Although the United States has been home to a significant multiracial population
since its founding, American scholarly interest in the racial identity of mixed-race people
is a fairly new phenomenon.1
This development is due in large part to the federal
government’s recent change in its official classification system to allow individuals to
identify with more than one race (see Office of Management and Budget 1997). With
multiple-race statistical data now available, especially after Census 2000, it became clear
that millions of Americans would choose to “mark one or more” races when given the
opportunity. This observation entailed new relevance for existing social scientific
research on identity formation. In particular, Mary Water’s (1990) description of “ethnic
options” for white Americans offered a template for thinking about the “racial options”
that mixed-race people might confront.