Mixed Race Studies

The Monochrome Society: Americanness and the unsung agreement across racial lines

Policy Review
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Feburary & March 2001

Amitai Etzioni

Various demographers and other social scientists have been predicting for years that the end of the white majority in the United States is near, and that there will be a majority of minorities. cnn broadcast a special program on the forthcoming majority of people of color in America. President Clinton called attention to this shift in an address at the University of California, San Diego on a renewed national dialogue about race relations. His argument was that such a dialogue is especially needed as a preparation for the forthcoming end of the white majority, to occur somewhere in the middle of the next century. In his 2000 state of the union address, Clinton claimed that “within 10 years there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in America. In a more interconnected world, this diversity can be our greatest strength.” White House staffer Sylvia Mathews provided the figures as 53 percent white and 47 percent a mixture of other ethnic groups by 2050. Pointing to such figures, Clinton asked rhetorically if we should not act now to avoid America’s division into “separate, unequal and isolated” camps.

Some have reacted to the expected demise of the white majority with alarm or distress. In The Disuniting of America (1992) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. decries the “cult of ethnicity” that has undermined the concept of Americans as “one people.” He writes, “Watching ethnic conflict tear one nation after another apart, one cannot look with complacency at proposals to divide the United States into distinct and immutable ethnic and racial communities, each taught to cherish its own apartness from the rest.” He also criticizes the “diversity” agenda and multiculturalism, arguing that “the United States has to set a monocultural example in a world rent by savage ethnic conflict; the United States must demonstrate ‘how a highly differentiated society holds itself together.’”

…Race as social construction

Many social scientists call into question the very category of race drawn on by those who foresee increasing racial diversity. Alain Corcos, author of several books on genetics, race, and racism, notes that “race is a slippery word,” one that is understood in varying manners at various times, one without a single definition we may readily grasp. He writes in The Myth of Human Races (1984):

Race is a slippery word because it is a biological term, but we use it every day as a social term. . . . Social, political, and religious views are added to what are seen as biological differences… Race also has been equated with national origin… with religion . . . with language.

The diversity of characteristics by which race is and has been defined points to its unsatisfactory quality as a tool for categorizing human beings. Both anthropological and genetic definitions of race prove inadequate, because while each describes divisions among the human population, each fails to provide reliable criteria for making such divisions. As Corcos notes, they “are vague. They do not tell us how large divisions between populations must be in order to label them races, nor do they tell us how many there are.” Importantly, “ [t]hese things are, of course, all matters of choice for the classifier.”…

…Intermarriage

Last but not least, the figures used by those who project a majority of minorities or the end of a white majority are misleading. These figures are based on a simplistic projection of past trends. How simplistic these projections often are can be quickly gleaned from the Census projection that the number of Native Americans will grow from 2,433,000 in 2000, or approximately 1 percent of the total population, to 4,405,000, or approximately 1 percent of the total population by the year 2050, and to 6,442,000, or approximately 1 percent of the total population by the year 2100. That is, 100 years and no change.

This tendency to depict the future as a continuation of the past is particularly misleading because it ignores the rapidly rising category of racially mixed Americans, the result of a rising number of cross-racial marriages and a rejection of monoracial categories by some others, especially Hispanic Americans…

…The merits of a new category

Dropping the whole social construction of race does not seem in the cards, even if the most far-reaching arguments against affirmative action and for a “color-blind” society win the day. However, there are strong sociological reasons to favor the inclusion of a multiracial category in the 2010 Census.

Introducing a multiracial category has the potential to soften racial lines that now divide America by rendering them more like economic differences and less like caste lines. Sociologists have long observed that a major reason the United States experiences relatively few confrontations along class lines is that Americans believe they can move from one economic stratum to another. (For instance, workers become foremen, and foremen become small businessmen, who are considered middle class.) Moreover, there are no sharp class demarcation lines as in Britain; in America many workers consider themselves middle class, dress up to go to work, and hide their tools and lunches in briefcases, while middle class super-liberal professors join labor unions. A major reason confrontations in America occur more often along racial lines is that color lines currently seem rigidly unchangeable.

If the new category is allowed, if more and more Americans choose this category in future decades, as there is every reason to expect given the high rates of intermarriage and a desire by millions of Americans to avoid being racially boxed in, the result may be a society in which differences are blurred…

Read the entire article here.

In multiracial America, the census puts us in a box

Washington Post
2010-03-21

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

I received the census form in the mail last week, and I was ready. A vaguely admonitory letter from the Census Bureau had arrived the week before, urging me to fill out the form because the results would be used to “help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.” It ended with a warning: “Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.”

That’s a lot of fairness and sharing and community going on. But as my three daughters and I talked about the form — and in particular its racial and ethnic categories — we started wondering: How does the census really define our community, and how would that affect whatever our fair share would be?

The first time I got to check a census box for a child, it was 1990. I had an 8-month-old daughter with curly, brown-black hair, cinnamon-dark eyes and almond-colored skin. Her father is a mix of African, Irish and Native American; I am white; and since we could check only one box, the only option available for her was “Other,” as if she were from a different planet…

Read the entire article here.

Susan Straight’s new novel, “Take One Candle, Light a Room,” about a mixed-race family, will be published in October.

How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census

The American Thinker
2010-03-17

James Lewis

Not many people like to fill in the “race” category on the Census, because we know perfectly well that it comes from the Left, which has found another way to slice and dice the American people, to set us against each other, and to empower the Left. Which happens to be exactly what the National Socialists did under you-know-who. You had to carry papers identifying your race, and your parents’ and grandparents’ race. Under slavery and segregation the Dixiecrat South did the same thing. But the main point, of course, was to separate the blacks and the whites…

…But Mr. Science has an answer. If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world.  Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.)…

Read the entire article here.

Count Yourself In California: The Census on Multiracial ID’s

Spot.Us
2010-03-18

Denise L. Poon

When she fills out her 2010 Census form this week, Mei-Ling Malone is looking forward to answering Question #9 ― “the race question.” She’s adamant about documenting her multiracial background. 

Malone, who studied multiracial politics at UC [University of California] Irvine and is now pursuing a doctorate at UCLA, has an African American father and a Taiwanese mother. For Malone, 26, this is her first opportunity to respond to a Census and possibly provide a different answer to the race question than what her parents may have noted for her 10 years ago.

“President Obama is called our first black president, yet his mother was white,” she said. “For a majority of people who are black and multiracial, we are physically viewed as black, and treated, or discriminated as such. I’m glad that when I indicate I’m multiracial, I’m also counted as black.”…

…The actual data collection process works as follows: The Census Bureau first takes responses from 2010 Census forms and scans and captures the answers. Then, this information is turned into electronic text. For Question #9, an “auto coder” ― a computer program that classifies and tabulates write-in information ― then tabulates the data into different multiracial combinations of the initial race groups.

The five major race categories, as defined by the OMB, plus the “Some Other Race” category, can be put together in 57 possible unique combinations of two, three, four, five or six races. When this information is added to data of the six single-race groups, the Census Bureau will have 63 different tabulated categories…

“For those who may think that the option to identify with more than one race is trivial, they are mistaken,” said Christopher Parker, a professor of political science at the University of Washington. “Marking more than one box can affect both the enforcement of civil rights and inform the political behavior of those who choose more than one racial category with which to identify.”…

Read the entire article here.

The age of Obama: The changing place of minorities in British and American society

Manchester University Press
2010-04-01
192 pages
234x156mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780719082771; Paperback ISBN: 9780719082788

Tom Clark, Columnist
The Guardian

Robert D. Putnam, and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University

Edward Fieldhouse, Professor of Social and Political Science and Director of the Institute for Social Change
University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Drawing on collaborative research from a distinguished team at Harvard and Manchester universities, The age of Obama asks how two very different societies are responding to the tide of diversity that is being felt around the rich world. Guardian journalist Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam – best-selling author of Bowling Alone – and Manchester’s Edward Fieldhouse offer a wonderfully readable account. Like Bowling alone, The age of Obama mixes social scientific rigor with accessible charts and lively arguments. It will be enjoyed by politics, sociology and geography students, as well as by anyone else with an interest in ethnic relations.

Injustice, it turns out, still blights the lives of many UK and US minorities – particularly African Americans. And there are signs the new diversity strains community life. Yet in both countries, public opinion is running irreversibly in favour of tolerance. That augurs well for the future – and suggests a British Obama cannot be ruled out.

Table of Contents

Summary
1. Introduction: the diversity revolution 
2. Two concepts in two countries: race and migration
3. Home truths: how minorities live
4. The rickety ladder of opportunity: minorities and work
5. Mosaic or cracked vase? Diversity and community life
6. Distorting mirrors: media framing and political debate
7. Tidal generation: politics and deeper currents of public opinion
8. Concluding thoughts: making a success of the revolution
Bibliography
Index

Homelands and Indigenous Identities in a Multiracial Era

Social Science Research
Article In Press, Accepment Manuscript
Online: 2010-02-17

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota

Although multiple race responses are now allowed on federal censuses and surveys, most interracially married single-race parents report a single race for their children. It is well-established that the social context of these racial identification decisions affects their outcome. This research focuses instead on the physical context. It is argued that homelands – physical places with cultural meaning – are an important component of the intergenerational transfer of a single-race identity in indigenous mixed-race families. To test potential explanations for the relationship between homelands and indigenous identities, this research focuses on families in which an interracially married American Indian lives with a spouse and child and was included in the Census 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample. Logistic regression reveals a strong effect of living in an American Indian homeland on the child’s chances of being reported as single-race American Indian. This effect remains even after accounting for strong ties to American Indians and other groups, family and area poverty levels, geographic isolation, and the racial composition of the area. The intergenerational transmission of strong identities continues in this multiracial era (as it has for centuries) in the context of culturally meaningful physical places.

Read or purchase the article here.

Beyond Black and White: A film by Nisma Zaman

Women Make Movies
1994
28 minutes
Color, 16mm/DVD
Order No. W99431

Beyond Black and White is a personal exploration of the filmmaker’s bicultural heritage (Caucasian and Asian/Begali) in which she relates her experiences to those of five other women from various biracial backgrounds. In lively interviews and group discussions these women reveal how they have been influenced by images of women in American media, how racism has affected them, and how their families and environments have shaped their racial identities. Their experiences are placed within the context of history, including miscegenation laws and governmental racial classifications. Beyond Black and White is a remarkable celebration of diversity in American society.

Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses

Journal of Medical Humanities
Volume 23, Numbers 3-4 (December, 2002)
Pages 171-186
Print ISSN: 1041-3545; Online ISSN: 1573-3645
DOI: 10.1023/A:1016890117447

Allyson Polsky McCabe, Lecturer in English
Yale University

This essay examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, Polsky reveals a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S. based on the so-called one drop rule that systematically discriminated against African Americans.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meeting the Needs of Multiracial and Multiethnic Children in Early Childhood Settings

Early Childhood Education Journal
Issue Volume 26, Number 1 (September, 1998)
Pages 7-11
Print ISSN 1082-3301; Online ISSN: 1573-1707
DOI 10.1023/A:1022974423276

Francis Wardle

Early childhood programs have been in the forefront of implementing a multiracial curriculum. Early childhood educators need to extend these approaches to support and embrace multiracial and multiethnic children. These are children whose biological parents crossed traditional U.S. Census categories to have children. To meet the unique needs of these children and their families, early childhood educators need to engage in staff training, provide classroom materials, work closely with parents, and challenge the single race approach to multicultural education.

Read or purchase the article here.

Examining Ethnic Identity and Self-Esteem Among Biracial and Monoracial Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Volume 33, Number 2 (April, 2004)
pages 123-132
Print ISSN: 0047-2891; Online ISSN: 1573-6601
DOI: 10.1023/B:JOYO.0000013424.93635.68

Jeana R. Bracey
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Mayra Y. Bámaca
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

The psychological well-being and ethnic identity of biracial adolescents are largely underrepresented topics in current scholarly literature, despite the growing population of biracial and multiracial individuals in the United States. This study examined self-esteem, ethnic identity, and the relationship between these constructs among biracial and monoracial adolescents (n = 3282). Using analysis of covariance, significant differences emerged between biracial and monoracial adolescents on both a measure of self-esteem and a measure of ethnic identity. Specifically, biracial adolescents showed significantly higher levels of self-esteem than their Asian counterparts, but significantly lower self-esteem than Black adolescents. Furthermore, biracial adolescents scored significantly higher than Whites on a measure of ethnic identity, but scored lower than their Black, Asian, and Latino peers on the same measure. Finally, correlational analyses revealed a significant and positive relationship between ethnic identity and self-esteem for all groups.

The number of interracial marriages in the United States, as well as the number of interracial individuals, has steadily increased since the 1967 Supreme Court repeal of laws barring interracial marriages (Root, 1992; Wardle, 1987). In response to a long-term debate over the addition of a multiracial category for the 2000 census (Rockquemore and Brunsma, 2002), a compromise was made that allowed respondents to select multiple racial categories, resulting in approximately 2% of the population self-identifying as multiracial (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Despite these figures, this segment of the population remains largely invisible in the area of scholarly research. Much of the literature on biracial or multiracial populations tends to be theoretical (Phinney, 1990), and the limited empirical work has been based largely on small clinical samples or samples recruited via snowball sampling techniques (Phinney and Alipuria, 1996).

Given the growing visibility of biracial families in society, it is critical to learn more about the developmental outcomes of adolescents within these families, specifically with regard to their psychological adjustment. Understanding the complexity and impact of diversity on adolescent development should be at the forefront of our priorities. Two interrelated psychological factors in need of more in-depth examination among biracial adolescents are ethnic identity and self-esteem. Despite the fact that self-esteem, as an evaluative measure of psychosocial adjustment, is linked to major mental health outcomes, researchers have not focused on examining the self-esteem of biracial adolescents…

Read or purchase the article here.