Mixed Race Studies

The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals

Russell Sage Foundation
October 2002
391 pages
Hardcover: ISBN-13: 978-0-87154-657-9, ISBN-10: 0-87154-657-4
Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-87154-658-6, ISBN-10: 0-87154-658-2

Edited by

Joel Perlmann, Senior Scholar and Program Director
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

Mary C. Waters, M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

The change in the way the federal government asked for information about race in the 2000 census marked an important turning point in the way Americans measure race. By allowing respondents to choose more than one racial category for the first time, the Census Bureau challenged strongly held beliefs about the nature and definition of race in our society. The New Race Question is a wide-ranging examination of what we know about racial enumeration, the likely effects of the census change, and possible policy implications for the future.

The growing incidence of interracial marriage and childrearing led to the change in the census race question. Yet this reality conflicts with the need for clear racial categories required by anti-discrimination and voting rights laws and affirmative action policies. How will racial combinations be aggregated under the Census’s new race question? Who will decide how a respondent who lists more than one race will be counted? How will the change affect established policies for documenting and redressing discrimination? The New Race Question opens with an exploration of what the attempt to count multiracials has shown in previous censuses and other large surveys. Contributor Reynolds Farley reviews the way in which the census has traditionally measured race, and shows that although the numbers of people choosing more than one race are not high at the national level, they can make a real difference in population totals at the county level. The book then takes up the debate over how the change in measurement will affect national policy in areas that rely on race counts, especially in civil rights law, but also in health, education, and income reporting. How do we relate data on poverty, graduation rates, and disease collected in 2000 to the rates calculated under the old race question? A technical appendix provides a useful manual for bridging old census data to new.

The book concludes with a discussion of the politics of racial enumeration. Hugh Davis Graham examines recent history to ask why some groups were determined to be worthy of special government protections and programs, while others were not. Posing the volume’s ultimate question, Jennifer Hochschild asks whether the official recognition of multiracials marks the beginning of the end of federal use of race data, and whether that is a good or a bad thing for society?

The New Race Question brings to light the many ways in which a seemingly small change in surveying and categorizing race can have far reaching effects and expose deep fissures in our society.

Copublished with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Read the entire first chapter here.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Acknowledgment
Introduction
PART I WHAT DO WE KNOW FROM COUNTING MULTIRACIALS?

1. RACIAL IDENTITIES IN 2000: THE RESPONSE TO THE MULTIPLE-RACE RESPONSE OPTION — Reynolds Farley
2. DOES IT MATTER HOW WE MEASURE? RACIAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MULTIRACIAL YOUTH — David R. Harris
3. MIXED RACE AND ETHNICITY IN CALIFORNIA — Sonya M. Tafoya

PART II HOW MUCH WILL IT MATTER?

1. BACK IN THE BOX: THE DILEMMA OF USING MULTIPLE-RACE DATA FOR SINGLE-RACE LAWS — Joshua R. Goldstein and Ann J. Morning
2. INADEQUACIES OF MULTIPLE-RESPONSE RACE DATA IN THE FEDERAL STATISTICAL SYSTEM — Roderick J. Harrison
3. THE LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF A MULTIRACIAL CENSUS — Nathaniel Persily

PART III A MULTIRACIAL FUTURE?

1. AMERICAN INDIANS: CLUES TO THE FUTURE OF OTHER RACIAL GROUPS — C. Matthew Snipp
2. CENSUS BUREAU LONG-TERM RACIAL PROJECTIONS: INTERPRETING THEIR RESULTS AND SEEKING THEIR RATIONALE — Joel Perlmann
3. RECENT TRENDS IN INTERMARRIAGE AND IMMIGRATION AND THEIR EFFECTS ON THE FUTURE RACIAL COMPOSITION OF THE U.S. POPULATION — Barry Edmonston, Sharon M. Lee, and Jeffrey S. Passel

PART IV THE POLITICS OF RACE NUMBERS

1. HISTORY, HISTORICITY, AND THE CENSUS COUNT BY RACE — Matthew Frye Jacobson
2. WHAT RACE ARE YOU? — Werner Sollors
3. COUNTING BY RACE: THE ANTEBELLUM LEGACY — Margo J. Anderson
4. THE ORIGINS OF OFFICIAL MINORITY DESIGNATION — Hugh Davis Graham
5. LESSONS FROM BRAZIL: THE IDEATIONAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF MULTIRACIALITY — Melissa Nobles
6. REFLECTIONS ON RACE, HISPANICITY, AND ANCESTRY IN THE U.S. CENSUS — Nathan Glazer
7. MULTIRACIALISM AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE — Peter Skerry
8. MULTIPLE RACIAL IDENTIFIERS IN THE 2000 CENSUS, AND THEN WHAT? — Jennifer L. Hochschild
9. RACE IN THE 2000 CENSUS: A TURNING POINT — Kenneth Prewitt

Appendix BRIDGING FROM OLD TO NEW

1. Chapter 19 COMPARING CENSUS RACE DATA UNDER THE OLD AND THE NEW STANDARDS — Clyde Tucker, Steve Miller, and Jennifer Parker

Index

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

SAGE Publications, Inc.
Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
2001
432 pages

Edited by

Loretta I. Winters
California State University, Northridge

Herman L. DeBose
California State University, Northridge

How multiracial people identify themselves can have major consequences on their positions in their families, communities and society. Even the U.S. Census has recognized the rapidly increasing numbers of those who consider themselves multiracial, adding a new racial category to the 2000 Census form: two or more races.

New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century examines the multiracial experience, its history and the political issues and consequences surrounding biracial and multiracial identity, bringing together top names in the field to give readers cutting edge views and insights gained from contemporary research.

This important new text follows the trail blazed by Maria Root, who contributes its opening chapter. An introduction places the issues of multiracial identity into context via a discussion of U.S. Census data and debates, providing an overview of the varied readings to come covering such topics as:

• Race as a social, rather than biological, construction
• The Multiracial Movement
• Racial/Ethnic Groups in America and Beyond
• Race, Gender & Hierarchy
• Gang Affiliation and Self-Esteem
• Black/White Interracial Couples and the Beliefs that Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide

The book concludes with “The Multiracial Movement: Harmony and Discord,” by co-editor Loretta Winters, an epilogue putting the readings into perspective according to three models in the multiracial identity literature: the Multiracial Movement model, the Counter Multiracial movements model and the Ethnic Movement model.

Timely and comprehensive in its range of topics, this is an important resource for many audiences: students in Ethnic Studies, Race Relations and related courses; human service professionals including psychologists, counselors, social workers and school personnel and, importantly, multiracial individuals themselves.

Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Stanford University Press
2009
304 pages
31 tables, 2 figures, 1 illustration.
ISBN-10: 0804762775
ISBN-13: 9780804762779

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The United States and Brazil were the largest slave-trading societies of the New World. The demographics of both countries reflect this shared past, but this is where comparisons end. The vast majority of the “Afro-Brazilian” population, unlike their U.S. counterparts, view themselves as neither black nor white but as mixed-race.  Legacies of Race offers the first examination of Brazilian public opinion to understand racial identities, attitudes, and politics in this racially ambiguous context.

Brazilians avoid rigid notions of racial group membership, and, in stark contrast to U.S. experience, attitudes about racial inequality, African-derived culture, and antiracism strategies are not deeply divided along racial lines.  Bailey argues that only through dispensing with many U.S.-inspired racial assumptions can a general theory of racial attitudes become possible. Most importantly, he shows that a strict notion of racial identification in black and white cannot be assumed universal.

White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Volume 13, Number 2 (July 2009)
pages 39-56
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2009-005

Patricia de Santana Pinho
State Univiersity of New York, Albany

This article analyzes anecdotes, jokes, standards of beauty, color categories, and media representations of “mixed-race” individuals to assess the junctions and disjunctions of whiteness and blackness in Brazil.  While the multiple and contradictory meanings of “racial” mixture stimulates a preference for whiteness, thus reducing the access to power by those deemed black, it simultaneously fuels a rejection for “pure” forms of whiteness as witnessed in the country’s celebration of morenidade (brownness).  Not all forms of miscegenation are valued in Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred in detriment of others. I argue that anti-black racism in Brazil is expressed not only against dark-skinned individuals, but it also operates in the devaluing of physical traits “deemed black” even in those who have lighter skin complexion, thus creating “degrees of whiteness.”  One’s “measure of whiteness,” therefore, is not defined only by skin color, but requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.

Read or purchase the article here.