Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Book Review/Compte rendu: Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

    Book Review/Compte rendu: Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

    Canadian Journal of Sociology
    Volume 35, Number 1 (2010)
    pages 189-191

    Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Toronto

    Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 304 pp. paper (978-0-8047-6278-6), hardcover (978-0-8047-6277-9)

    Legacies of Race is a must-read for anyone who thinks they understand “race” in Brazil, since it successfully challenges many assumptions in the literature. It is also an important contribution to the literature on racial attitudes in the US, highlighting their distinctiveness. Finally, its discussion of the myth of racial democracy provides food for thought for debates on whether multiculturalist discourse can address emerging issues of racism in Canadian society.

    For decades, foreign observers have wondered why the Brazilian Black Movement has had limited success mobilizing Brazilian blacks to fight for their rights, despite the existence of glaring inequalities correlated with skin color. Since the 1970s, social scientists have blamed this lack of black mobilization on the myth of “racial democracy” — the idea of Brazil as a unified mixed-race nation — used by Brazilian elites to downplay the extent of racial discrimination for most of the twentieth century. Scholars argued that black Brazilians failed to mobilize in large numbers because they were duped into thinking that racism was not a problem. Bailey demonstrates that this theory simply does not square with current survey data…

    Read the entire book review here.

  • Shifting Demographics: Preparing for a New Race and Ethnicity Classification Scheme in NAEP

    Shifting Demographics: Preparing for a New Race and Ethnicity Classification Scheme in NAEP

    Population Association of America
    2010 Annual Meeting Program
    2010-04-17
    3 pages
    1 chart, 1 table

    Salvador Rivas
    American Institutes for Research

    On September 24, 2007, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) issued final guidance for collecting and reporting race/ethnicity information to all its jurisdictions. Final implementation of these guidelines is expected to take place no later than the 2010–2011 school-year. This study will therefore try to anticipate how and to what extent the coming change in racial/ethnic classification schemes might affect NAEP trend reporting, especially in relation to previously established racial/ethnic achievement gaps. By using student-reported race/ethnicity information, as proxy parent reports, this study will explore the possible effects of the coming shift in racial/ethnic classification schemes. Data will come from the 2003, 2005, and 2007 NAEP Reading and Mathematics assessments at Grade 8. This study will also explore the possibility of using other data sources such as the American Community Survey (ACS) to help corroborate and contextualize NAEP findings.

    Read the entire summary here.

  • Measuring Race (and Ethnicity): An Overview of Past Practices, Current Concerns and Thoughts for the Future [Draft]

    Measuring Race (and Ethnicity): An Overview of Past Practices, Current Concerns and Thoughts for the Future [Draft]

    Population Association of America
    2010 Annual Meeting Program
    2010-04-17
    25 pages

    C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology
    Stanford University

    On the eve of the 2010 census, Census Bureau staff are already beginning to think about how race should be measured in the 2020 census. This paper looks at the history of racial measurement, assesses the performance of the current standard in the context of a 1996 NAS report, and concludes with a set of considerations that must be taken into account for the purposes of assessing race in the census or in any survey instrument. Particular attention is given to a variety of legal definitions that have historically been used to measure race, followed by the first issuance of OMB Directive No. 15 in 1977, and then followed by the latest revision in 1997. Discussion of how various federal agencies have adjusted to the 1997 revision is also included in this discussion.

    Read the entire draft paper here.

  • Geographies of racially mixed people and households: A focus on American Indians

    Geographies of racially mixed people and households: A focus on American Indians

    Population Association of America
    2010 Annual Meeting Program
    2010-04-17
    23 pages

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

    Meghan Zacher
    Department of Sociology and Minnesota Population Center
    University of Minnesota
    March 2010

    Multiracial individuals and mixed race households show different residential location patterns depending on the races of the groups involved and the ways in which people report their mixed racial heritage. In this research, we focus on multiracial and interracially married American Indians in recent decades. Although they are substantively interesting, American Indians and multiracial people are rarely represented in social science research on residential location and segregation. Using U.S. public-use microdata from four decades (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2008), we map the locations of two groups of multiracial American Indians and two groups of interracially married American Indians, in comparison to their single-race counterparts. In 1980 and 1990, we measure “multiracial” using the respondents’ answers to both the race and the ancestry census questions. Our disaggregation of different types of mixed-race American Indian households extends the work of Wong (1998, 1999) and Wright et al. (2003) to reflect current sociological knowledge about the varieties of experiences of people in different multiracial situations. By doing so, this research advances knowledge about the social context of race and identity in the contemporary United States.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

    Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

    Population Association of America
    2010 Annual Meeting Program
    2010-04-17

    Guang Guo, Odum Distinguished Term Professor of Sociology
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Yilan Fu
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Kathleen Mullan Harris, James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Two sharply divided perspectives concerning the nature of racial distinction have developed over the past two decades. On one hand, the consensus has long been established among academics that racial and ethnic categories are the invention of social construction. On the other, a number of genetic studies point to a bio-ancestral base for the major racial/ethnic categories used in the contemporary United States. Instead of treating the two perspectives as diametrically opposed, this application proposes to examine evidence for the coexistence of socially-constructed and bio-ancestrally-rooted racial identity in the contemporary United States.

    The overarching goal of this application is to investigate whether adding estimates of bio-ancestry will significantly advance our understanding of social construction of race and ethnicity. In previous studies of social construction of race, racial identities have been considered socially constructed. In this application, we investigate whether and why self-reports of race and ethnicity depart from bio-ancestry. The project will draw on decades of scholarship in race and ethnicity, recent advances in human genetics, and data resources from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Harris, Florey, Tabor et al. 2003) and the Human Genome  Diversity Project (HGDP) (Cann, de Toma, Cazes et al. 2002).

    This proposed project has two broad objectives. First, we assess the accuracy of a panel of 186 genetic ancestral informative markers in predicting self-reported race/ethnicity in the contemporary United States using a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 17,000 individuals from Add Health. Previous studies of bio-geographic ancestry were carried out for the purpose of understanding the history of human evolution (Li, Absher, Tang et al. 2008; Rosenberg, Pritchard, Weber et al. 2002) or population admixture in the context of genetic association studies (Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. 2005). These studies did not directly address the relation between bio-ancestry and racial/ethnic identity using a US-based racially- and ethnically-diverse population sample. Second, we take advantage of estimated bio-ancestry and use it in an investigation of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the US. We examine to what extent self-reports of race and ethnicity follow the one-drop rule—the century-old social practice of treating individuals with any amount of African ancestry as black in the US. We address whether and why individuals change their racial/ethnic identity under different social circumstances. We then examine the relationship between bio-ancestry and friendship social network in a school context.

  • Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Variation between Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification

    Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Variation between Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification

    Population Association of America
    2010 Annual Meeting Program
    2010-04-17
    10 pages

    Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Stanford University

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

    Recent research has demonstrated the existence of fluidity in both racial self-identification and interviewer classification. Racial self-identification has been shown to vary for the same individuals across contexts (Harris and Sim 2002), over time (Doyle and Kao 2007; Hitlin et al. 2006) and depending on their social position (Penner and Saperstein 2008). Similarly, interviewer classifications of the same individuals have been shown to vary over time (Brown et al. 2007), as well as change in response to biographical events such as incarceration, unemployment and experiencing a spell of poverty (Penner and Saperstein 2008). However, the specific pattern of variation between racial self-identification and interviewer classification—i.e., how they might influence each other over time—has yet to be empirically explored.

    The prevailing assumption in the literature on racial identity is that people calibrate or edit their self-identification based on how they are perceived by others (e.g., Nagel 1994). We propose to test this hypothesis directly by examining what happens when there is discordance between an individual’s perceived and self-identified race, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. This is a crucial, and up to now missing, piece of the puzzle of whether and how different measures of race relate to one another. Additional analyses will also provide insight into how differences in life chances, such as educational attainment and contact with the criminal justice system, affect how respondents racially identify, are perceived by others and how both change over time.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Who Is Multiracial? Assessing the Complexity of Lived Race

    Who Is Multiracial? Assessing the Complexity of Lived Race

    American Sociological Review
    Volume 67, Number 4 (2002)
    pages 614-627

    David R. Harris, Deputy Provost, Vice Provost for Social Sciences, and Professor of Sociology
    Cornell University

    Jeremiah Joseph Sim
    Univerisity of Michigan

    Patterns of racial classification in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health are examined. The survey’s large sample size and multiple indicators of race permit generalizable claims about patterns and processes of social construction in the racial categorization of adolescents. About 12 percent of youth provide inconsistent responses to nearly identical questions about race, context affects one’s choice of a single-race identity, and nearly all patterns and processes of racial classification depend on which racial groups are involved. The implications of the findings are discussed for users of data on race in general, and for the new census data in particular.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Educational Costs of Being Multiracial: Evidence from a National Survey of Adolescents

    The Educational Costs of Being Multiracial: Evidence from a National Survey of Adolescents

    PSC Research Report
    Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research
    University of Michigan
    Report No. 02-521
    August 2002
    24 pages, 5 tables

    David R. Harris, Deputy Provost, Vice Provost for Social Sciences, and Professor of Sociology
    Cornell University

    Justin L. Thomas, Lecturer in Public Policy
    Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
    University of Michigan

    There is clear evidence that the number of multiracial children in the U.S. is growing, yet existing research  offers few insights into how outcomes for these children compare to those of their single-racepeers. We address this gap by using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to assess racial differences in education. Specifically, we compare vocabulary scores, grade point averages, and odds of repeating a grade for multiracial and single-race youth. Our findings deviate substantially from the predictions of the marginal man hypothesis, an influential, rarely tested thesis about the consequences of being multiracial. We find that white/black youth have outcomes that are unlike those of blacks, and white/American Indians do not differ from whites, but the situation is more complex for white/Asians. We close by acknowledging that racial classification is a social process, and discussing the implications of racial fluidity for assessments of educational differences.

    Read the entire report here.

  • The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (10th Anniversary Edition)

    The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (10th Anniversary Edition)

    Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
    2006-02-07
    352 pages
    8.26 x 5.23in
    Paperback ISBN: 9781594481925

    James McBride

    James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut.

    Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared “light-skinned” woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.

    The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Mommy,” a fiercely protective woman with “dark eyes full of pep and fire,” herded her brood to Manhattan’s free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.

    In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents’ loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.

    At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. “God is the color of water,” Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life’s blessings and life’s values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth’s determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college—and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.

    Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

  • Was first black priest black enough?

    Was first black priest black enough?

    Chicago Tribune
    2010-05-02

    Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter

    Healy, son of a plantation owner, isn’t mentioned as often as Tolton, who is being pushed for sainthood

    More than a year after some African-Americans scrutinized the blackness of the nation’s first black president, America’s Catholics are now wrestling with the same questions to determine who was the nation’s first black priest.

    The debate emerges as the Archdiocese of Chicago seeks sainthood for the Rev. Augustus Tolton, long hailed in Chicago as the first African-American clergyman to serve in the U.S. Catholic Church.

    A rival for the title is Bishop James Augustine Healy, who was ordained in 1854, the year Tolton was born. But Healy, the son of an Irish-American landowner and a mixed-race slave, was light-skinned enough to pass as a white man. And in many cases, he did…

    …As bishop of Portland, Maine, Healy served another marginalized population: Native Americans.

    The eldest of 10 siblings, Healy was raised Catholic but attended a Quaker school in New York. In 1849, he graduated valedictorian of the first class at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

    He attended seminary in Canada and was eventually ordained in Paris. But he distanced himself from an African-American identity. He declined to participate in African-American organizations and turned down invitations to address the National Black Catholic Congress, citing the New Testament — “Christ is all and in all” — as his reason.

    James O’Toole, author of “Passing for White: Race, Religion and the Healy Family [, 1820-1920],” said that denial comes across to some as betrayal. To others, it gives a new dimension to the struggle. But he believes contemporary categories or agendas shouldn’t be imposed upon historical figures.

    “In a sense, that can look like racial treason. Why are you denying who you are?” said O’Toole. “Those are very much the standards of today. But they’re not their standards. As a historian, that’s what ought to govern here. … We should be assessing them on their own terms.”

    But Michelle Wright, associate professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University and author of “Becoming Black [: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora],” cautions that ceding to Healy’s self-identity could further the misconception that African-Americans did not contribute to society…

    Read the entire article here.