The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940 |
The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940
The National Bureau of Economic Research
NBER Working Paper No. 20828
January 2015
76 pages
DOI: 10.3386/w20828
Emily Nix
Department of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Nancy Qian, Associate Professor of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males “passed” for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later “reverse-passed” to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.
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Tags: Emily Nix, Nancy Qian, National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER, The National Bureau of Economic Research