Race & Ethnicity

Is race purely about the races in your family tree? Our new survey of multiracial adults suggests there’s more to racial identity that goes beyond one’s ancestry.

Our new survey of multiracial Americans finds that, for two-thirds of Hispanics, their Hispanic background is a part of their racial background – not something separate.

Interracial marriages have increased steadily since 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in 16 states.

Biracial adults who are white and American Indian are among the least likely of mixed-race adults to consider themselves multiracial (only 25% do). They are among the most likely to say their multiracial background has been neither an advantage nor a disadvantage.

The race, ethnicity and origin categories used in the U.S. decennial census have shifted over time often in a reflection of current politics, science and public attitudes. Our interactive tracks the category names from 1790 to 2010.

We released our first report on American multiracial adults, a group that comprises an estimated 6.9% of the adult population, or nearly 17 million adults. The report looks at who they are demographically, their attitudes and experiences, and the spectrum of their racial identity.

Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.

It could be a half-century (or longer) before Hispanics become a majority there, according to scaled-back state population projections.

Despite their increasingly upbeat economic mood, Europeans show growing support for nontraditional political parties critical of the EU.

A Pew Research Center experiment found several key areas where Web surveys produced different results than those conducted by phone.