More than 30,000 San Franciscans identify as both Asian and white, giving the city nearly a 4% share of that multiracial identity — the highest of any U.S. county outside Hawaii. At Lowell High School, that demographic reality has taken the shape of a weekly club where 10 to 15 students gather every Monday to talk about growing up mixed-race in a city where it is increasingly the norm rather than the exception.
The Lowell Hapa Club serves multiracial Asian students, though co-president Nelly Rauseo, 17, says it is open to anyone, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier this year, the club organized a presentation on Alysa Liu, a figure skater from Oakland who is half-Chinese and half-white.
San Francisco’s numbers help explain why. The city’s population is roughly 40% Asian, and among residents under age 10, nearly 16% identify as both Asian and white — up from a 3% share among school-aged children generally, edging past 12% in some measurements, per the Chronicle’s reporting. San Francisco’s overall Asian-and-white share is triple the percentage found in the U.S. as a whole, a gap that reflects decades of demographic and legal change.
From Census Boxes to TikTok Trend
None of this visibility existed on paper before 2000. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 1997 revision to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 allowed Americans, for the first time, to select more than one race on federal forms — an option first implemented in the 2000 Decennial Census, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Before that, respondents were forced to pick a single racial category, obscuring multiracial Asian identity in official statistics entirely…