Mixed Race Studies

Interracial marriage still rising in U.S.

Associated Press
2010-05-26

Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race

WASHINGTON – Melting pot or racial divide? The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000…

“Racial boundaries are not going to disappear anytime soon,” said Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology and public policy at Cornell University. He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law…

…Broken down by race, about 40 percent of U.S.-born Asians now marry whites — a figure unchanged since 1980. Their likelihood of marrying foreign-born Asians, meanwhile, multiplied 3 times for men and 5 times for women, to roughly 20 percent.

Among U.S.-born Hispanics, marriages with whites increased modestly from roughly 30 percent to 38 percent over the past three decades. But when it came to marriages with foreign-born Hispanics, the share doubled — to 12.5 percent for men, and 17.1 percent for women.

In contrast, blacks are now three times as likely to marry whites than in 1980. About 14.4 percent of black men and 6.5 percent of black women are currently in such mixed marriages, due to higher educational attainment, a more racially integrated military and a rising black middle class that provides more interaction with other races…

‘Multi’ label shunned

Due to increasing interracial marriages, multiracial Americans are a small but fast-growing demographic group, making up about 5 percent of the minority population. Together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, the Census Bureau estimates they collectively will represent a majority of the U.S. population by mid-century.

Still, many multiracial people — particularly those who are part black — shun a “multi” label in favor of identifying as a single race.

By some estimates, two-thirds of those who checked the single box of “black” on the census form are actually mixed, including President Barack Obama, who identified himself as black in the 2010 census even though his mother was white…

Read the entire article here.

Changing Answers but Not Identities: A Qualitative Investigation of Race Responses in a Longitudinal Survey

Population Association of America
2009 Annual Meeting
Marriott Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan
2009-04-16
19 pages

Kelsey Poss
University of Minnesota

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

Paper presented at the 2009 annual meetings of the Population Association of America on May 1, 2009

We seek to understand why people change their race responses over time. We use longitudinal survey responses to selectively recruit individuals for in-depth interviews about the reasons behind their changing responses to questions about their race(s) and primary racial or ethnic identities between 1988 and 2007. We find a wide variety of changes in 33 individuals’ answers to questions about their race, ancestry and Hispanic origin. To date, we have completed in-depth interviews with nine of these individuals. In many cases, respondents do not remember changing their answers and do not consider themselves to have changed their identities. Respondents’ post-hoc accounts of varied answers often focus on events or thoughts near the time of the survey and on details of question-wording. Many also report a rationalized process for selective reporting of their race(s), depending on the purpose of the form (e.g., job application versus social club).

Read the entire article here.

Black/Irish: How do Americans understand their multiracial ancestry?

Population Association of America
2009 Annual Meeting
Marriott Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan
2009-05-01
19 pages

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

In recent years, studies examining the racial identification of mixed-race individuals on surveys and the U.S. Census have proliferated. The majority of these studies either use parental racial information or a comparison of answers to the race question in different contexts to identify a multiracial population. This paper proposes another method for identifying a multiracial population that is broader and potentially more historical in its understanding of its multiracial heritage, by comparing the ancestry responses on the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census. The analysis clearly demonstrates that the identification patterns of multiracial individuals vary in systematic ways depending on which groups are involved that correspond to historical evidence on the dynamics of racial boundaries.

Introduction

Although the United States has been home to a significant multiracial population since its founding, American scholarly interest in the racial identity of mixed-race people is a fairly new phenomenon. This development is due in large part to the federal government’s recent change in its official classification system to allow individuals to identify with more than one race (see Office of Management and Budget 1997). With multiple-race statistical data now available, especially after Census 2000, it became clear that millions of Americans would choose to “mark one or more” races when given the opportunity. This observation entailed new relevance for existing social scientific research on identity formation. In particular, Mary Water’s (1990) description of “ethnic options” for white Americans offered a template for thinking about the “racial options” that mixed-race people might confront.

In this article, we seek to explain patterns of racial self-identification by multiracial people in the United States. Do they prefer to select one race or several to describe themselves, and why? Using census data from 1990 and 2000, we identify a mixed-race population by targeting adults who report having ancestry in more than one racial group. This approach offers several advantages over the more common method of equating the multiracial population with the children of interracial unions. First, it allows us to analyze the self-reported identity of adults rather than the parent-proxied identity of children. Second, this approach captures a multiracial population that is broader and potentially more historical in its understanding of multiraciality than the post-Loving “biracial baby boom” often identified by researchers.

The racial affiliations of mixed-race people offer insights into both macro-level historical trends in racial ideology, and micro-level mechanisms of contemporary social stratification. As we will see, the identity choices that individuals make today continue to be shaped by concepts of race that formed centuries ago: ideas (or their absence) of the properties of races and the nature of hybridity still dictate to a considerable extent how people conceive of their racial membership. Perhaps more important, some observers see in multiracial identity choices a harbinger of the future, either as the vanguard of an imminently miscegenated U.S.A., or as a “swing” faction that might eventually be incorporated in the white population (Gans 1979; Lind 1998; Sanjek 1994; Yancey 2003). On a more prosaic yet no less significant level, the ways that multiracial people identify themselves reveal a great deal about the continuing impact of class and gender in shaping the opportunity set of race labels that are available to them…

Read the entire paper here.

Book Review: Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

Hot Topics in Journalism and Mass Communication
2010-05-19

Queenie A. Byars, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America. Catherine R. Squires. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.

When Dispatches from the Color Line was published, Barack Obama was still  the junior senator from Illinois and fresh from a rousing keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Fast forward to 2009 and President Barack Obama has jokingly compared his multiracial identity to that of a mixed-breed dog. Obama’s joking aside, the October 2009 case of a Louisiana justice of the peace refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple is no laughing matter, and underscores the value of this book.

Catherine R. Squires is the Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarly work in Dispatches from the Color Line offers serious discourse on the media’s role in framing the identity of multiracial people. She uses case study analysis to examine this issue…

Read the entire review here.

Not-Black by Default

The Nation
Diary of a Mad Law Professor
2010-04-21

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia University

Most people who appear phenotypically “black” don’t play around when the government asks them to report their race.

Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, “Black by Choice,” about President Obama’s having checked the box marked “Black, African American or Negro” on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts “standard definitions of blackness” and creates “a definitional crisis for whiteness,” in American culture “having a white parent has never meant becoming white” if one also has an African-descended parent…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Mixed-Race Kids Examine Their Identity

Voice of America News
2010-05-05

Faiza Elmasry
Washington, DC

Photographs celebrate richness and beauty of multiracial society

At least seven million Americans identify themselves as belonging to more than one race, and interest is rapidly growing in issues of multi-racial identity.

In his new book, “Mixed: [Portraits of Multiracial Kids],” writer and artist Kip Fulbeck presents a collection of portraits celebrating the faces of mixed-race children.

Kip Fulbeck grew up in a multi-racial family.

His father was English, Irish and Welsh. He had a Chinese mother and Chinese step-siblings. At home, he says, he was considered the white kid, but at school he was the Asian kid. Exploring the multi-racial identity has inspired Fulbeck’s works, including his recent photography book…

Read the entire article here.

At last! It’s cool to be mixed race (which is handy because I’m African, American, Jewish, Geordie, Irish, Scottish and Hungarian)

The Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
2010-04-25

Oona King, Head of Diversity
Channel 4

White supremacy is so last century. These days it’s on-trend to be a mixed-race supremacist. Unlike the British National Party, mixed-race people can now point to scientifically credible research that highlights the various biological advantages of their ethnicity.

And that’s not to mention the anecdotal evidence pointing to sports stars and celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton, Theo Walcott and Leona Lewis as representing the new ideal of physical beauty.

But is this just a media fad, sparked by the election of the world’s most famous mixed-race person as President of the United States? And now that mixed-race people are our fastest growing ethnic group, what does it mean for Britain’s uneasy relationship with race?..

…And now it seems that mixed race genes are being hailed as the latest Darwinian ‘must-have’ accessory. If you spent your childhood being called a ‘mongrel’ in the playground, the recent research by Cardiff University, which seems to show that mixed-race people are more attractive and more successful, may bring a wry smile to your face.

Dr. Michael Lewis, who conducted the research said: ‘Darwin suggested that diversity of genes led to greater genetic fitness and this in turn seems to be linked to attractiveness.’

Far from being an abomination of the natural order, mixed-race children are apparently biologically preferable. The logic is that the wider the gene pool (the further apart genetically two parents are) the greater protection from illness or genetic abnormality their children enjoy…

Read the entire article here.

The Multiracial Sheep IS the White Supremacist Fox

Black Agenda Report: the journal of African American political thought and action
2010-03-16

Jared A. Ball, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

A government and society that is ever ready to restrict the freedoms of Black folks now offers “freedom” from Blackness. This census and social “opt-out” for the progeny of interracial couples allows them to hope to be considered “as something entirely separate, different and apart from” what Curtis Mayfield called the “dark deep well.” The Black “baggage” can be left behind.

Let’s be very clear from the outset.  Multiracial categorization is an aggressive defense of white supremacy.  Multiracial census categorization, particularly in the era of what some are calling the first Black and multiracial president, is, pun-intended, the bulked up steroid-induced version of the old sports aphorism that “the best defense is a good offense.”  By aggressively encouraging younger generations to identify officially as multiracial the national desire to disappear worsening racial divides gets further juice by offering folks a chance to both adopt the illusion of the “post-racial” and to seemingly categorize themselves away from, if not out of, oppression. The beautiful dialectic traditionally developed in this country’s form of white supremacy was its built-in inability to be white and forced inclusion into Black which has made Black America, if even to a fault, among the most diverse, open and accepting communities in the world.  It also increased the potential that that community would become more threatening to white domination which has led to the centuries-long development of neocolonial-styled light-skin privilege as a mechanism of siphoning off some of the more willing participants in an escape from blackness…

Read the entire article here.

The Marital Patterns of Multiracial People in the United States: A Comparison of Asian/Whites and Black/Whites

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Hilton San Francisco
San Francisco, California
2009-08-08
20 pages

Michael Miyawaki
Fordham University

In this paper, I examine and compare the marital patterns of two multiracial groups—Asian/whites and black/whites—in the United States. Examining the marital behavior of multiracial people is of particular importance to understanding their state of assimilation. Furthermore, the race of their spouse has important consequences for the racial classification of their offspring. Because the racial identity and experience of multiracial people differ by racial background (i.e., Asian/white, black/white, etc.), there may be differences in the marital patterns of multiracial subgroups in a marriage market segmented by race. In this study, I limit my analysis to non-Latino Asian/white adults (18 and older) married to non-Latino whites, Asians, and Asian/whites, and non-Latino black/white adults married to non-Latino whites, blacks, and black/whites. To compare the odds of Asian/whites and black/whites marrying whites, their nonwhite counterparts, and their multiracial counterparts, I use multinomial logistic regression. While both Asian/whites and black/whites are most likely to marry whites, results show significant differences between the two groups in terms of their odds of marrying whites, nonwhites, and multiracials. Whereas Asian/whites are more likely than black/whites to marry whites (vs. nonwhites) and multiracials (vs. nonwhites), black/whites are more likely than Asian/whites to marry nonwhites. Thus, results demonstrate that not only is the marriage market segmented by race among monoracials, it is also racially segmented among multiracials.

To read the entire paper, click here.

Politics and policies: attitudes toward multiracial Americans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
First Published on: 2010-04-15
Volume 33, Issue 9 (October 2010)
pages 1511-1536
DOI: 10.1080/01419871003671929

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dartmouth College

The growing prominence of the multiracial population in the United States is prompting new questions about attitudes toward multiracial people and popular opinion of policies designed to protect them from discrimination. Currently, American anti-discrimination policies are directed at groups who identify with a single race, but the rising profile of multiracial groups introduces new complexity into questions about racial policy. In this study, we find generally positive affect toward multiracial people, although monoracial minorities are more positive toward multiracial people than whites are. About half of the monoracial minorities and the majority of whites oppose including multiracial people in anti-discrimination policies. Attitudes are associated with traditional predictors such as education and political beliefs, and also with the racial heterogeneity of the local context and intimate contact with other racial groups. Although multiracial people report experiencing discrimination at levels similar to those of monoracial minorities, our results suggest there may be significant resistance to anti-discrimination policies that include multiracial groups. 

Read the entire article here.