When former President Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity in Chicago on Wednesday, he neglected a reality: that the country’s demographics have changed in recent decades, as more than 12 percent of Americans now identify as multiracial.
Beneath that fact is another, lesser-known shift. The number of Americans whose identities include being both Black and Asian has tripled over the past 15 years to more than 600,000, according to a New York Times analysis, a group that includes Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and father emigrated from Jamaica.
They are part of a jump in multiracial Americans that demographers have tracked for decades, a marked rise that reflects the steadily increasing diversity of the U.S. population. The numbers of Latino and Asian people have risen sharply since the 1990s, and so has the rate of marriage between people of different races. This has resulted in more multiracial children.
The U.S. Census Bureau also updated its methodology in 2020 and provided more ways for people to identify as multiracial, a change that demographers say better reflects the reality of the nation but also contributes to a rise in the figures.
In Mr. Trump’s comments on Wednesday, made to a roomful of Black journalists at a conference, he questioned whether Ms. Harris truly identified as two races.
“She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, who attended a historically Black university, pledged a prominent Black sorority and has always embraced both her Black and South Asian heritage.
Data shows that Black Americans are increasingly likely to identify as multiracial. About 15 percent of African Americans say they are multiracial, and in Ms. Harris’s home state of California that number jumps to 25 percent, more than in any other state with a large Black population.
California is home to about 6 percent of the nation’s Black population, and some 19 percent of Americans who say they are both Black and Asian.
The number of people who are multiracial in the United States has grown tremendously, said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The implications of that shift are especially significant because of the relative youth of multiracial people, compared with the nation’s white population, which is aging.
“The population projections from the Census Bureau suggest that is going to be a population that is growing very rapidly across the coming decades,” he said.
Younger Americans are much more likely to identify as multiracial, an analysis shows. Among Americans younger than 18 years old, 19 percent say they are multiracial. But that is true of only 6 percent of Americans 65 and older, census data shows.
The numbers are even more pronounced among Black Americans: 25 percent of those younger than 18 say they identify with at least two races, while only 7 percent who are 65 or older say the same.
Changes to U.S. law in the last century have opened the door to interracial marriage. In 1967, the year of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia that invalidated state laws restricting interracial marriage, just 3 percent of marriages crossed ethnic and racial lines. By 2019, 11 percent of all married American adults had a spouse who was a different race or ethnicity, according to the Pew Research Center.
Americans who are Latino, Asian or Native American have especially high rates of intermarriage, demographers said.
“It’s going to keep changing,” said Dowell Myers, professor of public policy and demography at the University of Southern California. “The older generations are going to age out and the younger generations are going to fill in, and there’s much more opportunity for the younger generation to intermix. That trend is a one-way street.”
The year 2000 was the first time that Americans could choose more than one race on census forms. Before that, Americans who had parents of different races or ethnicities had to choose between them to pick a single box on the census form.
The change came after people who did not see themselves in the census questionnaire pushed for a form that could capture the nuances of their racial and ethnic identities.
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