census Bureau should not correct them by using the additional information they provide about their origins,’ Starr told DailyMail.com.
‘Origins and identity are two different things.’
He added: ‘Clearly, there are white people with origins in Latin America or South Africa, and when they list those origins on a Census form, they are not saying they are mixed race.’
Starr, together with colleague Christina Pao, published his 17-page analysis in Sociological Science in December.
Starr said: ‘The procedure was misleading, and the public was misled about the extent of racial change.’
In 2020, an ostensibly white American with one grandfather from Chile could have been counted as ‘multiracial’
Officials said their new methods did a better job of capturing how people identify their race and ethnicity
When the figures were released in mid-2021, bureau officials said the new method did a better job of capturing how people identify their race and ethnicity in the 21st century.
But they acknowledged that some of the dramatic growth likely came from their changes.
For the first time, empty spaces were left on the 2020 census form so that respondents could write in their ‘origins,’ such as ‘German’ or ‘Jamaican,’ when answering the race question.
The detailed answers guided the bureau in classifying the respondents and members of their households into race and ethnicity categories.
‘These improvements reveal that the US population is much more multiracial and diverse than what we measured in the past,’ bureau officials said at the time.
The official numbers on multiracial people are important because they impact political district boundaries, civil rights enforcement, labor data, health statistics and federal funding.
The Princeton researchers said the bureau mistakenly mixed up ancestry with identity and national origin with race.
They urged the bureau to abandon using ‘origins’ to categorize people in future counts.
The issue flew under the radar because of other distractions surrounding the 2020 census, including the introduction of a citizenship question, data-privacy concerns, and the difficulty of gathering data in a pandemic.
David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University and author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, says the changes likely reflected a push by left wing ideologues at the bureau.
The 2020 census was ‘pushed in a less sensible way,’ Bernstein told DailyMail.com.
Researchers have been asking the bureau since 2021 to rerun the 2020 data using 2010 methods so that an ‘apples to apples’ comparison of demographic changes can be made, says historian Margo Anderson.
The 2020 count showed the white share of population dropping from 72.4 percent to 61.6 percent
Paul Starr, a top Princeton sociology professor, says the 2020 count was ‘misleading’
The bureau hasn’t done so yet.
‘It’s 2025 and people have been asking since 2021, ‘What the hell did you do?’ said Anderson, who served on a National Academies panel that reviewed the quality of the census.
‘There is a lot of frustration there because we can’t know.’
The bureau has historically struggled to classify multiracial people, says Susan Graham, an advocate for multiracial representation in official statistics.
Respondents weren’t allowed to check more than one race until the 2000 census.
‘Was the 2020 Census subjected to a fictitious multiracial boom? Possibly,’ Graham said.
‘As always, answers only get more confusing when the federal government goes back and tries, one more time, to get it right.’
Race and ethnic categories used by the federal government are changing further to combine questions about race and ethnicity instead of asking about them separately.
A Middle Eastern and North African category also is being added which will reduce the number of respondents identifying as white.
Not all demographers think the bureau’s methodological change was significant.
‘I don’t think it’s that big of a deal for most people using the data,’ said William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution.
‘I think that the Census Bureau is trying hard to get this right.’
