ABSTRACT
Racial inequality is a moving target. The way we defi ne racial groups changes
over time, the experiences of those groups change over time, and so our under-
standing of racial inequality changes over time. Almost every single decennial
census since the fi rst one has had a different version of the race and ethnicity ques-
tions (Lee and Tafoya 2007), so every census has produced different results
regarding how those groups compare. When U.S. residents were allowed to
choose more than one racial identity for themselves on the 2000 Census, we had
a new question to ask about racial inequality: how do multiracial groups compare
to the single-race groups that we know so much more about?
