The way that Americans perceive race today is very different then how our ancestors would have defined it. Is there more than one race in your family tree? Learning more about the race of your ancestors can be complex, depending on the time the person lived, and the way race was defined on certain documents.
Students who are in college right now make up the largest group of mixed-race people of any generation to come of age, so far. According to the Pew Research Center, who used data from 2008 and 2009, one in seven new marriages is between spouses who each come from races or ethnicities that are different from each other. In many ways, the lines that define the boundaries that separate one racial demographic group from another have been blurred. This leaves a lot of room to decide how you want to define yourself.
The 2000 census was the first one that allowed people to pick more than one box when selecting what race you believe identifies you. This means that people who have one black parent and one white parent, for example, now had the option to select both those boxes when answering the census question about race. The choices of races on this census were: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, “Some Other Race”, “Two or More Races”.
In 2010, the choices one could select to identify his or her race were: White, Black, African American, or Negro, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Other Asian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, Other Pacific Islander, “Some Other Race”. There was a separate question that asks if a person is “of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin”. Federal officials consider being Hispanic as an ethnicity, and do not consider it to be a race. The first time a census included the word “Hispanic” was in 1970.
The farther you go back through the census, the more changes you will see. The 1930 census stopped using the word “Mulatto”. Instead, a person who had both White and Black ancestry was recorded as “Negro”, except in cases where that person was considered to be “predominantly” American Indian. This census used the “one drop rule”, which meant that no one with mixed Black and White ancestry could be identified on the census as White. Interestingly enough, the 1930 census did identify Mexican as a race. Previous to this census, Mexican Americans were recorded on the census as White.
The 1890 census was the first one to use the term “race”. Choices included: White, Black, Mulatto, Quadroon (a person of mixed race who one-fourth African heritage and three-fourths Caucasian heritage), Octoroon (a biracial person who has one-eighth African ancestry), Chinese, Japanese, or Indian. It seems like every census identified race a little bit differently than the previous one. This can lead to confusion when you try and figure out what races are in your family tree.
Image by Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr