The unappreciated centrality of ethnoracially mixed Americans to the nation’s demographic future

The ethnoracial future of the United States has been framed as a demographic binary: Whites vs. people of color. The argument here is that this binary distorts by failing to take into adequate account the rapidly growing group of Americans who have been raised in mixed minority and White families, the great majority of the total mixed population. The members of this group generally have distinctive social characteristics: socioeconomic advantages compared to minorities and social integration into milieus with many Whites, as revealed by relatively high rates of marriage to them. However, their identities often encompass their minority heritage. Accordingly, they straddle the society's major ethnoracial fracture line, creating an in-between social space and connecting, through kinship and other close social relations, both of its sides. However, their numbers are distorted in public national population data, such as census data and population projections; and they are typically counted as part of the non-White population. The recently announced revision of the race/ethnic data standards for the census offers an opportunity to refashion public data in a way that illuminates the important role this mixed group is likely to play in the nation's demographic future.