Multiracial Americans

Multiracial Americans or mixed-race Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed-race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially (cf. the one-drop rule). In the 2020 United States census, 33.8 million individuals or 10.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial.^[1] There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number.

The impact of historical racial caste systems, such as that created by admixture between white European colonists and Native Americans, has often led people to identify or be classified by only one ethnicity, generally that of the culture in which they were raised.^[2] Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their multiracial heritage because of racial discrimination against minorities.^[2] While many Americans may be considered multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify so culturally, any more than they maintain all the differing traditions of a variety of national ancestries.^[2]

After a lengthy period of formal racial segregation in the former Confederacy following the Reconstruction Era and bans on interracial marriage in various parts of the country, more people are openly forming interracial unions. In addition, social conditions have changed and many multiracial people do not believe it is socially advantageous to try to "pass" as white. Diverse immigration has brought more mixed race people into the United States, such as a significant population of Hispanics. Since the 1980s, the United States has had a growing multiracial identity movement (cf. Loving Day).^[3] Because more Americans have insisted on being allowed to acknowledge their mixed racial origins, the 2000 census for the first time allowed residents to check more than one ethno-racial identity and thereby identify as multiracial. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the first biracial President of the United States; he acknowledges both sides of his family and identifies as African-American.^[4]

Today, multiracial individuals are found in every corner of the country. Multiracial groups in the United States include many African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Métis Americans, Louisiana Creoles, Hapas, Melungeons and several other communities found primarily in the Eastern US. Many Native Americans are multiracial in ancestry while identifying fully as members of federally recognized tribes.

white/Native American and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017,

white/black at 737,492,

white/Asian at 727,197, and

white/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 125,628.

[18]

Multiracial people who wanted to acknowledge their full heritage won a victory of sorts in 1997, when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) changed the federal regulation of racial categories to permit multiple responses. This resulted in a change to the 2000 United States Census, which allowed participants to select more than one of the six available categories, which were, in brief: "White," "Black or African-American," "Asian," "American Indian or Alaskan Native," "Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander" and "Other." Further details are given in the article: Race and ethnicity in the United States Census. The OMB made its directive mandatory for all government forms by 2003.

In 2000, Cindy Rodriguez reported on reactions to the new census:^[15]

Some multiracial individuals feel marginalized by U.S. society. For example, when applying to schools or for a job or when taking standardized tests, Americans are sometimes asked to check boxes corresponding to race or ethnicity. Typically, about five race choices are given, with the instruction to "check only one." While some surveys offer an "other" box, this choice groups together individuals of many different multiracial types (ex: European Americans/African-Americans are grouped with Asian/Native American Indians).

The 2000 U.S. Census in the write-in response category had a code listing which standardizes the placement of various write-in responses for automatic placement within the framework of the U.S. Census's enumerated races. Whereas most responses can be distinguished as falling into one of the five enumerated races, there remains some write-in responses which fall into the "Mixture" heading which cannot be racially categorized. These include "Bi Racial, Combination, Everything, Many, Mixed, Multi National, Multiple, Several and Various".^[16]

In 1997, Greg Mayeda, a member of the board of directors person for the Hapa Issues Forum, attended a meeting regarding the new racial classifications for the 2000 U.S. Census. He was arguing against a multiracial category and for multiracial people being counted as all of their races. He argued that a

According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, who analyzed the 2000 Census, most multiracial people identified as part white. In addition, the breakdown is as follows:

In 2010, 1.6 million Americans checked both "black" and "white" on their census forms, a figure 134% higher than the number a decade earlier.^[19] The number of interracial marriages and relationships, and transracial and international adoptions has increased the proportion of multiracial families.^[20] In addition, more individuals may be identifying multiple ancestries, as the concept is more widely accepted.

Auliʻi Cravalho is of Hawaiian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Portuguese and Chinese descent.^[29]^[30]^[31]

Charles Mingus was born to a mother of English and Chinese descent and a father of African-American and Swedish descent.^[32]^[33]

Barack Obama's mother was of mostly English and Irish ancestry and his father was from Kenya.

Jennifer Beals was born to an Irish-American mother and an African-American father.^[34]

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California to a Tamil Indian mother^[35] and an Afro-Jamaican father.^[36]

Tiger Woods was born to an African American father with partial European and Native American ancestry and a Thai mother with partial Chinese and Dutch ancestry.

Rebecca Hall was born to a mother of English, German, Dutch and African-American extraction and an English father.^[37]^[38]^[39]^[40]^[41]

Bill John Baker, who is 3.13% Cherokee,^[53] was the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 2011 to 2019.

Seminole elder Billy Bowlegs III was also of Muscogee, African-American and Scottish descent through his maternal grandfather Osceola.^[54]

Radmilla Cody is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and of African-American descent.^[55]

Charles Curtis was a Native American, born to a Kaw, Osage, a Potawatomi and French mother and an English, Scots and Welsh father.^[56]

Deb Haaland is from the Laguna Pueblo people and is the first Native American Cabinet Secretary as Secretary of Interior. Her father is Norwegian-American.^[57]

President of the Navajo Nation Buu Nygren was born in Utah to a Navajo mother and a Vietnamese father.^[58]

Mary Peltola was born to a Yup'ik mother and a German American father.^[59]

Booboo Stewart was born to a father of Blackfoot, Russian, and Scottish ancestry and a mother of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry.^[60]

Tia Mowry Her mother is of Afro-Bahamian descent and her father is of English and Irish ancestry.^[105]

James Brown was of Apache, African-American and Asian descent.^[106]^[107]

Muhammad Ali was of English, African-American and Irish descent.^[108]

Whitney Houston was part Native American, African-American and Dutch.^[109]

Martin Luther King Jr. was of Irish and African descent.^[110]^[111]

John Mercer Langston was of English, Native American and African descent.^[112]

Oprah Winfrey is 89% Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American and 3% East Asian.^[113]

George Herriman, who was born into a mixed-race Creole family, wore a hat to conceal his hair texture, and sometimes self-identified as Greek, Turkish, or Irish. His death certificate identified him as Caucasian.^[139]

Patrick Francis Healy was born to an Irish-American plantation owner and his biracial slave. He and his siblings identified as white in their formative years and most made careers in the Catholic Church in the North.^[140]

Carol Channing was born to a white mother and a half African-American and German father. She passed for white during the height of her career and later publicly acknowledged her mixed race origins.^[141]^[142]

Mary Ellen Pleasant, born to a slave and the youngest son of James Pleasants, contributed to advancing the abolitionist movement.

Harry Shum Jr. was born in Limón, Costa Rica, the son of Chinese immigrants. His mother is a native of Hong Kong and his father is from Guangzhou, China.

Stacey Dash is the daughter of a Mexican-American mother Linda Dash (née Lopez;^[163]^[164] d. 2017)^[165] and Dennis Dash, an African-American.^[164]

Geraldo Rivera is half Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Russian Jew.^[166]^[167]^[168]

Adrian Grenier mother is Mexican (Spanish, Indigenous) and some French.^[169] His father is of English, Scottish, Irish and German ancestry.^[169]

Chita Rivera's mother was of Scottish and Italian descent and her father was Puerto Rican.^[170]

Rosa Salazar is of French and Peruvian descent.^[171]

John H. Sununu was born to a Salvadoran mother of Lebanese descent and an American father of Palestinian and Lebanese descent.

According to DNA testing, Eva Longoria's Mexican-American ancestry consists of 70% European, 27% Asian and Indigenous and 3% African origin.^[172]

Comedian Sal Vulcano is of Italian, Puerto Rican, and Cuban ancestry.^[173]

Bruno Mars was born in Hawaii to a father of Puerto Rican and Hungarian and Ukrainian Jewish ancestry and a mother of Filipino and Spanish ancestry.^[174]

A typical Latino American family may have members with a wide range of racial phenotypes, meaning a Latino couple may have children who look white and black and/or Native American and/or Asian.^[153] Latino Americans have several self-identifications; most Latinos identify as "Some other race", while others identify as white and/or black and/or Native American and/or Asian.[1][2]

Latinos of darker skin tones are noted as having limited media appearance; critics and Latinos of color have accused Latin American media of overlooking dark-skinned individuals in favor of those that are of lighter complexion, blonde-haired and blue/green-eyed – especially in regards to actors and actresses on telenovelas – rather than the typical nonwhite Latin Americans.^[154]^[155]^[156]^[157]^[158]^[159]^[160]^[161]^[162]

Princess Kaʻiulani was of Indigenous Hawaiian and Scots-American descent.^[176]

Queen Emma of Hawaii was of Hawaiian Nobility and Scottish ancestry.^[177]

Actor Dwayne Johnson's mother is Samoan and his father is Black Nova Scotian.^[178]^[179]^[180]^[181]

Jason Momoa was born to a mother of Native American, Irish and German ancestry and a father of Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry.^[182]

Lou Diamond Phillips is of Cherokee, Hawaiian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Scotch-Irish American ancestry.^[183]^[184]^[185]

During the 19th century, Christian missionaries from Europe and the United States followed Western traders to the Hawaiian Islands, leading to a wave of Western migration to the Kingdom of Hawaii. Westerners in the Hawaiian Islands often intermarried with Native Hawaiian women, including Hawaiian royalty. These developments eventually led to a gradual change in the beauty standards of Native Hawaiian women to a more westernized standard, which was reinforced by the refusal of Westerners to marry dark-skinned Hawaiians.^[175]

While some American Pacific Islanders continue traditional cultural endogamy, many within this population now have mixed racial ancestry, sometimes combining European, Native American, as well as East Asian ancestry. The Hawaiians originally described the mixed race descendants as hapa. The term has evolved to encompass all people of mixed Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry. Subsequently, many ethnic Chinese also settled on the islands and married into the Pacific Islander populations.

There are many other Pacific Islanders outside of Hawaii that do not share this common history with Hawaii and Asian populations are not the only race that Pacific Islanders mix with.

Chloe Bennet; mother is Caucasian and her father is Chinese.^[188]

Moon Bloodgood is part Irish, Dutch, and Korean.^[189]^[190]

Tia Carrere is part Spanish, Chinese, and Filipino.^[191]

Norah Jones was born in Brooklyn, New York to an English-American mother and Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar of Bengali descent.

Sean Lennon is the son of Japanese multimedia artist Yoko Ono, and English and Irish descended John Lennon.^[192]

Olivia Munn; father is of English, Irish, and German ancestry,^[193] while her mother is from Vietnam.^[194]

Jennifer Tilly is part Native American, Irish, Finnish, and Chinese.^[195]^[196]^[197]^[198]

Danny Pudi was born to a Polish American mother and a Telugu Indian father.^[199]

Mitski was born in Mie Prefecture, Japan to a Japanese mother and an American father.^[200]

In its original meaning, an Amerasian is a person born in Asia to an Asian mother and a U.S. military father. Colloquially, the term has sometimes been considered synonymous with Asian-American, to describe any person of mixed American and Asian parentage, regardless of the circumstances. The term "wasian" is also common slang to describe the individuals. "Wasian" has gained popularity on online platforms like TikTok among younger audiences, where trends in the 2020s have increased the proliferation of the term.^[186]

According to the United States Census Bureau, concerning multiracial families in 1990, the number of children in interracial families grew from less than one-half million in 1970 to about two million in 1990.^[187]

According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, by some calculations the largest part white biracial population is white/American Indian and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017; followed by white/black at 737,492; then white/Asian at 727,197; and finally white/Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander at 125,628.^[18]

The U.S. Census categorizes Eurasian responses in the "some other race" section as part of the Asian race.^[16] The Eurasian responses which the U.S. Census officially recognizes are Indo-European, Amerasian, and Eurasian.^[16]

Nicki Minaj is part Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian.^[203]^[204]

Ne-Yo is part African-American and Chinese.^[205]

Bobby Scott is of African-American and Filipino (maternal grandfather) descent.^[206]

Sonja Sohn is part African-American and Korean.^[207]

Jero is part African-American and Japanese.^[208]

Tommy Pham is an American baseball player whose mother is black and whose father is of Vietnamese and African-American descent.

Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell was born to an African-American father and a Japanese mother.^[209]

Steve Lacy was born to an African-American mother and a Filipino father.^[210]

Tatyana Ali was born in New York to a Indo-Trinidadian father and an Afro-Panamanian mother.

Marilyn Strickland was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and an African-American father.^[211]

Chinese men entered the United States as laborers, primarily on the West Coast and in western territories. Following the Reconstruction era, as blacks set up independent farms, white planters imported Chinese laborers to satisfy their need for labor. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and Chinese workers who chose to stay in the U.S. were unable to have their wives join them. In the South, some Chinese married into the black and mulatto communities, as generally, discrimination meant they did not take white spouses. They rapidly left working as laborers and set up groceries in small towns throughout the South. They worked to get their children educated and socially mobile.^[201]

The Afro-Asian population drastically increased by the 1950s, with a number of Afro-Asians born to African American fathers and Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Filipino mothers due to the large number of African Americans who enrolled in the military and developed relationships with Asian women abroad. Other groups of Afro-Asians are those who are of Caribbean American descent and are considered Dougla, or of Indian or Indo-Caribbean and African or Afro-Caribbean descent.

As of the census of 2000, there were 106,782 Afro-Asian individuals in the United States.^[202]

In fiction[edit]

The figure of the "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a mixed-race woman raised as if a white woman in her white father's household, until his bankruptcy or death has her reduced to a menial position^[212] She may even be unaware of her status before being reduced to victimization.^[213] The first character of this type was the heroine of Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1842), a short story.^[213] This character allowed abolitionists to draw attention to the sexual exploitation in slavery and, unlike portrayals of the suffering of the field hands, did not allow slaveholders to retort that the sufferings of Northern mill hands were no easier. The Northern mill owner would not sell his own children into slavery.^[214]

Abolitionists sometimes featured attractive, escaped mulatto slaves in their public lectures to arouse sentiments against slavery. They showed Northerners those slaves who looked like them rather than an "Other"; this technique, which is labeled White slave propaganda, collapsed the separation between peoples and made it impossible for the public to ignore the brutality of slavery.^[215]

Charles W. Chesnutt, an author of the post-Civil War era, explored stereotypes in his portrayal of multiracial characters in southern society in the postwar years. Even characters who had been free and possibly educated before the war had trouble making a place for themselves in the postwar years. His stories feature mixed-race characters with complex lives. William Faulkner also portrayed the lives of mixed-race people and complex interracial families in the postwar South.

Comic book writer and filmmaker Greg Pak wrote that while white filmmakers have used multiracial characters explore themes about race and racism, many of these characters created stereotypes that Pak described were: "Wild Half-Castes", "sexually destructive antagonists explicitly or implicitly perceived as unable to control the instinctive urges of their non-white heritage" who exhibited the same racial stereotypes of their "full blood" counterparts, symbolically used by filmmakers to "[perpetuate] the association of multiraciality with sexual aberration and violence"; the "Tragic mulatto", "a typically female character who tries to pass for white but finds disaster when her non-white heritage is revealed" whose plight used by filmmakers to "to critique racism by inspiring pity"; and the "Half Breed Hero", an "empowering" stereotype whose objective of "[inspiring] identification as he actively resists white racism" is contradicted by the character being played by a white actor, reinforcing a "white liberal's dream of inclusion and authenticity than an honest depiction of a multiracial character's experiences." Pak noted that "Wild Half Caste" and "Tragic Mulatto" characters possess little to no character development and that while many multiracial characters have appeared more frequently in films without reinforcing stereotypes, white filmmakers have mostly avoided addressing their ethnicities.^[216]

Susan Graham, "Born Biracial: How One Mother Took on Race in America" (2020) Memories Press.

G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order, Temple University Press (2002) 978-1-56639-909-8.

ISBN

Teja Arboleda, In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up As a Multiethnic, Multicultural, and Multiracial American (1998) 978-0-585-11477-4.

ISBN

Yo Jackson, Yolanda Kaye Jackson, Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology (2006), 978-1-4129-0948-8.

ISBN

Joel Perlmann, Mary C. Waters, The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (2005), 978-0-87154-658-6.

ISBN

an online activist publication

The Multiracial Activist

founded 1988

The Association of MultiEthnic Americans, Inc.

offering resources and strategies (including videos, publications & trainings) to support mixed-race children in educational settings.

Multiethnic Education Program

Archived March 9, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, an organization advocating for mixed heritage people and families

MAVIN Foundation

an organization uniting interracial families in the Boston area, founded 1992

"NEAMF: The New England Alliance of Multiracial Families"

Archived August 11, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, US-based mixed community, founded in 2000

"Swirl"

an organization supporting multiracial classification

ProjectRACE

Kitoba

Notable Multiracial People

Asian-Nation

"Hapa/Multiracial Asian Americans"

Gregory Rodriguez (2001), "Multiracial identity, a shared destiny"

. BBS News. December 22, 2006. Archived from the original on April 3, 2007. Retrieved September 23, 2007.

"Williams/Zogby Poll: Americans' Attitudes Changing Towards Multiracial Candidates"

Infography

Multiracial Americans

[18]

In fiction[edit]

ISBN

ISBN

ISBN

ISBN

The Multiracial Activist

The Association of MultiEthnic Americans, Inc.

Multiethnic Education Program

MAVIN Foundation

"NEAMF: The New England Alliance of Multiracial Families"

"Swirl"

ProjectRACE

Notable Multiracial People

"Hapa/Multiracial Asian Americans"

Gregory Rodriguez (2001), "Multiracial identity, a shared destiny"

"Williams/Zogby Poll: Americans' Attitudes Changing Towards Multiracial Candidates"

"Interracial Marriage in the United States"