Mixed Race Studies

I’m Middle Eastern And White, And Those Are Not The Same Thing

xoJane
2015-06-08

Erica Pishdadian

It’s time to stop the confusion and give Middle Eastern and North African people our own racial classification.

I recently moved to New York City, and in between my two favorite hobbies (climbing up to my fifth floor apartment and sobbing over the state of my post-broker-fee bank account), I’ve been filling out a lot of job applications.

Agonizing over my resume and writing endless cover letters is time-consuming, but the most annoying part of the application process for me has nothing to do with trying to fit why I’m useful into a few short paragraphs.

I’m most aggravated by one of the simplest parts of the application: the “Please Select Your Race” portion.

My father is Iranian, and my mother is a mix of Western European. According to the Census definitions, I’m white. And that’s true; I am. But I’m only half white, because Middle Eastern and white are not the same thing.

The United States Census Bureau’s definition of white is “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

The first time I remember filling in a bubble for this question, I was in elementary school. I had to ask my teacher which races I counted as, and when she told me, all I could think about was how much darker I was than the kids around me. I’m visibly Middle Eastern, and while I’m not particularly dark-skinned, I’m not really white either…

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of a White Minority
2015-06-11

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
City University of New York Graduate Center

IN 2012, the Census Bureau announced that nonwhite births exceeded white births for the first time. In 2013, it noted that more whites were dying than were being born. In March, it projected that non-Hispanic whites would be a minority by 2044.

But the forecast of an imminent white minority, which some take as a given, is wrong. We will seem like a majority-white society for much longer than is believed.

The predictions make sense only if you accept the outdated, illogical methods used by the census, which define as a “minority” anyone who belongs to “any group other than non-Hispanic White alone.” In the words “group” and “alone” lie a host of confusions.

A report the Pew Research Center is releasing today on multiracial Americans demonstrates how problematic these definitions have become. Pew estimates that 8.9 percent of Americans now have family backgrounds that involve some combination of white, black, Latino, Asian and Native American.

“Mixed” unions — intermarriages and long-lasting cohabitations — have become far more common. According to a 2012 Pew report, 15 percent of new marriages cross the major lines of race or Hispanic origin. Some 70 percent of these relationships involve a white partner and a minority spouse. The most common minority partners for whites are Latinos, followed by Asians, though the frequency of white-black marriage also continues to rise.

But even as the on-the-ground understanding of race and ethnicity becomes more fluid, contingent and overlapping, our public conversation lags…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial in America

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2015-06-11
155 pages

Principal Researchers

Kim Parker, Director of Social Trends Research
Rich Morin, Senior Editor
Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Associate Director, Research
Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research

Research Team

Anna Brown, Research Assistant
D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer
Richard Fry, Senior Researcher
Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Research Associate
Sara Goo, Senior Digital Editor
Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research
Jens Manuel Krogstad, Writer/Editor
Gretchen Livingston, Senion Researcher
Kyley McGeeney, Research Methodologist
Andrew Mercer, Research Methodologist
Eileen Patten, Research Analyst
Renee Stepler, Research Assistant
Wendy Wang, Senior Researcher

Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers

Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.—young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.

As America becomes more racially diverse and social taboos against interracial marriage fade, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of multiracial adults are proud of their mixed-race background (60%) and feel their racial heritage has made them more open to other cultures (59%).

At the same time, a majority (55%) say they have been subjected to racial slurs or jokes, and about one-in-four (24%) have felt annoyed because people have made assumptions about their racial background. Still, few see their multiracial background as a liability. In fact, only 4% say having a mixed racial background has been a disadvantage in their life. About one-in-five (19%) say it has been an advantage, and 76% say it has made no difference…

Read the entire report here.