The 2020 Census: Three Things You Need to Know

The big finding supporting this hypothesis is that the multiracial population jumped 276% over the past decade—from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. Does this mean that there are 25 million more multiracial individuals living in the U.S. in 2020 than there were in 2010? No, and the reason why is that the way the 2020 census asked certain questions allows us to better understand America’s racial and ethnic makeup—both today and retrospectively. For example, the Hispanic/Latino origin question revised the nationalities it listed as example options to both reflect the largest populations in the U.S. and provide better geographic diversity. It also removed the word “origin” from the fourth option’s instructions. These two changes increase the likelihood that people will correctly identify as Hispanic or Latino.

The 2020 Census also made extensive changes to its race question. For instance, example origins were given for the White and Black or African American options, the word “Negro” was removed from the Black or African American option, and the Asian countries of origin were ordered to reflect U.S. population sizes. Finally, the 2020 Census changed its coding practices, allowing researchers to capture more information from individual responses.

The practical upshot here is that we get a better picture of how people self-identify in terms of race and ethnicity. And this is how we have come to understand that America is actually much more diverse than we thought it was 10 years ago. The revised questions most likely account for a significant portion of the changes we see in the 2020 racial and ethnic population counts. Another consequence, though, of the revised questions is that comparisons between 2010 and 2020 race and ethnicity counts are not “one-to-one” and require considerable caveats.