Mixed Race Studies

Midwest Home to Most of the Counties With Decreases in Median Age

United States Census Bureau
2018-06-21
Release Number: CB18-78

JUNE 21, 2018 — Approximately half (51.4 percent) of the nation’s 531 counties that were getting younger between April 2010 and July 2017 were in the Midwest, according to newly released 2017 population estimates. Out of the counties that were getting younger, the South also had a high proportion (32.4 percent) of the counties that experienced a decrease in median age — the age where half of the population is younger and the other half is older— followed by the West (14.1 percent), and the Northeast (2.1 percent).

“Nationally, almost 17 percent of counties saw a decrease in median age from April 2010 to July 2017. The majority of the counties getting younger were in the Midwest, and of these counties with 10,000 people or more in July 2017, some of the largest decreases were in North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska,” said Molly Cromwell, a demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau. “Williams County, N.D., had the largest decrease in median age, declining by 7.1 years.”

Despite the decrease in median age in many of the Midwest’s counties, a majority of counties in the country continued to grow older. The nation as a whole experienced a median age increase from 37.2 years to 38.0 years during the period 2010 to 2017. This continued aging of the country is consistent with the projected changes to the nation’s population through 2060.

“Baby boomers, and millennials alike, are responsible for this trend in increased aging,” Cromwell said. “Boomers continue to age and are slowly outnumbering children as the birth rate has declined steadily over the last decade.”

Last year, Florida had the largest percentage of seniors (age 65 and older) with 20.1 percent, followed by Maine (19.9 percent) and West Virginia (19.4 percent). Maine also saw its median age increase to 44.7 from 42.7 years old in 2010, making it the state with the highest median age.

On the other hand, Utah had the smallest percentage of its population age 65 and older (10.8 percent), followed by Alaska (11.2 percent) and the District of Columbia (12.1 percent). Utah is also the state with the lowest median age (30.9 years).

View our graphics on change in median age from 2010 to 2017 at the county level and the median age in 2017 to see how the nation has changed…

…The Two or More Races Population

• Those who identify as two or more races made up the second-fastest growing race group (2.9 percent) in the nation. Their growth is due primarily to natural increase.
• The two or more races group had the youngest median age of any other race group at 20.4 years.
• California had the largest two or more races population (1.5 million) and Hawaii had the highest proportion (23.8 percent)…

Read the entire article here.

Mayor de Blasio’s son Dante says the SHSAT, the elite high school admissions test, fostered racism at Brooklyn Tech

New York Daily News
2018-06-14

Dante de Blasio (son of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray, is a rising senior at Yale University.)

Dante de Blasio attends the Brooklyn Technical High School graduation ceremony on June 19, 2015. (Stephanie Keith for New York Daily News)

A year after I graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 2015, the hashtag #BlackinBrooklynTech started appearing on my social media. Black students and recent alumni were using it to share stories of overt acts of racism at the school.

The stories included a teacher laughing at a black student when that student shared her dream of becoming a doctor, white and Asian students using racial slurs to bully black students, and faculty members ignoring a black student’s complaints after he was called the N-word and “monkey” by his peers.

Older black alumni soon got involved, and they shared many of their own stories at a public meeting with the principal. The current and former students who drove the campaign were sick of having to defend their right to earn an elite education in the face of adversity from the students and faculty meant to support their success.

I understood exactly where my fellow black alumni were coming from. I’d had many of my own experiences. Some of them might seem innocuous. For example, I remember being the only black kid in many of my classes (something that seemed normal to many of my classmates). However, many experiences displayed the racism which was all too common in the school…

Read the entire article here.

Black + White = Not White: Understanding How Multiracial Individuals Are Categorized

UNEWS
The University of Utah
2018-06-14

Brooke Adams, Communications Specialist
University Marketing & Communication

Study finds minority bias exerts a powerful influence in categorizing multiracial individuals

How you perceive someone who is multiracial matters. Historically, the answer to that question for someone who was black-white multiracial had repercussions for who that person could marry, what school he or she could attend and other forms of discrimination the individual might experience.

Today, the United States is becoming increasingly multiracial, but social psychologists are just beginning to understand how multiracial individuals are perceived and categorized. A new study suggests that the so-called “minority bias” exerts a powerful influence — important since one in five Americans is expected to identify as multiracial by 2050.

University of Utah psychology professor Jacqueline M. Chen, lead author of the study published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, that found observers were most likely to categorize someone who is black-white multiracial as non-white. The findings are the first to document minority bias as a guiding principle in multiracial categorization.

“The question of how perceivers racially categorize multiracial individuals is important because it impacts other social perceptions, like stereotyping, and interactions,” Chen said. “The bottom line is that we find people tend to see racially ambiguous, multiracial people as racial minorities.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black + White = Not White: A minority bias in categorizations of Black-White multiracials

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 78, September 2018
pages 43-54
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.002

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
University of Utah

Kristin Pauker, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

David L. Hamilton, Research Professor, Professor Emeritus
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey W. Sherman, Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

Highlights

• We examined the categorization of Black-White multiracial faces using novel methods.
• Multiracials were implicitly categorized separately from Black and White targets.
• Multiracials were explicitly categorized into many non-White racial groups.
• “Non-White” categorizations of multiracials occurred very quickly.

The present research sought to provide new insights on the principles guiding the categorization of Black-White multiracial faces at a first encounter. Previous studies have typically measured categorization of multiracial faces using close-ended tasks that constrain available categorizations. Those studies find evidence that perceivers tend to categorize multiracials as Black more often than as White. Two studies used less constrained, implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit categorization (Experiment 2) tasks and found that multiracial faces were most frequently categorized into racial minority groups but not necessarily as Black. These studies suggested a minority bias in multiracial categorizations, whereby multiracials are more frequently categorized as non-White than as White. Experiment 3 provided additional support for the minority bias, showing that participants categorized multiracials as “Not White” more often than as any other category. Participants were also faster to exclude multiracial faces from the White category than from any other racial category. Together, these findings are the first to document the minority bias as a guiding principle in multiracial categorization.

Outline

• Highlights
• Abstract
• Keywords
• 1. Experiment 1: Implicit Categorization of Multiracials
• 2. Method
• 3. Results
• 4. Discussion
• 5. Experiment 2: Free Sorting of Faces by Race
• 6. Method
• 7. Results
• 9. Interim Summary
• 8. Discussion
• 10. Experiment 3: Time Course of the Minority Bias
• 11. Method
• 12. Results
• 13. Discussion
• 14. General Discussion
• Open practices
• Appendix A. Supplementary data
• References

Read or purchase the article here.

Carina Ray fuses scholarship and teaching with personal experience

Brandeis Now
Waltham, Massachusetts
2017-12-17

Jarret Bencks
Office of Communications

Carina Ray in the classroom

Almost 25 years ago, historian Carina Ray spent her junior year abroad as an undergraduate studying in Ghana. She planned to explore her Puerto Rican family’s African roots.

Most Ghanaians she met insisted she was white, despite her longwinded explanations about her multiracial background. Eventually, she realized it would be smarter to talk less and listen more.

“I was enthralled by what Ghanaians had to say about their own perceptions of blackness and how race works there,” says Ray, associate professor of African and Afro-American studies (AAAS). The seeds of Ray’s career were planted.

By the time she returned to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to finish her bachelor’s degree, Ray knew she wanted to study what it means to be black in West Africa — from an African perspective. The history of race in Africa was rarely written about from an African perspective, and it became the focus of her PhD in African history at Cornell University…

Read the entire article here.

Jefferson’s Monticello finally gives Sally Hemings her place in presidential history

The Washington Post
2018-06-13

Philip Kennicott, Art and architecture critic

A view of Monticello. (Jack Looney)

You cannot see Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello, from the small room burrowed into the ground along the south wing of his estate. When the door is closed, you can’t see anything at all, because it is a windowless room, with a low ceiling and damp walls. But this was, very likely, the room inhabited by Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six of Jefferson’s children, a woman about whom little is known, who lived her life as Jefferson’s property, was considered his concubine, was a source of scandal and a political liability, and yet who might be considered the first lady to the third president of the United States if that didn’t presume her relationship to Jefferson was voluntary.

On Saturday, Monticello will open the room to the public, with a small exhibition devoted to the life of Hemings and the Hemings family. Reclaiming this space, which previously had been used as a public restroom, marks the completion of a five-year plan called the Mountaintop Project, which has seen significant changes to the beloved estate of the founding father. Using archaeology and other evidence, Monticello curators have restored Mulberry Row, where enslaved people lived and labored, and made changes (including to the wallpaper, paint and furnishings) inside the mansion, restored the north and south wings, and opened the upstairs rooms to the public on special tours. But symbolically and emotionally, the restoration of the Hemings room is the heart of the new interpretation of Monticello, and it makes tangible a relationship that has been controversial since rumors of “Dusky Sally” became part of American political invective in the early 19th century…

Read the entire article here.

They married in 1968 as a nation fought for civil rights. 50 years later an interracial couple looks back

The Los Angeles Times
2018-05-29

Colleen Shalby, Community Engagement Editor

Charles and Janice Tyler are photographed in a hallway lined with family photographs including their wedding day photo, at right, at their Huntington Beach home. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Their wedding day was bookended by the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June. The Vietnam War raged abroad as a fight for civil rights continued at home.

For many, 1968 was marked by violence, bloodshed and protest. For Janice, a white woman, and Charles, a black man, 1968 marked the unlikely beginning of a 50-year marriage filled with four children and 11 grandchildren.

Interracial marriages were by no means a societal norm the year the Tylers wed. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down the remaining laws that banned such unions, was handed down just one year before. Charles and Janice were not directly affected by the case – Illinois wasn’t one of the remaining 16 states. They did face prejudice, nonetheless.

“Back then, you just didn’t see black and white,” Charles said about the racial divide…

Read the entire article here.

In Celebration of Loving Day: Raising Multiracial Kids

PBS Parents
Expert Tips & Advice
2018-06-12

Marj Kleinman

One year ago today, I met six-year-old Mattie (below) at a Loving Day event. Families had gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the 1967 landmark Supreme Court decision that made interracial marriage legal across the United States.

Between blowing bubbles and dancing, Mattie told me: “Today is a special day and it doesn’t matter if you’re black, brown or any other color; it’s just about your love.”

Her dad, Allen, shared, “It’s important to be here because we want the future to be brighter, safer and more diverse for them. We want to show them that that exists now and make it more commonplace going forward.”

In the last 50 years, the number of interracial marriages has increased dramatically — as has public acceptance of these marriages. Yet parents still face a variety of challenges around raising multiracial kids. Allen and his wife, Kelly (with their kids, below) said that they sometimes face stares and the question, “Is that really your child?”…

Read the entire article here.

Hungary’s first black MP aims to ‘destroy prejudice’

BBC News
2018-06-11

Tom Mulligan

Orsolya Kovacs Olivio Kocsis-Cake: Fidesz always finds an enemy who must be hated

Hungary has a reputation for anti-immigration politics, but a young black liberal MP wants to revamp the country’s image.

Olivio Kocsis-Cake, of the opposition Parbeszed (Dialogue) party, is being sworn in as an MP on Monday, taking a seat vacated by a colleague who is stepping down.

Mr Kocsis-Cake (pronounced “kochish-tsocker”) has become a talking point in Hungary because of the strong anti-migrant rhetoric – particularly against non-whites – ratcheted up by members of the governing Fidesz party, its loyal national media and far-right groups like Jobbik.

“In the 1990s I was physically in danger a number of times when confronted by skinheads on the street. But now this is very unusual. Mostly I just get suspicious looks,” Mr Kocsis-Cake told independent news website Index.hu.

Parbeszed won just five seats in the 2018 election, in which the right-wing Fidesz of Prime Minister Viktor Orban secured a super-majority of 133 seats and the ultra-nationalist Jobbik came second with 26 seats…

…Two different generations

Olivio Kocsis-Cake was born in 1980. His mother is Hungarian and his father, from Guinea-Bissau, came to Hungary via Senegal in 1976, aged 18.

Like many students invited to communist Eastern Europe from developing countries, Marcelo Cake-Baly studied and graduated at the Karl Marx Economics University. He settled and found work as a Budapest tram-driver and was even a one-time film actor…

Read the entire article here.

The Bi-Racial Artist Using White-Passing Characters to Talk About Blackness

Sleek
2018-06-07

Harriet Shepherd, Junior Editor

Drive-By, Side-Eye, 2016 © Genevieve Gaignard, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

Genevieve Gaignard uses American stereotypes and comfortable settings to confront uncomfortable issues surrounding race and identity.

American artist Genevieve Gaignard is a homebody. Not in the sense that she’s confined to the couch every Friday night, but rather that she’s infatuated with domestic spaces. “I’ve always had this fascination with what people surround themselves with in their homes,” she tells SLEEK. It’s a theme that’s been a constant in her work since she threw in the towel at cookery school and headed down a fine art path. From the panoramic interiors she lensed for her Yale application, to the carefully curated domestic installations that made up her solo show, Smell the Roses, at the Californian African American Museum earlier this year, to the household-centric creations currently on display at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London — home is where Gaignard’s heart is.

Though she’s what you’d call a multidisciplinary artist, it’s Gaignard’s photography that’s earned her such widespread attention. Known for turning the lens on herself, Gaignard’s Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits occupy a complex realm where class, race and gender intersect, seeing the artist assume caricatured roles that toy with her own bi-racial identity and the way that blackness and whiteness is perceived. And the home, more often than not, provides the comfortable backdrop for Gaignard’s more uncomfortable subject matter…

Read the entire article here.