According to the 1960 census, Whites constituted 88.8 percent of all Americans, with an additional 10.6 percent classified as Black. In addition, less than 1 percent of Blacks who were married were married outside of the race and interracial marriage was still illegal in over 20 states. Also, the 125,000 foreign-born Blacks in the United States comprised only 0.7 percent of the Black population.
Thus, when affirmative action programs were instituted in the 1960s, the most important assumption upon which selective higher education institutions developed these programs was that the predominant beneficiaries would be those Blacks whose entire ancestry were victims of the history of racial discrimination in the United States. Yet, in 2003, Professors Henry Lewis Gates and Lani Guinier pointed out that two-thirds of Blacks in the undergraduate student body at Harvard were either Black/multiracial or first- or second-generation Black immigrants.
Since the “Harvard Revelation,” several scholars have noted the changing racial and ethnic ancestry of Blacks attending selective higher education institutions. In 2010, this effort received a boost as new regulations promulgated by the Department of Education (ED) took effect. These regulations changed the way all educational institutions both collect and report racial and ethnic information.
They also required all educational institutions to rely on self-reporting in classifying a person’s racial/ethnic identity. These regulations added a new reporting category titled “Two or More Races” Non-Hispanic/Latino individuals who check multiple racial boxes are reported by their educational institutions to ED as members of this new category and not part of any single race category.
While the data reported to ED combines all two or more races individuals into one category, from the information that educational institutions actually collect they can generate data for any racial/ethnic combination of multiracial students in their student body.
For example, while varying each year, 42 percent of the Black students enrolled as freshmen starting at Yale University in the falls of 2011 to 2014 were multiracial (54 percent in 2014), at the University of Virginia 21.5 percent for the same years (with 22.4 percent in 2014), and at Indiana University Bloomington, Black multiracial students made up 18.4 percent of all Black undergraduate students on campus in the fall of 2013.
Beyond selective higher education institutions, the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) changed its registration form for the LSAT to reflect the changes required by the new ED regulations. LSAC data also relies on self-identification of racial/ethnic identity. This data revealed that the LSAT scores of Black multiracial students, particularly Black/White ones, are significantly higher than those of single-race Blacks.
