Mixed-Race Americans

Enumerating Mixed-Race Americans Through History

Mixed-race Americans have undergone shifts in acknowledgment, acceptability, and understanding since the first U.S. census was conducted in 1790. The U.S. census has always been tied to issues of race and ethnicity in the United States. While the primary purpose of the census was originally to count the national population in order to allocate representation, race was designated as a measure of “how much” an individual would count in the total population numbers. Continuing through history, the census has been used to map the different races and ethnicities in the United States, and to measure how each group is doing on the whole in terms of education, employment, income, and health. [Page 1477]The census helps shape racial identity as well as illuminate trends along defined racial and ethnic lines. The social constructive notion of mixed race by the U.S. Census Bureau can be described as a “combination” of two or more of these racial groups. Additionally, the census not only describes the population but also shapes categorization and identity, so the implications of the racial and ethnic choices on mixed race in the United States are significant.

The United States has the longest continuous history of dividing its population into mutually exclusive racial categories based on pseudo-scientific racial theories. Racial categorization began, in part, to distinguish between whites and nonwhites, because whites were reluctant to enfranchise nonwhite groups and allow them equal rights and legal protection. The installation of the “one-drop rule” by enumerators, which stipulated that a person was considered “black” if he or she had any black ancestry, worked to reinforce notions of hypodescent and personal identities that assume that any nonwhite ancestry means that the person is nonwhite. This distinction effectively discouraged individuals with mixed-race backgrounds to identify—if even acknowledge—their white ancestry, since it was denied by the larger society. Identifying with other nonblack ancestry would not have been socially or legally accepted at the time.

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