Mixed Race Studies

The Latino Flight to Whiteness

The American Prospect
2016-02-11

William Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy; Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy; Professor of African and African American Studies; Professor of Economics
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

This is a contribution to Prospect Debate: The Illusion of a Minority-Majority America.

Based upon trends in racial self-classification, one has to be skeptical about the emergence of “majority-minority” America.

Will the United States have a majority of people of color by the year 2050, as both researchers and the popular press commonly assert? Richard Alba urges skepticism because, he argues, U.S. Census policy overestimates the presence of nonwhites in the American population. As Alba observes, in mixed-race marriages where one parent is white and the other nonwhite, the Census uses a default rule of counting all the children as nonwhite, even though that is not necessarily how the children see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

This assimilation should disabuse us of the fantasy of the imminent demise of the white majority and its loss of power. Not all the newcomers to the mainstream will identify as whites, and its visibly growing diversity will be a key development of the early 21st century, as the election of the nation’s first black president unmistakably signals. “Whiteness,” however, has never been fixed; it is a malleable concept, and it is on its way to changing again, as it has before.

Yet it is critical not to lapse immediately into another fantasy, namely, the belief that assimilation will prove a panacea for still-glaring ethno-racial disparities. Contemporary assimilation is simply not on the same scale as that of the mid-20th century, when, for example, Italians caught up to other whites in education and socioeconomic attainment in just a 25-year period after World War II. Assimilation today is crimped by greatly heightened inequalities and is leaving many outside its reach, including many Hispanics, such as the undocumented and their children, even those who are U.S. citizens because they were born here. In one respect, however, the earlier and current patterns of assimilation are similar: African Americans are participating only to a limited extent. Indeed, one could even say they are being bypassed.

Richard Alba, “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority,” The American Prospect, Winter 2016, Volume 27, Number 1 (January 11, 2016). http://prospect.org/article/likely-persistence-white-majority-0.

The Likely Persistence of a White Majority

The American Prospect
Winter 2016, Volume 27, Number 1 (2016-01-11)

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

Has the notion of demography as destiny ever enjoyed so much credence? The disappearance of a white majority in the United States by the middle of this century is now widely accepted as if it were an established fact. Projections by the Census Bureau have encouraged those expectations, and people on both the right and left have seized on them in support of their views. On the right, the anxieties about the end of white majority status have fueled a conservative backlash against the growing diversity of the country. On the left, many progressives anticipate an inexorable change in the ethno-racial power hierarchy. Numerous sites on the web offer advice and counsel on how whites can handle their imminent minority status.

But what if these different reactions are based on a false premise—actually two false premises? The first stems from the Census Bureau’s way of classifying people by ethnicity and race, which produces the smallest possible estimate of the size of the non-Hispanic white population. Whenever there is ambiguity about ethno-racial identity, the statistics publicized by the bureau count an individual as minority. This statistical choice is particularly important for population projections because of the growing number of children from mixed families, most of whom have one white parent and one from a minority group. In the Census Bureau’s projections, children with one Hispanic, Asian, or black parent are counted as minority (that is, as Hispanic or nonwhite). The United States has historically followed a “one-drop” rule in classifying people with any black ancestry as black. The census projections, in effect, extend the one-drop rule to the descendants of other mixed families. A great deal of evidence shows, however, that many children growing up today in mixed families are integrating into a still largely white mainstream society and likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it…

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An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities

The American Prospect
2015-11-05

Gary D. Bass, Executive Director
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Adrien Schless-Meier, Program Associate
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority populations are in danger of losing representation in Congress as well as their share of more than $400 billion a year in federal funds for health care, education, job training, and community development. That possibility should get anyone’s attention, yet few have noticed that it will be the likely result if Congress cuts the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau to the extent it now threatens to do.

The Constitution requires a decennial census to determine congressional apportionment, and federal law relies on the numbers to allocate funds among states and localities. Historically, the census has missed large numbers of people in poverty and racial and ethnic minorities. By the 2000 and 2010 censuses, however, the national undercount had dropped to less than 2 percent, due primarily to the Census Bureau’s dogged determination to walk America’s streets and knock on the doors of the roughly 100 million U.S. residents who didn’t mail back their forms. Racial and ethnic minorities were still more likely to be missed than whites. But the Census Bureau could not have reduced the disparity in counting minorities without budgetary support.

Now, Congress is insisting that the Census Bureau spend less preparing for and conducting the 2020 census than it did on the 2010 census, even though the U.S. population is expected to have grown by more than 25 million people by 2020. The bureau has chosen not to fight this directive, which census experts call delusional. Instead, the bureau has embarked on a high-risk strategy to save $5 billion by rolling back door-to-door canvassing and conducting a largely electronic, Internet-based census…

…Adding to this uncertainty, and on top of the technology overhaul, the Census Bureau is exploring significant changes in the way it asks about race and ethnicity, which also need prior testing. The right changes could improve the quality of race and ethnicity data, but at least one approach under consideration—relying on write-in responses instead of check boxes—would do the opposite, according to civil-rights advocates…

…Resolving Confusion about Race and Ethnicity

The census might be the best source of data on race and ethnicity, but it is by no means perfect, and respondents often are confused about how to identify themselves. As currently designed, the survey first asks whether the respondent is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, and then offers a series of check boxes for Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other Hispanic origin, with a write-in box. The next question asks for the respondent’s race, with check boxes for white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, seven Asian nationalities, four Pacific Islander groups, or “some other race,” followed by a write-in box.

About 20 million people in 2010 checked the “some other race” box—making it the third most selected race category behind white and black—and the vast majority of those were Hispanic. Vargas, who serves on the Census Bureau’s advisory committee examining the race and ethnicity question, summed up the challenge: “Once you’ve asked, are you Hispanic, yes or no, and they answer yes, I’m Mexican American, they go to the next question and are asked, so what’s your race. And people are like, wait a minute, you just asked me that. I just told you I’m Mexican. And the bureau would say, no, being Hispanic is an ethnicity. It’s not a racial category. But they don’t see themselves in the white, black, Asian, [or] Native American categories.”…

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Seahawks’ Russell Wilson Controversy Shows Dangers of Racial Authenticity Tests

The American Prospect
2014-11-01

Kevin Cokley, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology; Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

The ‘are you black enough?’ question is perilously close to the racist one-drop rule of yore—whether called by blacks or whites.

Whether Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson is “black enough” is beside the point. The real issue is why we are still talking about racial authenticity at all.

“My feeling on this—and it’s backed up by several interviews with Seahawks players—is that some of the black players think Wilson isn’t black enough,” Mike Freeman writes at Bleacher Report, reporting on tensions between just-traded teammate Percy Harvin and Wilson, including a locker room reportedly divided into pro/con camps.

“This is an issue that extends outside of football, into African-American society—though it’s gotten better recently,” Freeman writes. “Well-spoken blacks are seen by some other blacks as not completely black. Some of this is at play.”

The “Am I Black Enough?” racial authenticity card is a recurring theme in the lives of black athletes in particular, and black people in general. Concerns about racial authenticity are always present, especially for those who are biracial or somewhat more racially ambiguous as Wilson, with his light skin tone and curly hair, is believed to be…

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Faces of the Democratic Future

The American Prospect
2014-09-04

Gabriel Arana, Senior Editor

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Elaine Teng, Assistant to the Editor
The New Republic

Young leaders on the future of their party

Demographers and political prognosticators like to talk about the rising “Obama electorate.” Majority-minority, more liberal on social and financial issues alike than their forebears, this young cohort stands poised to radically transform the country’s politics in the decades to come. For the July/August issue of The American Prospect magazine, we asked rising progressive leaders what they think about the future of the Democratic Party—and how it needs to change.

Svante Myrick, age 26
Mayor of Ithaca, New York
Ithaca, New York

I’d like to see the party elect a woman president. When Barack Obama was elected, I was a young mixed-race kid with a strange name, being raised by a white mother. It changed what I thought was possible for my life. After I was elected mayor here at 24, I remember a mother telling me the following story. She and her adopted son, who is black and around 15 years old, were coming to city hall. In the elevator, an elderly white woman looked at him and said, “Are you the mayor?” When the mother told me this story, I said, “Well, come on, I don’t look 15 years old.” She said, “You don’t understand. He’s gotten on elevators before and had older women jump off—he’s had people cross the street when they see him coming because he’s black. He’s been confused for a lot of things, but this is the first time he’s been confused for a figure of authority.” That’s powerful. Obama has changed the life outcomes, through his example, for millions of black men. His family has done the same for black families. He’s changed the way we think about a black family in this country. I think that our first female president is going to do the same thing for young women…

Read the entire article here.