Mixed Race Studies

2010 Census Data Products: United States (At a Glance – Version 1.0)

• Planned Release date: 2011-02-01 through 2011-03-31
• Product: 2010 Census Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File by State
• Category: State population counts for race and Hispanic or Latino categories / State housing unit counts by occupancy status (occupied units, vacant units)
• Lowest Level Geography: Blocks
• Media: Internet tables, DVD, download capability

View the file structure (in Microsoft Excel) here.

Many Biracial Students Game Racial-Classification Systems, Study Suggests

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2010-12-14

Peter Schmidt

A study of biracial people with black and white ancestry has found that many identify themselves solely as black when filling out college applications and financial-aid forms, raising new questions about the accuracy of educational statistics and research based on racial and ethnic data derived from students.

The study of 40 biracial people—all of whom reported having one black parent and one white one—found that 29, or nearly three-fourths, reported concealing their white ancestry in applying for college, scholarships, financial aid, or jobs.

“Frequently unaware that being biracial is often sufficient for affirmative-action purposes, they presented themselves exclusively as black,” says a summary of the study’s findings being published this month in Social Psychology Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association…

…The new study suggests that many researchers start out with bad data that conflate information on students with two black parents with information on students with one white parent and one black one, even though those biracial students are less likely, on average, to have grown up with the same disadvantages.

The researcher behind the study—Nikki Khanna, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, and Cathryn Johnson, a professor of sociology at Emory University— recruited their 40 research subjects by distributing fliers in an unnamed Southern urban city, asking “Do you have one black parent and one white parent?” They base their analyses on extensive interviews of the respondents conducted by Ms. Khanna in 2005 and 2006…

…Susan Graham, executive director of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally), an advocacy group for multiracial Americans, said she believes the article overstates how much people base their racial identification on self-interest. She also argued that, given how much racial-classification systems have changed in recent years, it is inappropriate to draw conclusions based on interviews conducted four or five years ago…

Read or purchase the article here.

Note by Steven F. Riley: See: Lawrence Wright, “One Drop of Blood”, The New Yorker, July 24, 1994…

Those who are charged with enforcing civil-rights laws see the Multiracial box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action, and they hold those in the mixed-race movement responsible. “There’s no concern on any of these people’s part about the effect on policy it’s just a subjective feeling that their identity needs to be stroked,” one government analyst said. “What they don’t understand is that it’s going to cost their own groups”—by losing the advantages that accrue to minorities by way of affirmative-action programs, for instance. [Susan] Graham contends that the object of her movement is not to create another protected category. In any case, she said, multiracial people know “to check the right box to get the goodies.”

Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work among Biracial Americans

Social Psychology Quarterly
Volume 73, Number 4 (Published online 2010-12-13)
pages 380-397
DOI: 10.1177/0190272510389014

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Cathryn Johnson, Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies
Emory University

Drawing on interview data with black-white biracial adults, we examine the considerable agency most have in asserting their racial identities to others. Extending research on “identity work” (Snow and Anderson 1987), we explore the strategies biracial people use to conceal (i.e., pass), cover, and/or accent aspects of their racial ancestries, and the individual and structural-level factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of some strategies. We further find that how these biracial respondents identify is often contextual—most identify as biracial, but in some contexts, they pass as monoracial. Scholars argue that passing may be a relic of the past, yet we find that passing still occurs today. Most notably, we find a striking reverse pattern of passing today—while passing during the Jim Crow era involved passing as white, these respondents more often report passing as black today. Motivations for identity work are explored, with an emphasis on passing as black.

…Characteristics of Respondents

Our data collection efforts resulted in a sample of 40 black-white biracial individuals. The ages ranged from 18 to 45, with the average age a little over 24 years of age. More than half of the respondents, 57.5 percent, fell between the ages of 18 and 22, which is typical college age; this is not surprising considering that our recruitment efforts began at local colleges and universities. Of the remaining respondents, 27.5 percent fell between the ages of 23 and 30, and 15 percent were over the age of 30. Regarding gender, 22.5 percent are men and 77.5 percent are women…

…Limitations…

Given the nature of the study and the characteristics of the sample, there are several limitations to be discussed. First, this study examines the phenomenon of passing (among other forms of identity work), yet if biracial people are passing for one race on a day-today basis, they likely would not have answered the advertisements to participate in this study. Hence, we examine those who pass as white or black on an intermittent basis, but not those who may be passing on a continuous basis.

Second, this sample is heavily female, and Storrs (1999) suggests that racial identity may be more salient for women than men; men’s self-concepts may be more tied to other identities, such as those based on occupation rather than race. If racial identity is indeed less salient for men (more work is needed here), then racial identity work and passing may be less frequent for men than women.

Third, these respondents were, for the most part, middle- to upper-middle class and often embedded in predominantly white settings. They were more likely to pass as black rather than white, but it is plausible that working-class biracials may be more motivated to pass as white (if their physical appearance allows it) or, at the very least, they may be more motivated to highlight their white ancestry than their middle-class counterparts; disadvantaged by social class, they may draw on white privilege (if they can) to access opportunities for upward social mobility. Conversely, because of their lower social class status, they may be even more likely than these respondents to present themselves as black. As will be discussed, these middle-class respondents passed as black to fit in with black peers, to avoid what they perceived as a stigmatized white identity, and to benefit from affirmative action programs. It is plausible that working-class biracials are more likely to live and work in minority/black settings and hence pass as black to fit in with black peers and neighbors; in minority/black settings, whiteness may be even more stigmatized as compared to white settings, and hence working-class biracials may feel more pressure to conceal their white ancestry; finally, because they are more disadvantaged financially than their middle class counterparts, affirmative action opportunities may be more crucial to moving up the socioeconomic ladder and so biracial people may be more likely to present themselves as black on admissions, employment, and scholarship application forms…

…Strategies of Identity Work…

…Factors limiting the accessibility/usefulness of identity strategies. Respondents draw on various identity strategies, and clearly these findings indicate that biracial people have considerable agency with regard to how they identify themselves. We find, however, that these options are not without limits. Extending previous research on identity work (Snow and Anderson 1987; see also Killian and Johnson 2006; McCall 2003; Storrs 1999), we discover several factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of these strategies—one’s phenotype, social class background, and racial networks. For instance, race in American society is intertwined with phenotype (i.e., we are often raced by how we look); depending upon which identity one is presenting, manipulation of one’s phenotype may or may not be an option. The majority of respondents cannot modify their phenotypes to pass as white, and some respondents have difficulty in altering their physical characteristics to pass as black. However, given the phenotypic variation among blacks (due to centuries of mixing with whites), passing as black is arguably less complicated than passing as white. Having light skin or straight hair, for instance, is not unique to those defined as biracial today; many individuals classified as black also share these traits. In contrast, those wanting to pass as white may face more challenges (e.g., hair cannot always be styled straight, skin tones are not easily lightened)…

…DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION…

…Most interesting, however, are not the few respondents who passed as white, but the many that passed as black. Scholars understand the motivations of passing as white in a society dominated by whites, but less is known about motivations for passing as black. We find that biracial people pass as black for several reasons. Most notably, we argue, because they can. While passing as white is difficult for most, passing as black is less difficult given the wide range of phenotypes in the black community regarding skin color and other physical features. With generations of interracial mixing between blacks and whites and the broad definition of blackness as defined by the one-drop rule, Khanna (2010) argues that most Americans cannot tell the difference between biracial and black. Hence, there is little difficulty when many biracial people conceal their biracial background; this is because many ‘‘blacks’’ also have white phenotypic characteristics (because they, too, often have white ancestry). Further, we find that biracial respondents pass as black for additional reasons—to fit in with black peers in adolescence (especially since many claim that whites reject them), to avoid a white stigmatized identity, and, in the post–civil rights era of affirmative action, to obtain advantages and opportunities sometimes available to them if they are black (e.g., educational and employment opportunities, college financial aid/scholarships)…

Read or purchase the article here.
Read a free summary here.

Reverse Passing? Kidding… Right?

The Root
2010-12-14

Jenée Desmond-Harris

A report that biracial people are denying their white parents seems absurd to me—but I’m paying attention anyway.

Ever heard of Barack Obama? You know, the first black president? The one who won an election and near-deity status in the African-American community while openly discussing his white mother in books, interviews and stump speeches?

Yeah, me, too. This is just one of the reasons I’m scratching my head at the findings of a new study that people with one white and one black parent “downplay their white ancestry,” in part to gain the acceptance of other black people. The authors dub this phenomenon “reverse passing” and call it “a striking phenomenon.” I’m beyond stumped. In a summary of the results, the sociologists behind “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans” report that this occurs especially in “certain social situations”—ostensibly, around other black people—where having a white parent “can carry its own negative biases.”

Let’s be clear: Although the study does conclude that people are “exercising considerable control over how they identify” racially these days, we’re not talking about having the freedom to elect to call oneself black. Rather, according to the lead author, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna, those who self-identify as biracial or multiracial “adopt an identity that contradicts their self-perception of race.” In other words, they’re being purposely disingenuous. They’re exchanging honesty for social benefits, in a mirror-image version of the well-known phenomenon of passing as white…

…While I don’t relate to the results of this study, I won’t dismiss them. My first reaction—after sheer confusion—was to feel superior to the study subjects. (Maybe they should have gone to an HBCU, where I got the message loud and clear that you can be black in any way that makes sense to you. Maybe they should be in social circles like mine. When polled on Facebook, many black acquaintances said that they always figured I had a white or mixed parent, and—surprise!—they didn’t de-friend me.)…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity

Time Magazine: Healthland
Friday, 2010-12-16

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

The practice of passing—identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another—reached its peak during the Jim Crow era. Needless to say, the notion of having to “pass” as white is outdated and offensive, but as sociologists Nikki Khanna and Cathryn Johnson report in a new study, passing is still alive and well today. It just happens in the other direction.

For their study, Khanna and Johnson interviewed 40 biracial American adults about their racial identity, and were surprised by what they found: most people tended to suppress or reject their white ancestry altogether and claim to be entirely African American. It wasn’t simply about calling oneself black, but also aggressively changing one’s behavior, looks and tastes to appear more “black.”…

…The question is whether strongly identifying with a racial minority really qualifies as passing. The researchers argue that it does, because it involves a concerted effort to reveal one portion of ancestry while concealing and rejecting another. The volunteers in the study also behaved strategically to project their race—something that sociologists call “identity work.” The authors of the current study prefer to call it “performing race”: they characterize the racial identities of their subjects as a strategically constructed, outwardly projected performance, and in this sense they liken it to the behavior of those who passed during the Jim Crow era…

Read the entire article here.

Métis, mixed-ness and music: Aboriginal-Ukrainian encounters and cultural production on the Canadian prairies

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington
Canadian Studies Center
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall
Wednesday, 2011-04-20 19:00 PDT (Local Time)

Marcia Ostashewski, Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies

Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal intermarriages, often described as “mixed-race,” have been the focus of historians and anthropologists, and represent an important legacy of the colonial pasts and present of both the United States and Canada which require further investigation. As an ethnomusicologist, Ostashewski is investigating a legacy of Aboriginal/Eastern European settler encounters and relations in music, dance and related expressive culture on the Canadian prairies. In this presentation, she focuses on Alberta-based musician Arnie Strynadka, “The Uke-Cree Fiddler”—looking at the ways in which his musical life and performance represent a particular encounter and fusion of ethnicities, examining experiences of hybridity and intercultural relations in the context of this unique, western Canadian musical life.

For more information, click here.

Journeys in Multiracial America

C-SPAN
Elliot Bay Book Company
Seattle, Washington
2007-01-27

Elliott Lewis

Journalist Elliott Lewis discusses his life as a biracial American at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. In his memior Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America, the author explains that while he was raised with two parents of mixed racial heritage who identified themselves as black, he eventually evolved into a biracial self-identity. The book also examines transracial adoption, interracial dating and immigration through the eyes of several multiracial people.

Elliott Lewis is a freelance television news reporter in Washington, DC. He has worked for CNN Headline News, BET, Associated Press Television, WJLA-TV, and the Washington bureaus of Tribune Broadcasting and Hearst-Argyle Television. Mr. Lewis is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and currently serves on their Board of Directors.

The Society for French Historical Studies 57th Annual Meeting

Sponsored by The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina
The Francis Marion Hotel
Charleston, South Carolina
2011-02-11 through 2011-02-12

Includes the following sessions:

1A “Representation and Commemoration in France and Its Colonies”…

Black and White: Figuring the Senegalese Signares [definition in French]
Thérèse De Raedt, Associate Professor of Languanges and Literature
University of Utah

4H “Children and Families in the French Empire”…

Who is French? Mixed-Race Children in the First Indochina War
Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

For the program guide, click here.

Defying the Civil Rights Lobby: The American Multiracial Movement

Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change
University of Memphis
April 2007
35 pages

Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University

Throughout the 1990s a handful of advocates argued to stunning if partial success that it was both inaccurate and an affront to force multiracial Americans into monoracial categories. They called for the addition of a multiracial designator on the U.S. Census to bolster the self-esteem of multiracial children; furthermore, they maintained that the recognition of racial mixture could help defuse American racial polarization. Fearing the potential dilution of minority numbers and political power, ironically, civil rights groups emerged as the staunchest opponents of the multiracial category effort. Nevertheless, from 1992 to 1998, six states passed legislation to add a multiracial category on state forms. Further, in 1997 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced an unprecedented “mark one or more” (MOOM) decision, which did not add a multiracial category to the census, but nevertheless, allowed Americans to identify officially with as many racial groups as they saw fit. Although in some ways its immediate impact might seem negligible, I argue in in Race Counts: American Multiracialism & Post-Civil Rights Politics [Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America] (The University of Michigan Press, Forthcoming) that MOOM will eventually reach deeply into the nation’s civil rights agenda. Ultimately this recent restructuring of the American racial classification system, in tandem with coexisting trends, could push the nation to rethink the logic of civil rights enforcement.

The multiracial movement started with a handful of adult-based groups that formed on the West Coast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Currently there are approximately thirty active adult-based multiracial organizations across the United States and about the same number of student organizations on college campuses. Most of the adult-based groups are oriented toward social support more than political advocacy, but in 1988, a number of these local organizations joined forces to create the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans (AMEA). At that point, the primary political goal of this new umbrella group was to push the Census Bureau to add a multiracial category on the 1990 census. Soon after the establishment of AMEA, two other national umbrella organizations formed: Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and A Place for Us. Beyond agenda setting, this small, disorganized social movement exerted little to no influence over the aforementioned outcomes. At the height of movement activity it involved no more than 1,000 individuals in a loose network of groups (Figure 5.1) scattered across the country and only twenty or so core, committed activists at the helm…

Read the entire paper here.

Passings That Pass in America: Crossing Over and Coming Back to Tell About It

The History Teacher
Volume 40, Number 4 (August 2007)
32 paragraphs

Donald Reid, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

TEMPORARILY PASSING as an other is a universal fantasy and a not uncommon practice. From Arab potentates dressed as commoners to check on the governance of their realms, to women going into combat as male soldiers, it has a long history, and passing is a phenomenon of particular resonance in the contemporary United States. In the affluent postwar decades, the belief that the middle class would come to encompass all was challenged by white middle-class exclusion of African-Americans from membership in this classless utopia, and of women from a patriarchal order. Today, this ideology of prosperity has changed; it is now predicated on the permanent existence of extremes in wealth and poverty, the unrelenting insecurity of an unconstrained market society and the emotional costs of gender norms. These are the contexts for the appearance of a number of widely-read accounts of race, class, and gender passing in the United States. 

 American culture glorifies the self-made man and this self-making extends to individual identity. The United States celebrates geographical and social mobility and the very anomie this produces is also the site of secular rebirths. In this essay, I will examine a literary genre that draws upon the American faith in self-transformation in an effort to confront the social boundaries that define its limits: narratives of white middle-class individuals who seek to live as an other for a while with the aim of revealing to their social group of origin its role in creating and sustaining the marginalization and oppression of the other whose identity they temporarily assume. John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and Grace Halsell’s Soul Sister and Bessie Yellowhair were products of an era when the challenges that racial integration presented to white middle-class society gave new impetus to the tradition of participant-observer social scientists and journalists living as workers and reporting on the experience. I conclude with a reading of recent accounts of inter- and intra-class passing: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, and Norah Vincent’s memoir of gender passing, Self-Made Man…

Read the entire article here.