For years, Jorge DelPinal's job as assistant chief of the Census Bureau's Population Division was to fit people into neat, distinct racial and ethnic boxes: white, black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. As the son of an Anglo mother and a Hispanic father, however, he knew all along that the task was not always possible.
For the 2000 decennial census, that will no longer be the case. For the first time, the census forms will allow people to check off as many races as apply. As a result, the Census Bureau should obtain a better picture of the extent of intermarriage in the United States. In the absence of such a direct method, a few years ago veteran demographer Barry Edmonston used sophisticated mathematical modeling techniques to calculate how intermarriage is changing the face of the United States as part of an immigration study he directed for the National Research Council of the American Academy of Sciences. His research was summarized in a report entitled The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. But as the Canadian-born, white husband of sociologist Sharon Lee, a Chinese-American, Edmonston really needed no computer to understand the transformation under way in this society. He and his family are living, breathing participants. The face of America is changing -- literally. As President Clinton has said, within 30 or 40 years, when there will be no single race in the majority in the United States. But afoot behind the scenes is another trend that, if handled carefully, could bring the country closer together rather than drive it apart. This quiet demographic counter-revolution is a dramatic upsurge in intermarriage. Edmonston's study projected that by 2050, 21 percent of the U.S. population will be of mixed racial or ethnic ancestry, up from an estimate of seven percent today. Among third-generation Hispanic and Asian Americans, exogamy-marriage outside one's ethnic group or tribe-is at least 50 percent, he and others estimate. Exogamy remains much less prevalent among African Americans, but it has increased enormously, from about 1.5 percent in the 1960s to eight to 10 percent today. Such a profound demographic shift could take place while no one was watching because, officially, no one was watching. Federal agencies traditionally collected racial data using a formula' one person, one race' similar to the time-honored voting principle. Thus, the Census Bureau could estimate that on census forms no more than two percent of the population would claim to be multiracial. In the absence of a more straightforward count, no one could know for sure what the demographics are.
