Black and Some Other Race: Examining Shifts in the Black Latino Population in the Census Bureau’s 2020 Race Question

The 2020 census race question featured a write-in response area to the Black race category as a way to capture detailed race responses. Evidence suggests that respondents who wrote a Hispanic or Latino origin response (i.e., Dominican or Panamanian) in this response area were reclassified as “Black” and “Some Other Race” (SOR) and tabulated as multiracial. In effect, the number of single-race Black Latinos declined by 3 percent since 2010, while the Black and SOR Latino count surged by 223 percent. These trends have been difficult to observe empirically because write-in responses to the race question are not readily available in public microdata. In this study, we leverage ancestry data from the American Community Survey (ACS) to assess how these changes may have influenced the odds of multirace classification among Black Latinos. Our findings suggest that Black Latinos who reported racially distinct ancestries (e.g., African American and Panamanian) were less likely to be classified as multiracial in the 2020 question design compared to those who solely reported a Hispanic or Latino ancestry. This implies that coding schemes used in the 2020 race question could be overestimating multiracial counts by disqualifying Hispanic or Latino origin responses from Black categorical membership. Moreover, these shifts point to the construction of a boundary that officially draws a line between “Black” and “Hispanic or Latino” membership at the cost of disregarding those Black Latinos who may see both categories as mutually inclusive.