The 2020 U.S. census results indicated not only a decline in the white population but a massive spike in the multiracial population over the previous 10 years, stating that Americans identifying as more than one race accounted for 10.2% of the population, up from 2.9% in 2010.

While bureaucrats patted themselves on the back, expressing confidence in their findings and methodology, various academics, pundits, and liberal publications made hay of the results, sounding off about the "multiracial boom" and the "nation's changing mosaic." In some cases, there was outright celebration of the decline in the white population, euphemistically referred to as an increase in diversity — 24% of Democrats and Democratic leaners told Pew Research pollsters that this alleged demographic shift was a good thing.

It turns out the boom, still a crutch for liberal arguments years later, was likely bogus.

A pair of Princeton University sociologists noted in a December paper in the journal Sociological Science that "the boom was largely a statistical illusion resulting from methodological changes that confounded ancestry with identity and mistakenly equated national origin with race."

Original claims

Several months after releasing race-ethnic population estimates, the U.S. Census Bureau announced in August 2021:

• The white population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the country, with 204.3 million solely identifying on the census as white; however, that cohort had decreased by 8.6% since 2010.
• Another 31.1 million people identified as white in combination with another race group.
• The Hispanic or Latino population grew from 50.5 million or 16.3% of the population in 2010 to 62.1 million, 18.7%, in 2020.
• The population of Americans solely identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native increased from 2.9 million in 2010 to 3.7 million in 2020.
• The population of Americans solely identifying as Asian increased from 14.7 million to 19.9 people over the 10-year period.
• The population of Americans solely identifying as black grew from 38.9 million in 2010 to 41.1 million in 2020.
• The multiracial population shot up from 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million people in 2020, representing a 276% increase.

The bureaucrats concluded that "nearly all groups saw population gains this decade and the increase in the Two or More Races population was especially large. The white alone population declined."

'Thus, many Hispanics who would have checked off white alone in 2010 may have checked "white" and "some other race" in 2020.'

The bureau reached these conclusions on the basis of a modified questionnaire that asked respondents who checked off white or black to also list their "origins." Based on their stated origins, respondents were frequently and automatically flagged as multiracial.

Early doubts

There were a handful of critics who indicated at the outset that this supposed boom was the result of a statistical sleight of hand.

John Judis, editor at large at Talking Points Memo, noted in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, that "contrary to Democratic hopes and right-wing anxieties, America’s white population didn’t shrink much between 2010 and 2020 and might actually have grown."

Judis pointed out:

The census asked respondents who checked off "white" to specify their nationality: "Print, for example, German, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc." No Spanish-speaking nationality was listed. That likely created the impression that Hispanic was another race, notwithstanding the previous question's disclaimer that "Hispanic origins are not races." Thus, many Hispanics who would have checked off white alone in 2010 may have checked "white" and "some other race" in 2020. The number of Hispanics checking two or more boxes increased by 567% from 2010 and make up about two-thirds of those who checked both boxes.

"One takeaway that we saw in the media a lot was about the alleged decline of the white population and certain rises in the 'mark one or more' [races] multiracial or biracial population," Ellis Monk, a sociology professor at Harvard University, told the campus paper in September 2021. "My main reaction is really to the way that the questions, the forms on the census itself are actually produced."

'Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield.'

Monk also suggested that the way the questions were worded "could have played into the rise of the number of people who feel compelled to mark one or more categories on the census."

Others who were content with the bureau's final figures proved willing to dismiss or ignore such doubts about the accuracy or meaning of the census findings.

True believers

MSNBC political analyst Charles Blow noted in an August 2021 piece for the New York Times titled "It was a terrifying census for white nationalists" that "white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off."

Blow suggested that pro-life activism, protections for the Second Amendment, and efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration were part of a grand white supremacist campaign that apparently failed and that a comeuppance was on the horizon.

"Population size determines, to some degree, the power you wield," wrote Blow. "The passage of power is not a polite and gentle affair like passing the salt at a dinner table. People with power fight — sometimes to the end — to maintain it. There's going to be a shift, but not without strife."

Others were more delicate when insinuating that American citizens were competing along racial lines or when suggesting that ascendant racial groups should be assigned greater priority and care.

"The unanticipated decline in the country's white population means that other racial and ethnic groups are responsible for generating overall growth," William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of the Census Bureau's early estimates. "One fact is already clear: As the nation becomes even more racially diverse from the 'bottom up' of the age structure, more attention needs to be given to the needs and opportunities for America's highly diverse younger generations."

"The mixing of all sorts [of races] is really a new force in 21st-century America," Richard Alba, a demographer and professor emeritus at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post. "We're talking about a big, powerful phenomenon."

While some leftists and race obsessives salivated over the prospect of fewer white Americans and the supposed power shift that would entail, others complained about the pace of the alleged change.

Sarah Gaither, an associate professor at Duke University, told CNN, "Even if the white individuals in our country are decreasing numerically, it doesn't necessarily suggest that they're losing any of their power. These power structures are built into our systems, historically, and will still be built pretty strongly going forward."

While it's unclear whether anyone stands to lose power, the U.S. Census Bureau has certainly lost credibility.

Bureaucratic bogus

In their paper, recently highlighted by the Associated Press, Princeton sociologists Paul Starr and Christina Pao suggested that the new question design and recoding algorithm used in the 2020 census were "largely responsible for the multiracial increase."

"The example of the individual from Argentina who checked only 'white' but was coded as multiracial is typical of what happened with both whites and blacks with any Latin American heritage," wrote the researchers. "The census algorithm did not recognize Latin American national origins or ethnicities as a race. When anyone who checked off 'white' or 'black' alone indicated a Latin American origin, they were reclassified as multiracial."

Apparently the illusion of a multiracial boom was driven also by Americans going the route taken by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Berkeley professor Elizabeth Hoover.

"The reclassification of whites as multiracial was not limited to self-identified whites with Latin American origins," continued the paper. "Among non-Hispanics, the biggest jump in the multiracial population was in the 'white and American Indian' category — an increase of 2.3 million."

The researchers concluded that while there has been an upward trend in multiracial identity, "it has been a much more slowly growing trend than recent data and the [New York] Times suggest."

"In short, the various steps the Census Bureau has already undertaken (using 'origins' for recoding) or has used in its tests (displaying racial data without the two-or-more category) raise the multiracial complication to a new level of perplexity," added the sociologists.

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