Mixed Race Studies

He’s Black, Get Over It

The American Prospect
2008-12-05

Adam Serwer

We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a provocatively titled op-ed for The Washington Post last Sunday, Marie Arana declared that President-elect Barack Obama is “not black” because he’s also “half white.” Arana argues, using a naïve and idealized evaluation of how race operates in Latin America, that identifying Barack Obama as black is “racist,” and “racially backward,” and pleads with the reader to stop “using labels that validate the separation of races.”

If identifying biracial people as black “validates the separation of the races” then there is perhaps no one contributing more to the cause of these neo-segregationists than Barack Obama himself. “My view has always been that I’m African-American,” Obama told Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Turner Trice back in 2004. “African Americans by definition, we’re a hybrid people.” In seeking a validation of her own ideas about race and racial identity, and by casting Obama as the victim of a reductive racial vocabulary, Arenas simply ignores the will of her subject. But racial categories are only unjust insofar as they prevent people from identifying how they wish. Arenas is doing exactly what she is attempting to prevent, forcing Obama into the racial category of her, rather than his own, choosing.

Part of the problem with the American conversation on race is the bizarre license that people take when writing about it on the basis of their own biography. But being “biracial” does not make one an expert on race, or on racial hybridity, any more than being a Republican or a Democrat makes one an expert on politics. So much of the writing on Obama’s racial identity, or on his political impact is muddled by our own subconscious racial desires. We want Obama to mean something specific, either to us or to others, with little regard for how he actually sees himself. As it stands, Arenas seems ill-prepared to talk about how biraciality operates in the African-American context. The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds. Originally, this was a consequence of racial oppression; racist laws that determined that anyone with black ancestry was black. We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

He’s Not Black

The Washington Post
2008-11-30
 
Marie Arana

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

2010 National Conference on Health Statistics
Omni Shorem Hotel, Washington, D.C.
2010-08-17
46 pages/slides

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
University of Michigan
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

The Multiracial Movement of the 1990s [page/slide 2]

• After Census 1990, a small social movement developed calling for a fundamental change in the way the federal statistical system classified people by race. Susan Graham played an important role in this.
• Rather than forcing persons to identify with one single race only, they insisted upon the addition of a “Multiple Races” category.
• Some leading advocates of this change were white women married to African-American men who found that their children were almost always classified as black by those who collected statistical data or tabulated persons by race. See: Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More Civil Rights in Multiracial America

Who Identifies with Multiple Races? [page/slide 9]

• Age differences are great. In 2008, 5% of those under 10 were identified with two or more races; fewer than 1% for those over age 64 did so.
• Race differences are substantial. In 2008, 52% of the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population identified with a second race; 45% of American Indians did so. For whites, it was only 3%
• Educational Attainment differences in identifying with multiple races were small.
• Geographic Differences in Identifying with Two or More Races are Large. In 2008, 21% of the residents of Honolulu and 10% in Anchorage identified with 2 or more races. In Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Portland, Maine and Sarasota, Florida; fewer than 1% identified with 2 or more races.

Measuring Race Will Be Increasingly Challenging [page/slide 26]

• A substantial increase in interracial marriages implies that the multiple race population is growing rapidly
• There is widespread consensus that race is a social construct. Perhaps, many people wish to construct their own racial identity.
• Question order and question wording effects are very large

Read the entire presentation here.

Multiracial Patterns in the United States By State

Public Research Report No. 2001-02
Race Contours 2000 Study: A University of Southern California and University of Michigan Collaborative Project
Released: 2001-04-13

Noel Hacegaba, Adjunct Instructor of Public Administration
University of La Verne, La Verne, California

Dowell Myer, Professor of Public Policy
University of Southern California

• The size of the multiracial population in the United States (2.4%) is roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts.
• The highest prevalence of multiracial residents in a particular race group is generally found in states that have smaller concentrations of that group.
• California departs from the rest of the country in both population size and multiracial prevalence.

INTRODUCTION

In 2000, the Census Bureau allowed multi-racial respondents to identify themselves as such, enabling them to select more than one racial category. This has amplified the opportunities for further research on race.

The number of multiracial persons in the United States amounts to 2.4% of the total population, roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts. Within the different race groups, this prevalence varies considerably. Exhibit 1 is a table showing what percentage of the U.S. population in each racial group is monoracial or multiracial. For this analysis, we define racial groups as all those who selected that race alone or in combination with other races.

The percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders that identify themselves as multiracial, for example, is 54.4%. The same number is 39.9% for American Indians and Alaska Natives and 13.9% for Asians. Blacks and whites show a lower multiracial prevalence with 4.8% and 2.5%, respectively.

Among whites, 97.5% identify themselves only as white. Similarly, 95.2% of blacks identify themselves as strictly monoracial. As expected, the number of monoracial respondents is relatively lower across all other race groups with the exception of the Other category, which is largely comprised of Latinos…

Read the entire report here.

The Law of the Census: How to Count, What to Count, Whom to Count, and Where to Count Them

Cardozo Law Review
Volume 32, Number 3 (2011)
pages 756-791

Nathaniel Persily, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
Columbia Law School

The 2010 Census, like its predecessors, represented a momentous logistical and technological undertaking with far reaching consequences for political representation and allocation of public resources. It also promised to spawn a series of legal controversies over how to count people, what information the government should gather, which individuals truly “count” for purposes of the census, and where they should be counted. This Article explores these present and past controversies surrounding the census. The issues of “sampling” and “statistical adjustment” pervaded much of the legal commentary and case law concerning the census for the past twenty years. The undercount will continue to be a common theme, although given new found ideological opposition to filling out the census form, it is unclear at this stage who is less likely to be counted. The 2010 Census raises new issues of relevance to redistricting claims under the Voting Rights Act, concerning the counting and distribution of data on both the non-citizen and prisoner population. At the same time, recent developments in voting rights law, which place a premium on the size of a minority community, have raised the legal stakes for this census. Despite the technical nature of many census related controversies, one’s position on how, what, whom, and where to count cannot be separated from the larger questions of how easy or difficult it should be for plaintiffs to bring and win civil rights claims, particularly with respect to the redistricting process.

The Framers of the American Constitution viewed the decennial census as providing a certain rhythm to American politics. Every ten years a state’s tax burdens and representation in the House of Representatives would change to reflect its share of the national population as revealed in the “actual enumeration,” the manner of which Congress “shall by law direct.” Much has changed since the first census, but the rhythm still remains. Perhaps unintended and unimagined by the Framers, however, is the rhythmic and ritualistic dance to the courtroom every ten years to argue over the census numbers themselves and the methods used to construct apportionment totals.

Just as its rhythm has remained true to the Framers’ intent, so too the controversies surrounding the census have remained linked to the unique place of the census in the constitutional design. In the Constitution itself, the census is “about” representation, money, and race, so we should not be surprised to learn that courtroom controversies over the census have persisted with respect to these three themes. By tying both representation in the House and taxation to the census, the Constitution provided cross-incentives and an internal political check that might guard against manipulation of the census to overrepresent a state’s population. Today, dickering over the census numbers represents a critical stage in arguments states and localities make for more representation (concerning either apportionment among states of seats in the House of Representatives or within states with respect to redistricting) or for more money (given that funding for many federal and state programs is tied to the census). In addition, just as the first census necessarily had to categorize the population according to race in order to determine which people were “Indians not taxed” or “other persons” subject to the three-fifths rule, so too today the racial categories of the census and the racial implications of census counts become fodder for litigation over representation and funding.

This Article examines the law of the census: specifically, how to count, what to count, whom to count, and where to count them. For the most part this Article draws on my experience and research concerning the use of census data in the redistricting process; however, many of the topics discussed apply to federal funding decisions as well. The Article begins by describing the most recent legal controversies involving census methods, particularly imputation and statistical adjustment. When one thinks of the “law of the census,” these high-profile disputes probably come first to mind. In cases that have arrived at the Supreme Court at the beginning of each of the last three census cycles, undercounted cities and states have argued that census methods were deficient in that the procedures missed some people, double-counted others, or counted people that did not exist.

Second, this Article explores the legal implications of the decisions concerning what to include on the census form, paying particular attention to the topics of race and citizenship. For the second time, the 2010 Census allows respondents to check off more than one race, raising a host of interesting questions concerning the legal implications of alternative methods for categorizing the multiracial population. More significantly for the 2010 Census, the long form, which was previously asked of one sixth of the population, has been replaced by the yearly American Community Survey (ACS), distributed to 2.5% of households. The ACS is the only source for citizenship data from the census, raising questions about the reliability of citizenship estimates for purposes of VRA litigation.

Finally, this Article examines the related issues of who should be included in the census and where they should be counted. The section deals with special populations such as soldiers and other Americans living abroad, college students, the homeless, and prisoners. Prisoners, in particular, present an important case, as some have argued that the wholesale involuntary transfer of convicted criminals away from their communities toward more rural and often whiter areas has allowed for the padding of legislative districts in one part of a state at the expense of districts in other parts of a state. For the first time in 2011, the census will make data available in time for redistricting about the number of prisoners in each census block. Jurisdictions will now be able to subtract out prisoners from the census redistricting data file. Some states have even gone further and have reallocated prisoners to their pre-incarceration address for purposes of redistricting…

…The race question on the 2000 Census was the first to allow respondents to check off more than one race. In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued “Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” a directive that changed the way federal agencies, including the Census Bureau, would categorize people according to race. By moving to a format that allowed respondents to check off any and all of the six principal racial groups on the census, the form effectively created one hundred and twenty six possible combinations of racial and ethnic categories. Although many social scientists worried about the policy implications at the time the OMB and the Census made these decisions, the actual political and legal effects of this change have been minimal. Even so, with each census, the share of the population identifying with more than one racial group will undoubtedly increase. At some point, the confusion caused by the data format, let alone the actual politics of multiracial identity, will present real political and legal challenges.

The first problem to recognize is a logistical one: How does one use the data with its 126 combinations in the process of redistricting? The short answer is that it is not easy unless one reaggregates the data into some more usable format. The OMB therefore promulgated a directive to do just that in the context of civil rights enforcement. The OMB issued Bulletin No. 00-02, which provides the following rules of aggregation:

“Federal agencies will use the following rules to allocate multiple race responses for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement.

• Responses in the five single race categories are not allocated.
• Responses that combine one minority race and white are allocated to the minority race.
• Response that include two or more minority races are allocated as follows:
  • If the enforcement action is in response to a complaint, allocate to the race that the complainant alleges the discrimination was based on.
  • If the enforcement action requires assessing disparate impact or discriminatory patterns, analyze the patterns based on alternative allocations to each of the minority groups.”

The OMB approach maximizes the numbers for racial minority groups by recategorizing some multiracial respondents as some category other than white. Critics of the OMB guidelines have therefore described them as a modern version of the “One Drop Rule”—the Jim Crow-era law where one drop of black blood made someone black. Defenders, however, would point out that the reaggregation rules merely create a presumption for purposes of civil rights enforcement. That presumption places the data in the light most favorable for the civil rights plaintiff (usually non-white). The reaggregation rules, while smacking of the same racial essentialism that often follows from any categorization scheme, simply try to provide rules of thumb that prevent such plaintiffs from being disadvantaged by the new census format…

Read the entire article here.

Review of Spencer, Jon Michael, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America

H-Net Reviews
January 1998

Richard L. Hughes

The Census, Race, and…

Amid a racial climate which includes a presidential advisory board on race and a discussion of slavery within the popular media, there lies an increasingly prominent dialogue on race in American culture. As the United States nears its next federal census in the year 2000, many Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the current four categories of white, black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. Some observers have supported the addition of a “multiracial” category where others, such as historian Orlando Patterson, have criticized the continued existence of racial categories on the census as a “scientifically meaningless” and “politically dangerous” “Race Trap.”[1]

One of the reasons why this debate resonates with so many Americans is that the discussion of race and public policy includes both the persistent belief that race is a fixed biological factor and the emerging notion of many scholars and policymakers that race is a fluid historical and sociopolitical construct. Acknowledging both perspectives, Jon Michael Spencer’s The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America is the latest scholarly contribution to this ongoing debate concerning the census and the possible use of the category “multiracial.” Borrowing both the title and analytical framework from Joel Williamson’s New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (1980), which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Spencer offers a cautionary tale about a “multiracial” category in the contemporary United States.[2] He contends that without a “frank assessment of race” and the end of racism, such a category would be “politically naive” and even “suicidal” to black Americans (pp. 148,155).

While Spencer shares Williamson’s astute perspective that the status of “mulattoes” or, to use Spencer’s term, “multiracial” Americans, is an instructive index for race relations, his argument about the dangers of a new government-sanctioned racial category centers on a “cross-cultural analysis” of multiracial Americans and the coloured people of South Africa (p. 11). Building on the comparative work of historian George Fredrickson, the writings of coloured intellectuals such as Richard Van der Ross and Allan Boesak, and interviews with other “coloured nationalists,” Spencer concludes that the creation of a coloured “middle status” under apartheid served to divide and oppress nonwhites by creating a buffer zone between white elites and the black masses (pp. xiii, 91).[3] The result was the continued oppression of South African blacks and a marginal status for coloured South Africans. Cognizant of the centrality of issues of personal identity in the current American debate, Spencer adds that the middle status robbed coloureds of the identity, esteem, and culture only possible through a unified black consciousness movement in more recent South Africa. Spencer’s valuable contribution lies in his comparative analysis in which the tragedy of South African apartheid underscores the possible dangers in careless additions to America’s racial landscape…

Read the entire review here.

Jen Chau Reflects on Her Work as a Change-Maker for Mixed-Race Communities

JVoices.com
2008-12-03

Cole Krawitz

Jen Chau, founder and director of SWIRL, (and an eagerly anticipated contributor to JVoices) will be presenting this Sunday at Inside the Activists’ Studio (which JVoices is a co-sponsor) on how activism needs a serious make-over, and tools for building a sustainable activist life. We caught up with her before the day’s event to ask her a few questions about her work, the celebration of SWIRL’s 8th Anniversary, and how the Obama campaign raised awareness of mixed-race experiences in the United States.

CK: Today you’re celebrating the 8th Anniversary of the organization you started, SWIRL, and it’s continual growth and success as a national multi-ethnic organization that challenges society’s notions of race. Tell us how this all got started, and what it’s like to watch your organization continue to grow.

JC: My work with Swirl primarily grew out of a real need for community. Since I had grown up very much between and outside of communities, I was determined to create something for those who had also experienced having “one foot in and one foot out” – mixed race individuals. Additionally, I decided at the start that Swirl would also serve interracial couples and mixed families. We have always been inclusive of anyone who feels that their experiences challenge this country’s traditional notions of “race,” culture, and identity.

Read the entire article here.

Color outside the lines

Columbia Missourian
2006-06-11

Sara Fernández Cendon

The boundaries between traditional racial categories shift as more people identify themselves as multiracial. The term adds another dimension to the complex issue of race in America.

Some say Tiger Woods started it all.

After winning the Masters Tournament in 1997, the golf star described himself as “Cablinasian” — as in Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian.

Colin Powell, a light-skinned black man, quickly dismissed Wood’s invention.

“In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you’re black,” Powell said.

Woods says “Cablinasian” honors his multiracial heritage. In 1997 he told Oprah Winfrey that being identified solely as an African-American bothered him. But others, who agree with Colin Powell, believe Woods will always be thought of as black and treated as such.

The Woods-Powell disagreement illustrates the deep rift between those who believe that race is a biological category and those who believe it is a political one. As more mixed-race couples join Woods’ camp by identifying their children as “multiracial,” or even “white,” civil rights groups worry about the loss of historical racial categories.

Critics of the multiracial label believe the American racial landscape is still dominated by the “one-drop” rule, which held that a person with just one black ancestor was still black. Their argument is that you don’t need much “color” to be a “person of color.” Discrimination affects people of color, they say, regardless of how light their skin might be or how they identify themselves racially…

…AGAINST THE MULTIRACIAL LABEL

David Brunsma

White people have made disparaging racial comments around him expecting to get a nod in return. But fair-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed David Brunsma has no tolerance for “whiteness” because “white” to him is synonymous with privilege. He says he gets questions like, “What are the best neighborhoods in town, if you know what I mean …” His response: “No, I really don’t know what you mean.”

Half-Puerto Rican and half-Caucasian, Brunsma does not think of himself as biracial, but he does consider “Hispanic” to be a racial category…

…FOR THE MULTIRACIAL LABEL

Susan Graham and Project RACE

You can’t blame Ryan Graham for not wanting to check “other” on questionnaires requesting racial information. “It makes me feel like a freak or a space alien,” he testified during a U.S. House hearing on multiracial identification back in 1997, when he was 12 years old.

Ryan’s mother, Susan Graham, is the executive director of Project RACE, an advocacy organization for multiracial individuals. She, too, testified before the House on behalf of a separate multiracial category in census forms.

In her testimony, Graham berated the “all that apply” compromise announced by the Office of Management and Budget just days before the hearing.

“My children and millions of children like them merely become ‘check all that apply’ kids or ‘check more than one box’ children or ‘more than one race’ persons. They will be known as ‘multiple check offs’ or ‘half and halfers,’” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience

This paper was first presented at a symposium on Arab Americans by:
The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
Georgetown University
1997-04-04

(This is also a chapter in Arabs in America: Building a New Future)

Issues of race and identity are certainly dominant factors in American social history. The dual legacies of slavery and massive immigration – and how they have intersected over time—deeply conditioned the ways in which the citizenry relates to race, and how the government intercedes to classify the population.

Throughout the more than 100 years that Arabs have immigrated to the U.S., there has been the need to clarify, accommodate and reexamine their relationship to this peculiar American fixation on race. In each historical period, Arabs in America have confronted race-based challenges to their identity. Today, the constituency known as Arab American is situated at an interesting social crossroads, where issues of minority and majority affiliation demand more attention—and reflection.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine race classification policy as it has impacted the Arab American experience. Rather than approach the question of identity development from within the ethnic boundaries (which continues to be ably and amply studied), this view is principally to examine the externally—imposed systems of classification in the American context: how and why they have developed, changed over time, and how they have related historically to Arab immigrants and ethnics…

…The effect of racial classification on Arab Americans thus became one of the topics that continued to be debated throughout the three-year review process. Under the heading of “emerging categories”, the AAI proposal was presented at the next major phase of the review process, a workshop sponsored by the National Research Council in February 1994 to discuss further the federal standards and make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget. The other principal emerging category issue proposed was the addition to the race choices of a multi-racial check off for individuals of mixed parentage who in the current framework are obliged to select one identifying race. Although other refinements to the federal guidelines were entertained, such as reclassifying Hawaiians as Native Americans and merging Hispanics into the race categories, the mixed race question was clearly the most controversial recommendation, one that generated the most organized public pressure and one that virtually every stakeholder requiring data on race—including the minority communities—oppose on the grounds that it skews continuity of race data and, in effect, serves to undermine policies that implement affirmative action.

Though overshadowed by the mixed race issue, the Arab American proposal continued to be raised in the final phase of the federal review: a series of public hearings sponsored by the OMB around the country during the summer of 1994. By then, a similar proposal for a specific “Arab American” category—as a linguistically-based identifier—was introduced by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Testimony for the regional category (Middle East/North African) with ethnic subgroups (Arab, Iranian, Turk, Cypriot, Assyrian, etc.) was presented alongside support for a distinctly Arab American classifier—a mixed signal cited in the OMB report as a lack of consensus over the definition of the population in question. This was in fact one of several findings cited by the OMB as not justifying further research in this area at this time; another factor was the relatively small size of the population. By September 1997, the review process was complete and the OMB decided against the Arab American proposals, leaving open the possibility of study at some future date…

Read the entire paper here.

The “Multiracial” Option: Social Group Identity and Changing Patterns of Racial Categorization

American Politics Research
Volume 39, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 176-204
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X10378845

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

This article focuses on a new and growing trend in the United States: multiracial (or mixed race) identification. Multiracial self-identification forces us to consider that the norms of racial identification are shifting in which Americans perceive greater individual agency in how they choose to racially identify compared to the choices offered in the past. Given this, is the willingness to identify as multiracial a proxy for changing political attitudes about American race relation? Using a unique data set that includes multiple measures of racial identification, this article examines the individual-level determinants that predict who is willing to self-identify as multiracial and the political consequences of this identity. This research demonstrates the complexity of racial identification today as well as the need to reconsider how race is measured in public opinion surveys. Most importantly, the data demonstrate that those who self-identify as multiracial hold different racial attitudes than those who do not.

Read or purchase the article here.