Will ‘Multiracial’ Survive to the Next Generation?: The Racial Classification of Children of Multiracial Parents.” Social Forces 86(2

Will multiracial identification resonate with future generations? Using the 2000 U.S. Census, I analyze the impact of a multiracial parent on the classification of children in four types of multiracial families (e.g., white/non-white, black/non-black). Compared to families where parents are of two different single-race backgrounds, parental multiracial identity decreased the likelihood of multiracial classification due to the use of labels reflecting a shared single-race category (e.g. white-Asian mother and white father). When parents ’ races did not overlap, multiracial classification was more common in households if the other parent was white or American Indian. These results suggest that intergenerational transmission of a multiracial identity is more common in contexts of racial diversity. In response to recent revisions by the Office of Management and Budget, the 2000 U.S. Census allowed individuals, for the first time, to check more than one category in declaring their racial identity (OMB 1997). Civil rights activists feared that providing a multiracial option of any sort would decrease their demographic base and compromise their ability to use racial statistics to show empirical evidence of discrimination due to “…a slow but perceptible flight from monoracial to multiracial identification (Nobles 2000:137). ” Multiracial activists argued that the standard practice of single-race options unjustly denied the mixed-race population the right to be publicly recognized as a self-conscious and racially distinctive community (Da Costa 2003; Nobles 2000; Williams 2006). The final decision by the OMB to allow persons to select one or more races attempted to appease both camps by allowing for mixed-race enumeration while not separating multiracials from their component racial communities so they could continue to be tracked for compliance with civil rights polices (see Goldstein and Morning 2002). However, the central issue of this debat