The U.S. Just Made Millions of Multiracial Americans Disappear

It’s Not a Data Glitch, It’s a Power Move

Erasing Multiracial America

Brothers, Sisters, and friends— this spring, the U.S. Census Bureau quietly “reassigned” millions of Americans’ racial identities with the release of its 2025 Modified Age and Race Census (MARC) data files. In a technocratic stroke, the Bureau collapsed multiracial and “Some Other Race” responses into the five standard 1997 racial categories, effectively wiping out a huge portion of the multiracial population on paper. No press conferences or prime-time announcements accompanied this change – just a sterile technical memo. But behind the wonky language of “reassigning SOR responses” lies a harsh reality: millions who previously identified as mixed or multiracial have been re-categorized (without their consent or even knowledge) as single-race. The official count of multiracial Americans has plummeted – one analysis indicates the number was slashed from roughly 33.8 million down to just 14.6 million. Meanwhile, the count of “white” Americans magically swelled, as many mixed individuals were lumped wholly into the white category. This isn’t just about database cleanup; it’s a deliberate narrative shift with real stakes.

By collapsing complex identities into blunt boxes, the Census Bureau has boosted the numbers of the white population and reduced visible diversity. That, in turn, can skew political representation, federal funding, and civil rights enforcement. Minority communities rely on accurate counts to draw fair districts and allocate resources – if millions who once counted as “multiracial” (or “some other race”) are now folded into the white majority or erased altogether, those communities stand to lose funding and influence. And let’s be clear: this was not done at the request of multiracial people. It was done to them, via algorithm and administrative sleight of hand. The Bureau used proxies like household composition, neighborhood demographics and even statistical models to decide on a person’s “real” race when they didn’t fit the official categories. In practice, that means your race could be reassigned based on who you live with or what your ZIP code says about you – a computer deciding whether to stamp you “white” or “black” or “Asian” for the record books.

Officials claim these adjustments merely align the census with other data sets and vital records that don’t use a catch-all “Other” race. But strip away the technocracy, and it’s evident this is social engineering by data. The “Some Other Race” category – used overwhelmingly by Latino and multiracial respondents to reflect identities the five boxes don’t capture – was the second-largest racial group in the 2020 Census. Rather than reckon with what that means, the Bureau chose to make it disappear, folding those people into pre-approved races. The paper U.S. suddenly looks a lot “whiter” and less mixed than it did just a year ago. That’s not an accident; that’s power putting its thumb on the scale.

Whitewashing by the Numbers – A Feature, Not a Bug

We can’t separate this data manipulation from the broader agenda of systemic whiteness and social control. The dramatic 2020 Census results had shown the U.S. white population dropping to 61.6% and a 276% explosion in multiracial Americans. Those numbers challenged the long-dominant narrative of a white majority and signaled a more complex, multiethnic future. In response, conservative pundits sounded alarms about the “loss of white power”. Now consider what the MARC data adjustment achieves: it stems the “decline” of the white majority on paper by reclassifying many mixed people as simply white (or Black, or Asian, depending on context). This is essentially a statistical sleight-of-hand to preserve a whiter image of America. By bureaucratic fiat, the share of white Americans is propped back up, staving off the dreaded tipping point of a “minority-majority” nation. The Princeton researchers who analyzed the 2020 multiracial boom noted that much of it was due to the Census’s own new methods – and indeed, when those methods made white numbers drop, there was backlash. Now the pendulum swings back, quietly restoring “whiteness” to millions of individuals who had dared to identify outside the old lines.

This is white supremacy in the guise of demography. It follows a historical pattern: when confronted with the erosion of their numerical or political dominance, those invested in whiteness find new ways to redraw boundaries and fortify control. In the Jim Crow era, the “one-drop rule” classified anyone with a trace of African ancestry as Black – a tactic to bulk up the oppressed Black population and preserve the myth of pure whiteness. Today, we see almost the inverse – authorities willing to expand the definition of who is “white” whenever it serves power. Many Latino people, for example, have been classified as white by default in government records for decades. Now, by collapsing “some other race” (which included many Latinos and multiracial folks) into standard races, the system is effectively absorbing many of them into the white category, bolstering white stats while erasing nuanced identities. It’s the same white supremacist logic: whiteness is a club that will bend its rules to keep numeric superiority and social dominance.

Let’s be very clear: race is not a biological reality – it is a social fiction created to uphold a power hierarchy. Scientists have long debunked any genetic basis for racial categories; as one Scientific American piece put it, “the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning”. The Encyclopædia Britannica likewise affirms that “race is socially constructed, not biologically natural,” invented and maintained by dominant groups (white colonial elites) “to justify their oppression and exploitation” of others. In other words, race was built as a lie to prop up a system – a lie enforced through law, pseudo-science, and violence. The Census Bureau’s data games might look bloodless and relatively neutral compared to the other heinous activity of the Trump administration, but they are part of this same legacy of defining and redefining racial lines to serve those in power. By controlling the narrative of “who is what,” the architects of the system control who gets advantages or disadvantages. The MARC data’s narrative is convenient for preserving a racial status quo: minimize the multiracial, maximize the white, and pretend America’s power structure isn’t really changing. History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. And this is more of we’ve seen for centuries.

The Invention (and Reinvention) of Whiteness

To fully grasp this moment, we have to remember whiteness has always been a political project – elastic, expedient, and defended with zeal. In colonial America, wealthy plantation owners and lawmakers literally invented the “white race” as a means of social control. Prior to the late 1600s, “white” wasn’t a widespread identity; people were English, Irish, etc., and free Blacks and poor whites often cooperated. That changed after Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, when Black and white indentured servants united against the elite. The frightened Virginia ruling class responded by codifying a new racial order, giving poor Europeans privileges and status as “whites” while permanently enslaving Africans. As historians have noted, “the ‘white race’ was invented as a ruling-class social-control formation in response to labor solidarity” during that rebellion. In the decades that followed, laws banning interracial marriage and instituting perpetual slavery for Black people cemented this new identity of whiteness as the badge of the free and the entitled. Race became the “great distinction in society,” deliberately imposed so that poor whites would see themselves as aligned with rich whites, rather than with Black folks. Divide and conquer; it worked depressingly well.

Fast forward to the 20th century, and whiteness proved malleable whenever expedient. In the United States, immigrant groups once viewed as non-white (Irish, Italians, Eastern European Jews, etc.) were gradually accepted into the white fold – often after generations of proving their “American” (read: not Black) bona fides. Whiteness stretched to maintain a solid majority. Across the ocean, Nazi Germany crafted its own rigid racial codes with the Nuremberg Laws, determining who was a “true Aryan” and who was a Jew based on arcane ancestry fractions. A person with two Jewish grandparents was Jewish; with one, maybe not – a perverse calculus to decide who would be ostracized or worse. It was pseudoscience draped in bureaucracy: charts, blood laws, and measuring noses – all to fortify a myth of a superior Germanic white race. We know the horrific ends of that regime’s racial fanaticism. And yet, even there, whiteness was political – for instance, Nazi ideologues considered some peoples (like Slavs) lesser even though they looked “white,” while making exceptions to classify certain allied ethnicities as “honorary Aryans” when useful. The lines of whiteness moved when power demanded it.

Perhaps the clearest example of whiteness as a flexible tool is apartheid South Africa. The apartheid government hung its entire social order on absurd racial classifications – white, black (“native”), colored (mixed), Indian – and policed those lines obsessively. Racial classification boards would literally examine people’s skin tone, hair texture, and even administer the infamous “pencil test” (stick a pencil in the person’s hair; if it fell out, maybe you could be white) to decide which category a person belonged in. If that sounds arbitrary, that’s because it was. As one historian notes, race under apartheid was defined by appearance and “general acceptance,” not science – you were white if you “looked white or were generally accepted as White” by society. Believe it or not, people could even petition to change their official race; with enough paleness or the right connections, a family labeled “colored” last year might be reclassified as “white” this year. A flip of paperwork, and poof – you’re white now, congratulations. This was not about any fundamental truth of biology; it was about maintaining a white ruling class. Whites had the best lands, jobs, and rights, so the regime both guarded the category’s prestige and, when convenient, allowed a few to “ascend” into it. The whole absurd system underscored that racial categories are purely a construct of power. Apartheid eventually fell, but its pencil tests and population registries stand as a warning of how far a government will go to preserve a racial hierarchy.

The United States is not Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. But we’d be naïve to think we are immune to the same forces. When I see the Census Bureau algorithmically deciding that millions of multi-ethnic, mixed, or “other” people should now be classified as just one of the standard races – effectively “you’re white now, whether you see yourself that way or not” – I get a chill of recognition. It’s their old trusted playbook: adjust the parameters of whiteness (and blackness, etc.) to keep the social order intact. And note, it’s often done in whispers and backrooms, through mundane bureaucratic actions rather than bold pronouncements. The architects of racial hierarchy learned long ago that if you want to preserve power, sometimes you do it with a spreadsheet and not spectacle.

The Weaponization of Identity Politics on the Neoliberal Left

It’s easy to spot how the right wing manipulates race – from Trump’s bluster about “white genocide” in South Africa (a blatant lie) to open white nationalists chanting about replacement. But let’s talk about the so-called left, the mainstream liberal establishment that claims to champion diversity. They too weaponize identity – often in shallow, opportunistic ways that ultimately reinforce the same binary racial thinking. A striking example is how political figures of mixed heritage are framed. Take Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is the daughter of an Indian Tamil mother and a Jamaican father; she’s both Black and South Asian, a proud mixed-race woman. Yet how was her candidacy most commonly sold to the public? As a triumph for Black women – full stop. Headlines hailed her as the “first Black woman” VP, which is true, but conveniently erased her equally significant South Asian identity. The New York Times observed that “Ms. Harris… is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president” while her Indian-American identity remains in the background. Only 2% of Americans could identify her as Asian American in one survey, even though she’s literally the first Asian American VP as well. It’s as if our political narrative can only handle a simplistic checkbox: Black or Asian, but not both. In Harris’s case, “Black” was the chosen label because it was politically expedient for the Democratic Party to rally Black voters and tout a historic first.

I want to be clear: Harris’s Black identity is deep and real, and celebrating a Black woman’s achievement is absolutely important. But why must it come at the cost of ignoring her Indian heritage? Why do we so rarely hear mainstream Democrats praise her as a trailblazer for South Asians or for multiracial Americans? Because the neoliberal establishment prefers a neat, marketable narrative of representation – one that fits the pre-existing hierarchy of identity. “Black woman” slots Harris into the familiar story of racial progress (and checks the diversity box in a way that doesn’t confuse anyone), whereas embracing her full complexity might force Americans to confront a less comfortable, less binary vision of race. So the Indian side gets softly obscured. We saw a similar pattern with President Obama – lauded universally as the first Black president, while the fact that he was equally the son of a white Kansan mother was almost treated as a footnote. Obama himself identified as a Black man, of course, but it’s telling how the media and political machinery leaned into a one-dimensional portrayal. Mixed identities get flattened into a single category when convenient.

This binary framing of identity reinforces the old racial hierarchy in subtler ways. By insisting on slotting multiracial individuals into one box or the other, society avoids grappling with nuance and maintains the idea that race categories are clear-cut. It’s basically the one-drop rule in new clothing: Harris has one drop of Black, so she’s only Black for public purposes; Obama had one drop, so he’s Black; conversely, many mixed people with partial white ancestry are encouraged to identify or are seen as white – again keeping the illusion that whiteness and blackness are discrete, monolithic groups. The hierarchy of “white vs. non-white” stays intact, because we don’t allow people to live authentically in the grey areas that actually a huge number of humans inhabit. The nuance is suppressed in favor of a simple narrative – and who benefits from simplicity? The people at the top of the hierarchy. They can point to a “Black woman” VP as proof of progress (while not addressing more complex issues of intersectionality or the specific needs of, say, South Asian communities). They can tokenize a single identity and pat themselves on the back, without truly challenging the racial order that privileges whiteness. Identity politics, as practiced by neoliberal elites, often becomes a cynical game of token representation – a Benetton ad approach to diversity that looks colorful on the surface but doesn’t transform power underneath.

Meanwhile, those who are multiracial or who don’t fit tidy categories feel unseen. When Harris’s Asian identity is glossed over, it sends a message to other multiracial folks: only part of you is of value to the story. On official documents and public discourse, you’re pressured to choose, to simplify yourself. That is painful on a personal level, and it’s also politically stifling. It suppresses coalition-building by obscuring how identities overlap. It can even fuel resentment; e.g., I’ve heard some South Asian Americans express frustration that Harris isn’t celebrated as “one of us” as much – an artificial divide born of how the narrative was shaped. In short, the system uses identity as it sees fit – emphasizing or erasing as needed to maintain its narrative, whether that’s a narrative of national whiteness or of sanitized multiculturalism that doesn’t upset the power balance.

Neither Black Nor White: A Personal Reflection on Checking the Boxes

I write about this with both anger and empathy, because I’ve felt the squeeze of these arbitrary categories in my own life. I am a light-skinned Black man with some Afro-Latino heritage, which means strangers, and even some forms, often misperceive or miscategorize me. Both of my parents are Black – our roots in the African diaspora – but because one branch of my family comes from Latin America (and because of my lighter complexion), I’ve gotten the dreaded “What are you?” or the “Which one of your parents is white?” question more times than I can count. Growing up, people would assume I’m mixed – half white and half black. On the U.S. Census, I’m forced to navigate the two-question format: first “Hispanic or Not,” then race. I check Hispanic and I check Black. And I always wonder – how will they tabulate me? Am I counted as Black? As Latino? As both (unlikely, because officially Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race)? There’s no box for Afro-Latino in this supposedly advanced data driven regime. In a sense, I end up being exactly what the system fears: I count as a Black person for one statistic and a Hispanic person for another, potentially “inflating” minority counts in multiple categories. Perhaps that’s one reason the powers that be aren’t eager to create an Afro-Latino category or truly acknowledge multiracial ones – it gives too much weight to people like me, who break their neat accounting of power.

It’s a disorienting experience to live as a full human being yet be sliced up on paper. These identities interweave in us completely. But on a government form or a demographic survey, we’re sometimes made to choose or to see ourselves split into parts. The result is that Afro-Latinos often vanish in the data, much as multiracial people are now vanishing in the new MARC files. I think about my cousins who might have checked “Some Other Race” because they didn’t feel any of the five options fit – they got collapsed and invisibilized by this new scheme. I stand in solidarity with the multiracial community that’s being erased because I know what it’s like not to see yourself reflected truthfully. Our experiences aren’t identical – I won’t pretend a light-skinned Black Latino man faces the same journey as someone who’s, say, half Japanese and half white, or a Black-Asian biracial woman. There are unique struggles and privileges in different mixed identities. But there is a kinship in the struggle to assert our whole selves in a system that wants to simplify and control us. We all live, to some degree, at the margins of the racial lines – and that gives us a certain clarity about how false those lines are.

This is how whiteness perpetuates – by co-opting those it can and excluding those it can’t, regardless of the truth. I can only imagine how many multiracial or culturally mixed people are routinely nudged to identify in the way others see fit rather than how they experience themselves. It’s dehumanizing. And when the government effectively does the same – deciding our identities from above – it sends a message that our own voices about who we are do not matter. That is a continuation of colonial logic. That is the opposite of freedom.

Race: The Fiction Used to Justify Oppression – And Still Doing Damage

We must never forget that race was invented to divide us and to justify violence and exploitation. From the start, it was a tool to prop up economic and social hierarchies – European colonizers created racial categories to rationalize the slaughter and enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples. Over time this calcified into an entire ideology of white superiority. It’s a fiction – but a deadly powerful one, because when enough people believe a fiction, it might as well be reality. These racial distinctions were “created and maintained by dominant groups (in the United States, whites of Western European descent) to justify their oppression and exploitation of other groups”. The idea that Africans were an inferior “Black race” was concocted to excuse slavery – you can’t enslave a fellow human equal to you, but if you convince yourself they’re fundamentally less, a different breed, then all horrors become possible. Likewise, Indigenous people were cast as savages to excuse genocide and land theft. Race as a concept has always been about creating categories of humanity and inhumanity – who has rights and who doesn’t, who belongs and who is disposable.

Modern science has obliterated any notion that these categories have genetic or biological meaning. There is more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them. You and a random stranger across the world share 99.9% of your DNA. There is no gene for race. Yet, the social impacts of race are very real, precisely because societies have built laws and institutions on this false premise. By law and custom, being white in America meant you could vote, own property, be a citizen (the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons”) – while being Black meant you were property, and later meant you were a second-class citizen under Jim Crow. Those injustices were rationalized by a whole pseudo-scientific enterprise – eugenicists and racial “scientists” in the 19th and early 20th centuries measured skulls and concocted IQ tests to “prove” white superiority. It was all garbage, but it influenced policy – from segregated schools to immigration bans on “non-white” groups. Race became institutionalized at every level: legal segregation, redlining in housing, employment discrimination, you name it. And it was always about power – keeping one group on top and others underfoot.

Why bring this history up now? Because the MARC files and the erasure of multiracial identities are part of the same old pattern, just in a new form. Nobody is being dragged from their home or jailed due to the MARC data – at least not yet, anyway– but the underlying motive of preserving a power structure by manipulating racial categories is akin to the motives of those past abuses. It’s a softer deception, buried in data tables, but it ultimately serves to shore up the position of those who benefit from a white-dominated narrative of America. It’s a reminder that the struggle against racism is not just against overt hatred, but against the very frameworks by which our society defines and divides us. Sometimes the battlefield is a courthouse; sometimes it’s a scientific debate; and sometimes, like now, it’s an Excel spreadsheet in a government office.

Consider also how selective the powerful are about whose suffering counts. Trump, who decried (nonexistent) “large scale killing of white farmers” in South Africa, has never, to my knowledge, lifted a finger or even shed a tear for Black Africans actually facing real atrocities. Where is the outrage for the six million Congolese who have died in conflicts since the 1990s? Where are the emergency visas for the victims of genocidal violence in places like Congo or Sudan? They don’t fit the narrative. But when white Afrikaner farmers spun tales (exaggerated and outright false) of being targeted after apartheid, that found a megaphone in the White House. Trump even instructed his Secretary of State to investigate these claims of “land seizures” and murders – which the South African government said twisted the facts. And extremist forums cheered the idea of offering refugee status to white South Africans.

This was not a mistake; it was a deliberate manipulation. It mirrors another infamous example: when Trump promoted a clearly doctored image of Abrego Garcia with the obviously photoshopped MS-13 hand tattoo. The text on the image was added, but it didn’t matter. It served the purpose: to stoke fear, weaponize race, and manufacture enemies. Facts were incidental. The emotional truth – white victimhood, brown villainy – was all that mattered.

This starkly shows the double standard of weaponized whiteness: empathy and action can be summoned readily when white folks are perceived as victims (even in dubious scenarios), but Black victims of actual large-scale violence are met with silence at best. It’s not that the lives of those white farmers actually mattered more in any moral sense – it’s that their plight is politically useful to stoke fear of “white replacement” and to reaffirm a worldview where whites are under siege (a favorite trope of white supremacists). Ignoring the much greater suffering of Black Africans in Congo or elsewhere wasn’t an oversight; it was intentional, because acknowledging those would mean centering Black pain without a white angle – and that does nothing for the white supremacist project.

The same mindset underpins the Census changes: focus on protecting the stature of whiteness, even if it means erasing others. Whether it’s manipulating public perception with false farmer genocide claims or manipulating demographics by reclassifying multiracial people, the goal is to preserve the power and innocence of “whiteness” as a category. Whiteness must remain large (numerically and symbolically) and unassailable – never mind if reality is more complex.

We Will Not Be Erased – Toward a Truer Solidarity

What do we do in the face of this? First, we call it out for what it is: a power play, a whitewashing of our reality, an insult to self-determination. This is not merely a dry bureaucratic issue for statisticians to bicker over. It is about our stories – who we say we are, and who gets to tell the tale of our nation. We must demand that the full complexity of America be recognized and respected. That means pushing back on the Census Bureau’s actions. They may present MARC as a one-time technical adjustment, but we can pressure for transparency and perhaps reversal. Why not keep data on multiracial individuals as they actually identified, rather than forcing everyone into antiquated boxes? Why not embrace a system that lets people be multiracial – proudly, openly – and counts them as such for all purposes? There is a proposal for the 2030 Census to adopt a combined race/ethnicity question and add a “Middle Eastern/North African” category, possibly reducing the use of “Some Other Race”. That could help, but only if multiracial remains an option and isn’t quietly coded into oblivion. We should all comment and advocate when these standards are debated. It sounds wonky, but it’s foundational – data drives policy, and visibility in data is power. We cannot let them turn back the clock on acknowledging mixed identities.

Second, we build solidarity across communities. The multiracial community and monoracial communities of color need to have each other’s backs here. There have been unfortunate divides – some mixed-race folks feel excluded or not “enough” for certain groups, and some monoracial folks have suspicions about those of mixed heritage (“are you with us or not?”). We have to transcend that, because guess what? To the white supremacist system, anyone not purely white is a potential threat or tool. They will use us against each other if we let them. Instead, let’s recognize how our struggles intersect. When the count of multiracial people is slashed, it’s not just “mixed people” who lose – the broader POC coalition loses political strength. When the narrative tries to pit Black vs. biracial vs. Latino vs. Asian, that’s an age-old divide-and-conquer tactic. We can resist by celebrating the beautiful complexity of identities rather than seeing it as a problem. That means making space in our movements for those of multiple backgrounds, and recognizing, for example, that a Black-Asian person can simultaneously experience anti-Black racism and anti-Asian racism – and also bring unique perspective to unite communities. My own Afro-Latino identity has shown me the common threads between Latino struggles and Black struggles – and how crucial it is that we refuse to be pigeonholed when building solidarity.

Finally, we must continue to educate and tell the truth about race. Every time we repeat that race is a social construct – but one with real consequences – we chip away at its mystique. We need to teach how these categories have been manipulated over time. When people understand that “white” and “black” were literally created and redefined by governments and elites, it becomes easier to see current manipulations for what they are. The knowledge that race is made up can be liberating: if it’s made up, we can remake it or unmake it. We don’t have to accept the narratives handed to us. Our consciousness of how race operates is a weapon. We can organize not just against overt racists, but against the insidious structural moves like this census change. Because radical truth-telling requires us to say: No, this isn’t just benign data cleaning – it’s an extension of white supremacist logic into the realm of statistics. And we won’t stand for it.

In my heart, I carry the words of ancestors and freedom fighters who preached the value of real human unity. Not a false “colorblind” unity that ignores difference, but a unity that embraces our differences and sees in them a strength. The forces of whiteness have always feared that kind of unity – from Bacon’s Rebellion to the Rainbow Coalition. They fear it because if we actually all stood together, proud of who we are but united against injustice, their centuries-old house of cards would finally topple. Recognizing multiracial identities in all their fullness is a step toward that unity, because it inherently bridges groups. So of course the system tries to erase or co-opt it. But that attempt will ultimately fail. You can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle; the younger generations are more mixed, more fluid, more unwilling to be confined. The Census may try to whitewash the mosaic of America, but the truth will shine through in our lived experiences and our insistence on being seen.

This is warning and a rallying cry. A warning that even in 2025, the engines of systemic racism are humming along in new disguises – and a rallying cry that we, the people of this vibrant, multi-hued nation, will not be defined by those engines. We will check as many boxes as apply – or break the boxes entirely. We will tell our own stories, in all their nuance, and demand a country (and a census) that honors them. The days of racial control by the elite are numbered, no matter how many tricks they pull, because a new consciousness is rising – one that knows our diversity is our strength and refuses to let it be weaponized against us. The data may be modified, but we won’t be. We are still here, uncollapsed and unapologetic, and our truth will outlive any spreadsheet.

Power to the People!