Mixed Race Studies

Criollo, Mestizo, Mulato, LatiNegro, Indígena, White, or Black? The US Hispanic/Latino Population and Multiple Responses in the 2000 Census

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1724-1727

Hortensia Amaro, Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and of Counseling Psychology
Bouve College of Health Sciences
Northeastern University

Ruth E. Zambrana, Profesor of Womens Studies
University of Maryland

Current dialogues on changes in collecting race and ethnicity data have not considered the complexity of tabulating multiple race responses among Hispanics. Racial and ethnic identification—and its public reporting–among Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is embedded in dynamic social factors. Ignoring these factors leads to significant problems in interpreting data and understanding the relationship of race, ethnicity, and health among Hispanics/Latinos. In the flurry of activity to resolve challenges posed by multiple race responses, we must remember the larger issue that looms in the foreground—the lack of adequate estimates of mortality and health conditions affecting Hispanics/Latinos. The implications are deemed important because Hispanics/Latinos will become the largest minority group in the United States within the next decade.

Read the entire article here.

For Asian-American Couples, a Tie That Binds

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Rachel L. Swarns

WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago, Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it was simply the way of the world.

But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,” said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”

Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul mates from among their own expanding community…

Read the entire article here.

Black Orpheus and the Merging of two Brazilian Nations

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 71, October 2001
pages 107-115

Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos, Associate Professor of Sociology
State University of Rio de Janeiro

The second cinematic remake of the play ‘Orfeu da Conceição’ has sparked a new debate among filmmakers and social scientists, bringing out opposing views on major aspects of Brazilian nationhood, such as race relations, bodily practices and the meaning of Carnival. The Brazilian poet Vinícius de Moraes wrote the original play, which was presented for the first time in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. This play is about a tragic love affair between two black characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, posed against the background of carnival in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Orpheus is a gifted musician who meets Eurydice during carnival. It so happens that after falling in love with Orpheus, Eurydice is killed by a man who represents the devil. The desperate Orpheus descends into Hell to rescue her. When he comes back home with the corpse of Eurydice, Mira, who was his former lover, kills him. Central to the play is the defence of the eternity of art set against the tragic reality of life.

Two films were produced based on this same play, and both directors claim to reveal the universal meaning of art against the background of a carnival feast associated with the Brazilian black population. The films were produced in 1959 and 1998. The first, Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) was directed by the French filmmaker Marcel Camus. It is mainly recognised for its utopian view in which love and passion, race relations and carnival are represented. The second film, entitled Orfeu, was directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Cacá Diegues, and has been praised for its commitment to the description of reality. In it, Diegues explored the commodification of bodies, racial conflicts, and the commercialisation of the carnival feast. This director previously belonged to the important movement of Brazilian filmmakers known as cinema novo, which tried to transform cinematic industrial productions into critical and artistic productions. He is also the director of acclaimed Brazilian films such as Bye Bye Brasil, Xica da Silva and Tieta. In his Orpheus film, Diegues used a set of sophisticated cinematic techniques in order to give the illusion of reality. While making the screenplay, he worked with an excellent group of intellectuals and cast many well-known celebrities of Rio’s cultural life rather than using professional actors.

As the latter production was not well received by international film critics, the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso wrote a challenging article in the New York Times defending the recent remake. Veloso criticised the former internationally acclaimed version of the play for depicting Brazilians as exotics using outrageously fanciful colours and the general ‘voodoo for tourists’ ambience (Veloso 2000). Indeed, the film directed by Marcel Camus did win the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was considered the Best Foreign Film and the Best Film, respectively, by the New York Film Critics’ Circle and by the British Academy. In 1960 it received the Golden Globe Award. The acclaimed version of Black Orpheus attempted to produce an ageless representation of art and it fascinated foreign audiences. According to Veloso, however, the film was not well considered by Brazilians.Veloso happened not only to be the author of the soundtrack of the second film, but he also appeared in a short scene in this film, and his wife was one of the producers.

Despite his involvement with the production of the film, Veloso is absolutely right as he points out that although the first production is capable of completely engaging a foreign audience, the ambience of fun and happiness among all the characters is not attractive to most citizens of Rio. For them any possibility of self-recognition in the story diminishes from the earliest scenes. For most Brazilians, the first production seems to be one more in a long list of those commodities that were made para inglês ver, that is, produced according to a foreign idealization of Brazilian customs and dress. Therefore, the musician called attention not only to the diversity of interpretations, but also to the power associated with the different forums that appraise and legitimate the meaning of art. However, to what extent is it possible to affirm that whereas the first film is a mere fairy tale, the second fulfils the task of depicting reality? In addition, how are we to understand the influence of two different historical contexts upon these two films?

In this paper, I will investigate the two cinematic productions, considering them as part of processes that took place within different historical periods. In particular, I will be examining the issues of race relations and bodily pleasures within carnival, as they appear to be overriding in both versions of the play. I will consider that although each film can be seen as part of its respective time, they both represent two one-sided versions of the meaning of carnival practices in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Whereas the first production was produced at the end of the 1950s when the Brazilian ideal of racial democracy was widely accepted, the second was produced at the end of the 1990s when mass media, violence and the rights of ethnic minorities constituted the political agenda of our times. In the second film, from the earliest scenes the focus is on poverty, shootings and injustice. The poor neighbourhood located on the hillsides of the city is continually invaded by brutal police forces, and Eurydice is senselessly killed by the leader of the drug trafficking gang. The decomposing corpses thrown at the edge of the hillside by drug dealers represented Hell…

…From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism

On the subject of race relations in Brazil, the two cinematic productions of the Greek legend offer two dramatically different approaches. With its all-black cast, the first film brought about a remarkable revolution in the complex racial relations of Brazil. Even so, the cinematic images portray Rio’s natural beauty, the mesmerising sound of drums, and the festive manifestations of life, romanticising the conflict present among the poor and black population that inhabits the hillsides of the city. The film was produced at a time when the myth of racial democracy in Brazil was held, and it reinforced the myth. The more recent production is also very much a product of its time. It portrays racial conflict through the medium of racially radical rap lyrics as well through the images of a white man being executed by a group of predominantly black drug traffickers.

A series of studies developed in the 1970s completely transformed the contemporary approaches to race relations in Brazil as they showed that despite widespread miscegenation, race remained an important indicator of privilege in Brazilian society. Furthermore, they showed that blacks continue to occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic scale (Hasenbalg 1979). This is a social and political issue that confronts citizens to this day. Based on these studies, many analyses of race relations concluded that the image of Brazil as a racially democratic nation is a fantasy essentially constructed either by the dominant classes or by the Brazilian elite. Based on the assertion that the myth of racial democracy obscures discrimination, many authors maintain that black people need to build their own identities separate from white values and beliefs. According to their analyses there would be an evolving process of ‘racialisation’ whereby Brazilian race relations would become more transparent (Guimarães 2000)…

Nevertheless, if it is true to say that, regardless of the social class to which black people belong, there is prejudice against them in Brazil, it is also true to say that to this day it is almost impossible to represent the majority of the Brazilian population in terms of a strict code of race. I would risk saying that, although the North-American dual model of race is beginning to be appropriated by some groups of the black movement in Brazil, the racial code, which would easily consider those to be of black or of African descent by either European or North American standards, is far from being recognised by the majority of the Brazilian population. Discrimination in Brazil does not occur according to the same mechanisms as it does in the United States. The idea of miscegenation is still widespread in Brazil. Although it involves exclusion of dark-skinned people and represents the mechanism by which racism operates, it also entails a wider acceptance of different cultures, values and beliefs. The Brazilian population defines itself according to more than three hundred terms that relate to race and colour. Although Brazilians are people who see themselves according to multiple definitions, including the opposition between blacks and whites, they are far from being limited to them.

It is also important to point out that the idea of miscegenation has been part of the idea of the nation since the 1930s. It is widely recognised that a new national identity was formulated during Getúlio Vargas’ populist government. This new identity promoted the image of a harmonious and homogeneous whole capable of including all citizens regardless of race, ethnic origins or colour. The imagery of the nation was constituted as the composite of diverse cultural elements such as samba, carnival, and feijoada, all of which are associated with the ‘Brazilian’ population. The Brazilian construction of nationalism conflated the ideas of miscegenation and nation, and this conflation can be considered as the result of a process of negotiation that has not yet been completely concluded.

Myths are not abstract constructions. They are continually manifested through the ways in which most Brazilians define themselves and interact with one another. Gilberto Freyre was one of the authors who first described in positive terms the process of widespread criss-crossing among different social and cultural populations. However, although Freyre has been praised for having pointed out that the blending process in Brazil was highly inclusive (Freyre 1930), he has not been sufficiently criticised for failing to call attention to the fact that the process of inclusion was often cynical and ambivalent. The process of inclusion did not include black people in the same way and in the same arenas as it did for white people. The recognition and positive values attributed to Brazilian miscegenation came with a series of other mythologies, such as the belief in the goodness of progressive whitening and the association between blacks and all sorts of hedonism. One should not overlook the resulting violence and inequalities that have occurred as a result of those contexts…

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Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas

Michigan State University Press
April 2012
344 pages
6 x 9, notes, references
ISBN: 978-1-61186-040-5

Edited by:

Bernd Reiter, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics
University of South Florida

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies; Director of the Latin American Studies Program
University of South Carolina

A detailed analysis of issues facing African descendants in Latin America

Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi- faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.

Invisible citizens?

IDB America: Magazine of Inter-American Development Bank
August 2001

Charo Quesada

Censuses in many Latin American countries omit questions about race, rendering minority groups statistically invisible

If we relied entirely on censuses to understand what the people of Latin America and the Caribbean look like, the picture that would emerge would be a complete fantasy.

While the cities and villages of this part of the world abound with color and vitality thanks to the multitude of ethnic groups that live together on its soil, most of the region’s censuses do not include questions about race or ethnicity. As a result many indigenous communities and, in particular, millions of citizens of African descent, are not officially recognized as such by their governments. In many cases, questions about the respondent’s native language are also absent from census forms.

Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is of indigenous or African descent, less than one-third of the region’s countries gathers information on its population of African descent explicitly. The data collected on indigenous peoples, while somewhat more abundant, tend to be incomplete and flawed.

Since these two groups are not taken into account or are poorly covered in official figures, their particular needs are not reflected by government programs in which resources are allocated for such important areas as health, education, employment, and housing.

The consequences of this fact can be seen in regional statistics on poverty and marginalization, that consistently show indigenous groups and Afro-Latin Americans to be disproportionately disadvantaged. A 1994 World Bank study shows that in Guatemala, where the national poverty rate is 64 percent, the figure climbs to 86.6 percent for the indigenous population. In Peru, the national poverty rate is 49.7 percent, compared with 79 percent for the indigenous population. In Mexico, it is 17.9 percent for the country as a whole, and 80.6 percent among indigenous groups. In general, indigenous and Afro-Latin American communities experience higher infant mortality, illiteracy, and unemployment, and also tend to be less healthy than the white population…

Read the entire article here.

Room for Debate: Brazil’s Racial Identity Challenge

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Jerry Dávila, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Brazilian History
University of Illinois

Peter Fry, Anthropolgist

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

Yvonne Maggie, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

João Jorge Santos Rodrigues, Lawyer and President
Olodum (cultural group that aims to combat racism in Brazil)

Marcelo Paixão, Professor of Economics and Sociology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2016 Olympics and celebrate its newfound economic prowess as a player on the world stage, the connection between poverty and racial discrimination in Brazil is coming under scrutiny. Would Brazil benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action to counter its history of slavery? What are the challenges of implementing such programs?

Note from Steven F. Riley: See also: Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008): 577–614.

What Brazil Does Well (Dávila)

In the United States and Brazil, Jim Crow’s shadow has yielded divergent understandings of the nature of racial inequality and the role of race-conscious policies. In the U.S., placing “separate but equal” in the rearview mirror feeds legal challenges to affirmative action.

But in Brazil, the distance from Jim Crow shapes a growing recognition that racial discrimination and inequality are not legacies and are not just the fruit of segregation. To the contrary, they have a stubbornly viral ability to reproduce and renew themselves…

…These Brazilian policies are not meant to redress legacies of racism: instead, they recognize and counteract ongoing inequalities. Brazil, in turn, has drawn a lesson from the U.S. history with affirmative action: policies that promote inclusion are insufficient without policies that reduce exclusion.

Race Is Too Hard to Identify (Fry)

Racial quotas in universities are polemical. For a start, they can hardly be called “U.S. style” since they would be unconstitutional in the United States. Furthermore, unlike the U.S., the majority of Brazilians do not classify themselves neatly into blacks and whites. In Brazil, therefore, eligibility for racial quotas is always a problem…

Quotas Are Working in Brazil (Nobles)

In 2004, when state and federal universities began implementing affirmative action policies, Brazil closed one chapter of its history and began another.

Brazil’s once dominant “myth of racial democracy,” made the contemplation, let alone implementation, of such policies impossible for most of the 20th century. Unlike the United States, Brazil’s post-slavery experience had not included deeply entrenched legal and social barriers. Nor had it included rigid racial identifications. Affirmative action policies were not needed, or so the reasoning went…

…Today, debate turns on arguments about merit and racial identity. Some hold that the quota system violates meritocracy. But basing university admissions solely on high-stakes standardized tests, which significantly advantage test preparation, seems a dubious way of determining merit. Others argue that Brazil’s system of racial classification is too fluid and ambiguous: the problem of “who is black?”…

Brazil Sets an Example to Follow (Seigel)

Affirmative action programs in Brazil are widespread and growing. Based on state legal victories beginning in 2000 and directed to expand further by the far-reaching federal Racial Equality Statute passed in 2010, all but three of Brazil’s 26 states now have reparative quota systems. The widespread objection that Brazilian racial categories were too fluid to define “black” for policy purposes has not panned out. Candidates define their racial identity themselves; apparently the disincentives to proclaiming black identity in a society still shot through with racist presumptions are enough to stave off the flood of sneaky white candidates who opponents claimed would jam the system. Plus, Brazilian affirmative action is not solely racial; it is class-based as well, and implemented in intelligent ways. In most states, quota candidates’ families must meet a salary limit, and an equal number of slots are set aside for children who have attended Brazil’s challenged public school system as for black students. Since most families poor enough to meet the income ceiling will have sent their kids to public schools, this means most students who meet the income requirement can apply, regardless of color…

Looking to the U.S. Has Been a Mistake (Maggie)

The history of racial relations in Brazil, which is completely different from the American case, leads me to believe that no, Brazil would not benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action.

In Brazil, there was no legislation dividing the population into “races,” nor prohibiting marriage between people of different “races,” in the post-abolition period; we’ve had no “one drop of blood” rule. The result is a national society based on the idea of mixture. U.S. affirmative action seeks to unite and make equal what had been separated by law. To implement this in Brazil, we would have to create legal identities based on the opposition between whites and blacks or African descendents.

Step in the Right Direction (Guimarães)

Brazil has already implemented some important affirmative action programs in higher education, and the balance is overall positive. Some 71 universities — with free tuition, linked to the federal system of higher education — as well as different state universities now have some kind of preferential system of entrance benefiting disadvantaged students (those coming from public high schools, those self-declared “pretos,” or blacks; “pardos,” or browns; “indigenous”; or those with low incomes).

The best thing is that those policies were taken one by one by different university boards trying to adapt the principles of social or racial justice to their regional reality. Available data on the school performance of those students show that they are doing pretty well and are not putting any kind of stress on the system. The real stress comes more from the huge expansion of slots than from the admission system.

Symbolically those policies are important in showing that being black (preto or pardo) in Brazil today is no longer a source of shame but rather one of pride. Descent from Africa is openly assumed and socially recognized. The policies also demonstrate that publicly financed universities must care for the quality of the education they offer without degrading the fairness of their admission when it becomes biased by class, race or color…

Read the entire debate here.

Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States… and Racial Politics in Brazil?

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 4, Issue 2, 1998
pages 201-234
DOI: 10.1080/13504639851807

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Professor in Ethics
Queen Mary University of London

Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil’s self-image as a ‘racial democracy’. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white-black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilisation. In doing this, these studies (unreflectedly) take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation. What seems to escape these analysts is that the Brazilian construction of race was set against the view that ‘racial differences’ identify distinct groups, a view which still prevails in the United States and in sociological constructions of race. Actually, an analysisof writings on Brazilian subjectivity suggests that the texts which write blackness do so by deploying various modern categories of ‘being’ (race, nation, gender, and class) both in the narratives—which have produced blacks as subordinate subjects in modernity and in the texts which aim to foster black emancipation.

October, 1995, After three years living in the United States, during which time I had followed the unfolding of three episodes which placed race at the centre of the political debate (the L.A. riots, O.J. Simpson’s trial and the Million Man March), I was very excited by the timing of my second trip back home. I would have the opportunity to participate in an event which seemed (finally) to place race at the centre of the political debate in Brazil: the 300th anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the most lasting (one hundred year) community of runaway slaves in Brazil, Quilombo dos Palmares. Over the past 20 years, the black movement has chosen Zumbi as the symbol of a separate identity and has declared 20 November (the supposed date of his death) as the national day of black consciousness.

In 1995, however, Zumbi was at risk of being captured by the dominant racial discourse, as a national hero—as Palmares reconstructed by academics and politicians as an initial experience of racial democracy in Brazil. Throughout the year, city, state and federal administration promoted several events (conferences, parties, and political activities) to celebrate the third centennial of Zumbi’s death. Black movement organisations, on the other hand, seized the opportunity (once again) to denounce the ‘myth of racial democracy’ and the continuing subordination of blacks in Brazilian society. Excited about the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Black-White Marital Matching: Race, Anthropometrics, and Socioeconomics

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6196
December 2011
34 pages

Pierre-André Chiappori, E. Rowan and Barbara Steinschneider Professor of Economics
Columbia University

Sonia Oreffice, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

Climent Quintana-Domeque, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

We analyze the interaction of race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the U.S. marriage market, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1999 to 2009 for black, white, and inter-racial couples. We consider the anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, together with their wage and education, and estimate who inter-racially marries whom along these dimensions. Distinctive patterns arise by gender and race for inter-married individuals: the black women who inter-marry are the thinner and more educated in their group; instead, white women are the fatter and less educated; black or white men who inter-marry are poorer and thinner. While women in “mixed” couples find a spouse who is poorer but thinner than if they intra-married, black men match with a white woman who is more educated than if they intra-married, and a white man finds a thinner spouse in a black woman.

Read the entire paper here.

A Longitudinal Study of Migration Propensities for Mixed Ethnic Unions in England and Wales

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6394
February 2012
21 pages

Zhiqiang Feng, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Maarten van Ham, Professor of Urban Renewal
Delft University of Technology and IZA

Paul Boyle, Professor of Geography and Sustainable Development
University of St. Andrews

Gillian M. Raab, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Most studies investigating residential segregation of ethnic minorities ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic unions that involve a minority member and a white member. To our knowledge, hardly any research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on the residential choices of households in terms of the ethnic mix of destination neighbourhoods. Our study addresses this research gap and examines the tendencies of migration among mixed ethnic unions in comparison with their co-ethnic peers. We used data from the Longitudinal Study for England and Wales. Our statistical analysis supports the spatial assimilation theory: ethnic minorities move towards less deprived areas and to a lesser extent also towards less ethnically concentrated areas. However, the types of destination neighbourhood of minority people living in mixed ethnic unions varied greatly with the ethnicity of the ethnic minority partner.

INTRODUCTION

Residential integration is regarded as a measure of structural assimilation of ethnic minority populations and has drawn long-standing interest from academic studies (Park and Burgess 1969; Lieberson 1963; Massey 1985; Allen and Turner 1996). Residential integration is not only an indicator of the degree of ethnic assimilation, but also further enhances social and cultural integration. Conversely, ethnic segregation is deemed to hinder social interaction with majority populations, and to marginalise ethnic minority populations. Hence the British government has increasingly promoted community cohesion and residential integration.

While a body of research has examined aggregate levels of residential segregation of ethnic minority groups and the cross-sectional residential locations of ethnic minority populations at the individual level, few studies have examined the determinants of the actual residential migration of ethnic minorities in relation to characteristics of neighbourhoods of origin and destination (Finney and Simpson 2008). Little is known about how ethnic minority people move between neighbourhoods with different levels of concentration of their own groups and with different levels of deprivation. Most existing studies of ethnic segregation ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic families that involve a minority member and a white member (Feng et al, 2010). However, to our knowledge, almost no research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on tendencies of residential migration between different types of neighbourhood. In the US, a few studies which examined the residential locations (but not mobility) of ethnic populations, have taken the ethnic mix within households into account. Ellis et al. (2006) used cross-sectional data in the US and came to the conclusion that mixed-ethnic households are less likely to live in minority ethnic neighbourhoods. White and Sassler (2000) also used US census data and found that Latinos and blacks who married a white spouse were more likely to reside in higher status neighbourhoods, while in contrast the marriage of a white person to a non-white person seemed to result in them residing in a lower-status neighbourhood than they might otherwise have done. Although Ellis et al (2006) argued that their results are more likely due to mixed-ethnic couples choosing to live in mixed-ethnic neighbourhoods, rather than mixed neighbourhoods ‘creating’ these couples, it is difficult with cross-sectional data to come to any firm conclusion about this. The same is true for the study by White and Sassler (2000) due to the use of cross-sectional data. In their review of geographies of mixed ethnic unions, Wright et al (2003) called for further research on migration of mixed ethnic unions in a longitudinal perspective.

With this study we fill this gap, and use longitudinal data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), to explore whether minority people in mixed ethnic unions were more likely to move to areas which are less concentrated in their own group than ethnic minorities living in mono ethnic unions. In our analyses we also take the level of deprivation of neighbourhoods into account…

…In the past decades Britain has witnessed a growing ethnic diversity in populations. In England, for example, the percentage of ethnic minorities has risen from 4.6 % to 8.6 % between 1981 and 2001 (Rees and Butt 2004). It is estimated that nearly a million people report themselves as having a mixed-ethnic identity in Britain today (CRE 2006). Along with the trend in diversity the number of marriages and partnerships between people of different ethnic groups is also on the rise (Aspinal 2003; Coleman 1985; 2004; Voas 2009; Song 2010). The one per cent census sample from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS) reveals that the total number of mixed ethnic unions reached 5,139 in 2001 in England and Wales, a 46 Per cent increase from 1991 (Feng et al. 2010)…

…The ONS LS was a unique and very rich dataset. However, we acknowledge that the data has some limitations. We did not have information on migration between two censuses. Some couples might move more than once between 1991 and 2001. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) is a panel dataset which provides annual information for sample couples. However, the number of mixed ethnic unions in the BHPS is too few for a meaningful statistical analysis. The other limitation is the self reported ethnicity can change over time. It is not a big problem for South Asians as they reported their ethnic identity very consistently over time. But the consistency was not high for Black Others who were part of the Black group in our analysis (Platt et al 2005). Therefore our results here should be treated with caution…

Read the entire paper here.

Black people ‘least satisfied of UK population’

BBC News
2012-02-28

Black and mixed-ethnic Britons are less satisfied with their lives on average than the UK population as a whole, a survey suggests.

Some 80,000 people across the UK, polled by the Office for National Statistics, produced an average life satisfaction rating of 7.4 out of 10.

But black Britons averaged 6.6, while mixed-ethnic Britons scored 6.9.

The survey, in April to September 2011, was part of the ONS’s ongoing Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The average rating for life satisfaction was also lower than the national figure for those of Pakistani origin – 7 out of 10 – and Bangladeshis – 7.1.

The four questions posed by the survey also included one seeking ratings for people’s overall happiness, with answers nationwide producing an average of 7.3 out of 10.

Again, black Britons reported the lowest level of happiness – 6.9 on average – followed by mixed-ethnic and Pakistani respondents, with both of those groups averaging 7 out of 10…

Read the entire article here.