Mixed Race Studies

Health Care, Research Failing to Adapt to U.S.’s Growing Multiracial Population

School of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2015-10-12

Data collection methods in research and health care settings have lagged behind in adapting to the rapidly growing population of multiracials, according to studies led by social work professor Karen M. Tabb Dina

Multiracial people who change their racial identity from a single race to multiracial over time may be healthier than their minority peers who consistently identify as monoracial, new research suggests.

Despite the U.S.’s rapidly growing population of multiracial individuals, researchers and health care systems continue to use outdated approaches to racial categorization that force people to classify themselves as monoracial, which may be masking the incidence of health conditions and obscuring disparities in health care access and utilization among multiracial populations, a University of Illinois scholar said.

Social work professor Karen M. Tabb Dina is the lead author of two recent studies that explored issues of racial identity and its impact on health care access and utilization among nearly 8,000 U.S. young people.

The subjects in both of Tabb Dina’s studies were participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, one of the first surveys to allow respondents to identify themselves as multiracial using two or more racial categories, Tabb Dina said.

Participants in the Adolescent Health survey were asked about their racial background during the first wave of data collection in 1994 and again during the third wave, conducted in 2002.

Of the 7 percent of participants identified as multiracial at either wave, only 20 percent of these people selected the same racial categories both times, Tabb Dina found.

Read the entire article here.

Disparities in Health Services Use Among Multiracial American Young Adults

Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health
First online: 2015-09-29
8 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s10903-015-0289-7

Karen M. Tabb, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Christopher R. Larrison, Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Shinwoo Choi
School of Social Work
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Hsiang Huang, Instructor of Psychiatry
Cambridge Health Alliance
Harvard Medical School

Addressing disparities in health services utilization remains critical for improving minority health; however, most studies do not report on the health service use of multiracial young adults (age 22–34). This study compares past year health service use of self-identified multiracial (two or more races) young adults with monoracial White young adults. Weighted survey data from Add Health (N = 7296) and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used. Compared to monoracial White young adults, Black-White multiracial [OR 0.40, 95 % CI (0.17–0.90)] and Black-Native American multiracial [OR 0.23, 95 % CI (0.09–0.63)] young adults are less likely to report primary care service use in the past year. Multiracial young adults have different health care service utilization than their White monoracial peers with Black-Native American young adults appearing to be particularly vulnerable to under-utilization of primary care services. It is important to examine multiracial subgroups when studying patterns of health services utilization.

Musician’s life brings more than passing interest in passing

San Francisco Chronicle
2015-07-28

Leah Garchik, Features Columnist

As colleagues at KGO-TV, Eric Christensen and John Turner — Eric was a sports producer, John a news editor/arts producer — shared a passion for exotic cultural phenomena. Retired, they’ve combined know-how with that passion to make the doc “Korla, the Movie,” about organist Korla Pandit.

Turban-wearing Pandit, who said he was born in India, had his own TV show in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He was known for playing exotic “foreign” music. He was living in Petaluma when he died, in 1998. A subsequent magazine profile revealed that he was African American, born in Missouri.

A documentary about Pandit as an exotic performer — the likes of Yma Sumac — would be interesting at any time. But now, in the midst of a national discussion about identity that intensified with the recent revelation that Rachel Dolezal had chosen to identify as black, the movie’s tale of “passing” seems particularly relevant. It will be shown Aug. 20 at the Museum of the African Diaspora…

Read the entire article here.

I Am the Blood of the Conqueror; I Am the Blood of the Conquered

Christina Torres: Teacher. Runner. Writer.
2015-10-12

Christina Torres, Middle and high school English and Drama Teacher
University Laboratory School, Honolulu, Hawaii

I didn’t know the true extent of Columbus’s reign of horror until a few months ago. Sitting in a Nashville library, I read accounts of the things Columbus and his men did and felt sick to my stomach.

Columbus and his fellow “conquerors” were assholes. There are a number of sources that show this. It’s easy (and correct) to hate it all. The level of prestige bestowed on them is, frankly, disgusting…

…There was also rage. A sickening, black cloud of it stormed in behind my eyes, as it usually does when I read the real history of things. Normally, that rage has a name: white supremacy, slavery, segregation, police brutality, racism, privilege, bias. I can normally pin that rage to something, burn that effigy as things to stay away from and consciously choose to try and rid myself of, to work day and day to scrape out internalized oppression and beliefs.

You can’t scrape bloodlines clean, though…

..I am Mexicana and Filipina. I have been raised to be proud of the centuries of ancestors who came before me. Both cultures place a strong emphasis on not forgetting familial and cultural history…

Read the entire article here.

Trevor Noah Says He’s Not a Political Progressive. He’d Be Funnier If He Were.

The Nation
2015-10-09

Katie Halper

(The Daily Show with Trevor Noah / Brad Barket)

The new Daily Show host doesn’t have much to say, which leaves him making jokes about tramp stamps and body weight.

Unlike Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah doesn’t ground his comedy in a political ideology. This is of course politically disappointing to people who saw Jon Stewart as someone who not only raised awareness but influenced politics and sometimes even policy. But what’s less obvious is that the lack of political perspective makes the show less funny.

Like millions of viewers in the United States and across the globe, I depended upon Jon Stewart, night after night, to excoriate people in high places who had messed with ordinary people during the day. When Comedy Central announced that Trevor Noah would replace Stewart, I knew that the odds of someone doing as good a job were slim. But I defended Noah when he came under attack for a handful of tweets that ranged from offensive to not at all offensive (just critical of Israeli policy), and from unfunny to really, really unfunny. It seemed an unfair point of focus. I was hopeful that his background, so different from Stewart’s, would bring a fresh perspective. And I thought it went without saying that Noah would continue the show’s political focus and insight…

… In contrast, correspondents Roy Wood and Jordan Keppler brought an angle and some character to the show, which made them funnier. It wasn’t earth-shattering (no pun intended), but Roy Wood Jr.’s report on NASA’s discovery of liquid on Mars was the first time I laughed during the debut episode. It was also the first time racism (and not just race) was addressed on the show. When Noah asks Wood what he can tell us about the story, Wood responds, “I can tell you I don’t give a shit.” When an optimistic Noah says, “Doesn’t this raise the possibility that one day people can live on Mars?” Wood responds, “People like who? Me and you? How am I going to get there? Brother can’t catch a cab, you think we can catch a spaceship?… Black people ain’t going to Mars! And that includes you, Trevor.”…

Read the entire article here.

A resurgence of black identity in Brazil? Evidence from an analysis of recent censuses

Demographic Research
Volume 32
Article 59 (2015-06-18)
pages 1603-1630
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2015.32.59

Vítor Miranda
Population Studies Center
University of Pennsylvania

Background: The second half of the 20th century brought a sharp increase in the number of people self-identifying as “brown” in the Brazilian Censuses. Previous studies have demonstrated that this was not the result of demographic forces, such as differential birth rates, but of a large number of people changing their response in the censuses from “black” or “white” to “brown”. Despite the increased black political activism of the last two decades, whether this historical pattern of racial reclassification continued after 1990 has not yet been systematically investigated.

Objective: This study investigates if the increase in identity politics by the Brazilian black movement since the 1990s was associated with a number of people changing their answers in the census from non-black to black.

Methods: The residual method is used to estimate a counterfactual scenario: what the distribution of the population by race would look like in the 2000 and 2010 censuses if no racial reclassification had occurred during the 1990s and 2000s.

Results: The “black” category experienced net gains of 2.2 million and 3.1 million newly reclassified members in the 2000 and 2010 censuses, respectively. By 2010 at least one in every three people in the black population was a newly reclassified black. The increase was particularly strong among males and the younger generations.

Conclusions: The historical flight from blackness in Brazil documented by previous studies has reversed in the last two decades. This suggests that the increased black activism might have been successful in valorizing black identity and increasing identification with blackness.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Racial statistics in Brazil
3. Earlier studies and open questions
4. Analytic strategy and data
5. Results
6. Alternative scenarios: Mortality, international migration, and census coverage
7. Conclusions and discussion
8. Acknowledgments
9. Reference

Read the entire article here.

Tap Roots (1948): A Review of the first “Free State of Jones” movie

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2015-10-11

Vikki Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

As we await the release of The Free State of Jones, I thought it might be fun to visit an earlier movie similarly inspired by Newt Knight and the Knight band’s Civil War uprising. Tap Roots, adapted from James Street’s 1942 novel of the same name, was released by Universal International Pictures in August, 1948.

As I searched the internet, I quickly discovered that New York Times reviewer Tom Pryor had been anything but impressed by the movie. “Checking the accuracy of historical detail in Tap Roots, the romanticized Civil War drama,” he wrote, . . . “would serve no special purpose,” presumably because, he added, “clichés, oral and visual,” had produced a drama whose characters exhibited no “individuality or substance.”

Although I had read the novel Tap Roots many years ago, I had never seen the movie—until now. After viewing seven of the eight sections of Tap Roots on YouTube over the space of two days, I have to say, Pryor was correct. Moviegoers learned little to nothing about the important story of Southern Unionism in Jones County, Mississippi, from this production…

Read the entire review here.

The Criminal Justice System and the Racialization of Perceptions

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 651, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 104-121
DOI: 10.1177/0002716213503097

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Jessica M. Kizer
Department of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Recent research on how contact with the criminal justice system shapes racial perceptions in the United States has shown that incarceration increases the likelihood that people are racially classified by others as black, and decreases the likelihood that they are classified as white. We extend this work, using longitudinal data with information on whether respondents have been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated, and details about their most recent arrest. This allows us to ask whether any contact with the criminal justice system triggers racialization, or only certain types of contact. Additional racial categories allow us to explore the racialization of crime beyond the black-white divide. Results indicate even one arrest significantly increases the odds of subsequently being classified as black, and decreases the odds of being classified as white or Asian. This implies a broader impact of increased policing and mass incarceration on racialization and stereotyping, with consequences for social interactions, political attitudes, and research on inequality.

Read the entire article here.

Patterns of Racial and Educational Assortative Mating in Brazil

Demography
June 2014, Volume 51, Issue 3
pages 835-856
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0300-2

Aaron Gullickson, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Florencia Torche, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of “brown” individuals. If exchange is contingent on strong racial boundaries, it should be weak or non-existent in Brazilian society. Contrary to this expectation, we find strong evidence of status exchange. However, this pattern results from a generalized penalty for darkness, which induces a negative association between higher education and marrying darker spouses (“market exchange”) rather than from a direct trading of resources by partners (“dyadic exchange”). The substantive and methodological distinction between market and dyadic exchange helps clarify and integrate prior findings in the status exchange literature.

Read the entire article here.

Disentangling the Effects of Racial Self-identification and Classification by Others: The Case of Arrest

Demography
June 2015, Volume 52, Issue 3
pages 1017-1024
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-015-0394-1

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Scholars of race have stressed the importance of thinking about race as a multidimensional construct, yet research on racial inequality does not routinely take this multidimensionality into account. We draw on data from the U.S.Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to disentangle the effects of self-identifying as black and being classified by others as black on subsequently being arrested. Results reveal that the odds of arrest are nearly three times higher for people who were classified by others as black, even if they did not identify themselves as black. By contrast, we find no effect of self-identifying as black among people who were not seen by others as black. These results suggest that racial perceptions play an important role in racial disparities in arrest rates and provide a useful analytical approach for disentangling the effects of race on other outcomes.