Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of
multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new ‘‘check all that
apply’’ method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly
defined the population of multiracial individuals as the ‘‘biracial’’ children of single-race
parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000
5% samples of the US Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader
in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical
continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and partAmerican
Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple-race
identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as
evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent
immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay
closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.