The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the US Population: Emerging American Identities

Abstract

Images and interpretations of the past, present, and future of the American racial and ethnic landscape are contradictory. Many accounts focus on the increasing diversity that results from immigration and differential natural increase as well as the proliferation of racial and ethnic categories in census data. Less attention has been paid to the formation and erosion of racial and ethnic identities produced by intermarriage and ethnic blending. The framers and custodians of census racial classifications assume a “geographic origins” definition of race and ethnicity, but the de facto measures in censuses and social surveys rely on folk categories that vary over time and are influenced by administrative practices and sociopolitical movements. We illustrate these issues through an in‐depth examination of the racial and ethnic reporting by whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the 2000 census. The emerging pattern, labeled here as the “Americanization” of racial and ethnic identities, and most evident for whites and blacks, is of simplified racial identities with little acknowledgment of complex ancestries. National origin is the predominant mode of reporting racial and ethnic identities among Asians and Hispanics, especially first‐generation immigrants. The future of racial and ethnic identities is unknowable, but continued high levels of immigration, intermarriage, and social mobility are likely to blur contemporary divisions and boundaries.

Population Composition by Race and Ethnicity: North America

“…Intermixture between groups, as well as variable notions of how and on what basis to define racial groups, created ambiguity in how these categories could be applied. The category 'White,' for example, did not initially include members of Italian, Spanish, or Irish descent as it did for persons of French or English descent (Perez and Hirschman, 2009). While membership within the African-American or Black category has been defined under the 'one-drop rule' (i.e., returning anyone of any African admixture to this category), categories of partial African descent (e.g., mulatto, quadroon, octoroon) were classified during the 1800s and early 1900s.…”

“…On one hand, this reflects the expanding immigrant presence as well as the population momentum driven largely by the children of immigrants and as the growth of interracial unions and multiracial identities (Passel, 2011;Humes et al, 2011;Lee and Boyd, 2007). On the other hand, shifts in composition have also occurred alongside ever-evolving discussion of how best to capture racial and ethnic identity through census classification (Perez and Hirschman, 2009;Goldscheider, 2002), and this increased complexity raises new questions about how race/ ethnicity will be captured in the future.…”

Mídia lusófona nos EUA: entre a Flórida e a Região Nordeste

“…The U.S. racial and ethnic classification system has added some confusion in terms of how to classify Portuguese-speaking immigrants (Laversuch, 2007;Perez and Hirschman, 2009). Brazilians are most often classified as Latino and/or as African-American (Beserra, 2005;Marcus, 2013;McDonnell and de Lourenço, 2009;Torres-Saillant, 2008), while Cape Verdeans and Angolans, because of their African heritage (Marcus, 2013), can also be classified as African-American (Fisher and Model, 2012).…”

Morphological integration in human skull and its possible role in etiogenesis of neuropsychiatric disorders: Deciphering the link between evolution, development and disease

“…The human skull shows tremendous inter-individual variations (25,26) in its anatomy and dimensionality of the landmarks, which may be pronounced in a population representing admixture of different ethnic groups (27), as for example, Indian (28-31) and American populations (32). Plausibly, these variations accumulated in the long course of evolution (33)(34)(35), through assimilation of co-variances (34,35) and epigenetic changes (36) in the gross and genetic structure of a population respectively, implied morphological integration (34,37).…”