State Leads Nation in Mixed-Race Individuals

More multiracial individuals live in California than any other state, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau analysixs released today.

With 1.6 million people claiming a mixed-race heritage, California was the only state where more than 1 million people marked two or more racial categories. New York was a distant second, with 590,000 multiracial individuals.

Census 2000 was the first in history to allow respondents to indicate more than one race. The change was instituted to respond to a rising multiracial lobby in the U.S. and to depict more accurately a diversifying and integrating nation.

But the census has also introduced some puzzling problems, especially regarding Latinos who were given their own ethnicity category outside of the race question. Many Latino respondents checked white or black and “other.”

In fact, a third of all multiracial people in the western United States are of Latino origin, according to the report. Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Claremont think tank, said that is a glitch in the new census.

“If you are the product of a Guatemalan Indian and a Spanish or Anglo parent, how would you check yourself [if you cannot indicate Latino as a race]?” asked Pachon.

“Basically what this census shows is integration and confusion.”

Other immigrants also had difficulty with the question. USC demographer Dowell Myers said Glendale had a high number of multiracial people because many in the city’s large Armenian American population checked “white” and “other.”

Myers said California’s unique historical and social makeup have validated multiracial identity.

“In California, we have four prominent groups--blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians,” he said. “We don’t have a biracial dichotomy; our whole attitude is more fluid.”

Slavery and Jim Crow never took root in California the same way they did in many other states, Myers said, so racial identity has always been less proscribed.

California had the third-highest percentage, 4.7%, of multiple-race respondents in relation to its overall population. Hawaii, with its blend of Asian, indigenous and Anglo heritage, ranked far above all other states--more than a fifth of its population is multiracial.

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