Mixed Race Studies

Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America’s New Racial/Ethnic Divide

Social Forces
Volume 86, Number 2 (December 2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-7605 Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0024

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Contemporary nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia, increasing racial/ethnic intermarriage, and the growing number of multiracial individuals has made the black-white color line now seem anachronistic in America, consequently raising the question of whether today’s color line is evolving in new directions toward either a white-nonwhite divide, a black-nonblack divide, or a new tri-racial hierarchy. In order to gauge the placement of today’s color line, we examine patterns of multiracial identification, using both quantitative data on multiracial reporting in the 2000 U.S. Census and in-depth interview data from multiracial individuals with Asian, Latino or black backgrounds. These bodies of evidence suggest that the multiracial identifications of Asians and Latinos (behaviorally and self-perceptually) show much less social distance from whites than from blacks, signaling the likely emergence of a black-nonblack divide that continues to separate blacks from other groups, including new nonwhite immigrants. However, given that the construction of whiteness as a category has been fluid in the past and appears to be stretching yet again, it is also possible that the color line will change still further to even more fully incorporate Asians and Latinos as white, which would mean that the historical black-white divide could again re-emerge.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black by Choice

The Nation
2010-04-15

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

The first black president has created a definitional crisis for whiteness.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was “Black, African American or Negro.” Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.

This choice disappointed some who have fought to ensure that multiracial people have the right to indicate their complex racial heritage. It confused some who were surprised by his choice not to officially recognize his white heritage. It led to an odd flurry of obvious political stories confirming that Obama was, indeed, the first African-American president…

Read the entire article here.

Census reveals history of U.S. racial identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2010-04-18

Sally Lehrman, Fellow
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
also Knight Ridder San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest

Whether or not they can lay claim to a special category, the “Confederate Southern Americans” who want to write themselves into the U.S. census section denoting “race” have a point.

Race, as the social scientists like to say, is “socially constructed.” Since the founding of this country, we have been making it up as we go. Race is a modern idea, historians and anthropologists tell us, a means to categorize and organize ourselves that we constantly adjust.

The U.S. census serves as an archive of this change, a record of classifications that have been “contradictory and confused from the very outset,” says Margo Anderson, a University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, urban studies historian and expert on U.S. census history. Begun in 1790 as a solution to the problem of how to allocate seats in Congress, the survey didn’t mention “race” originally, but the idea as we understand it today was central. How should slaves be counted? Were they entirely property or were they people? What to do with “civilized” Indians?..

…All along, the “race” category of the census has been a powerful social and political tool wielded both to discriminate and to guard against discrimination. At first, survey categories reflected ideas about the divide between black and white, which immigrants were eligible for citizenship, and how to sort categories of “Indians.” Later, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its groupings also made it possible to measure compliance with equal treatment under the law…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed feelings about mixed-race census option

The Stanford Daily
2010-03-31

Brianna Pang

The 2010 census, which hit mailboxes this month, is causing scholars and mixed-race people to debate, for just the second time in the count’s history, the dilemma of whether or not to check multiple “race” boxes.

One Stanford professor, Michele Elam, the director of the Program in African and African-American Studies, wrote in a recent op-ed in The Huffington Post that people should consider “thinking twice, but checking once,” since the goal of the census is to diagnose the resources the federal government should offer.

Elam said that the question of whether or not to check more than one box is not about meeting some level of “mixedness.”

“[The question is] a recognition that ‘race’ is and has always been a broad political category that has had and continues to have real impacts,” Elam wrote in e-mail to The Daily, “and most important, in this context, is being invoked to help track inequities based on race and to distribute economic resources.”

Matthew Snipp, the director of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity program, also commented on the effects of checking more than one box. According to Snipp, who has been involved in the census since the 1980s, census data is used to allocate $400 billion per year…

…As determined by the Department of Justice in the 2000 Census, if one were considered a member of a protected minority group and also a majority group, then for civil rights enforcement purposes, the person is counted as the minority…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Censuses From Around the World

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2009-03-29

Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College

Different countries formalize different racial categories.  Below are examples of the ”race” questions on the Censuses of 9 different countries.   They illustrate just how diverse ideas about race are and challenge the notion that there is one “correct” question or set of questions…

Read the entire article here.

The Census and the Social Construction of Race

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2010-03-29

Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College

Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethicity are social constructions, not biological categories.  The U.S. government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”  You can find them on the U.S. Census…

…Alvaro V. asked us to talk a little bit about the Census.  So, here are some highlights from the hour-long lecture I give in my Race and Ethnicity course…

Read the entire article here.

Does the British State’s Categorisation of ‘Mixed Race’ Meet Public Policy Needs?

Social Policy & Society
Volume 9, Number 1 (January 2010)
pages 55-69
DOI:10.1017/S1474746409990194

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

The England and Wales 2001 Census was the first to include ‘Mixed’ categories which have now been adopted across government. The four ‘cultural background’ options were highly prescriptive, specifying combinations of groups. This paper assesses how satisfactorily these analytical categories captured self-ascribed cultural affiliation based on the criteria of validity, reliability and utility of the data for public services. Finally, the paper asks whether we now need a census question on ethnic origin/ancestry in addition to—or instead of—ethnic group or whether multi-ticking or a focus on family origins might give more useful public policy data and better measure the population’s ethnic diversity.

Read the entire article here.

Obama Census Choice: African-American

The Huffington Post
2010-04-02

Mark S. Smith

WASHINGTON — He may be the world’s foremost mixed-race leader, but when it came to the official government head count, President Barack Obama gave only one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African-American.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Obama did not check multiple boxes on his U.S. Census form, or choose the option that allows him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He ticked the box that says “Black, African Am., or Negro.”…

…Obama the community activist and then politician always self-identified as African-American, and he now wears the mantle of America’s first black president with pride…

Read the entire article here.

Who are the ‘Mixed’ ethnic group?

Office for National Statistics [United Kingdom]
May 2006

Ben Bradford

Introduction

The last fifty years have seen the emergence of some new, predominantly British-born, ethnic minorities. These are the children of inter-ethnic partnerships, primarily partnerships between people from the White British group and people from ethnic minority groups. They include the children of White and Black Caribbean parents, White and Asian parents and White and Black African parents, as well as a multitude of other Mixed identities.

The majority of people who have a Mixed ethnic identity have a White parent and were born in Britain. One of the key issues of interest about the Mixed ethnic groups concerns the extent to which they are more similar to the White group, or to the ethnic minority groups, from which they are drawn. For example, whether young people from the Mixed White and Black Caribbean group experience the relatively low unemployment of their White peers, or the much higher unemployment of their Black Caribbean peers.

This article profiles the four Mixed ethnic groups identified in the 2001 Census. These groups are necessarily abstractions from the multitude of actual Mixed ethnicities which exist in Britain today. The three specific groups identified in the Census—Mixed White and Black Caribbean, Mixed White and Black African and Mixed White and Asian—were designed to allow the greatest number of people possible to easily identify themselves. Those who did not identify with one of these Mixed ethnicities could use a write-in space to provide their own description of their ethnicity.

We look at the size of the groups, their demographic and socio-economic characteristics and we consider how they compare with other ethnic groups. This article is intended to complement similar analysis of the ‘Other’ ethnic groups already published by ONS. Together this work provides an overview of the characteristics of these less well known ethnicities.

Table of contents

Introduction
Executive Summary
1. The introduction of Mixed ethnic group categories on the Census
2. Who are the Mixed ethnic groups?
3. The size of the Mixed ethnic populations in England and Wales
4. Age profile of the Mixed ethnic groups
5. Country of Birth
6. Religion
7. Region of residence
8. Socio-economic occupational class
9. Economic Activity
10. Unemployment
11. Educational Attainment
References

Read the entire article here.

Who Counts & Who’s Counting? 38th Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference

National Association for Ethnic Studies, Inc.
2010-04-08 through 2010-04-10
L’Enfant Plaza Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Larry Shinagawa, NAES 2010 Conference Chair

Our theme of “Who Counts and Who’s Counting” signals the importance of Washington, D.C. as a physical, cultural, and social nexus for policy decisions that will shape the 21st Century. With the 2010 Census signaling the dramatic changes that are affecting all ethnic and racial communities in the United States, who is doing the counting and how we construct the discourse and policies of who counts will be central to the future of all residents of the United States and will shape global relations around the world. We hope you will participate in this important dialogue; welcome to NAES 2010 in Washington, D.C.!

A paritial tenative program is below (All times are local EDT):

Session II – Thursday 10:30 – 10:45
Whiteness studies
Heidi Cooper, Emily Drew, Zaid Mahir

Racial classifications and stereotypes
Jamelia Bastien, Bonazzo Claude, Jacco van Sterkenburg

Session III – Thursday 13:30 – 14:45
Black identities
Janet Awokoya, Anne Brubaker, Yanyi Djamba, Mizaba Abedi

Defining Race
Tiffany King, Arturo Nunez, Maisha Wester

Session IV – Thursday 15:00 – 16:15
Beyond the binary of race
Kaysha Corinealdi, José Luis Morín, Jodie Roure

Session IX – Saturday 09:00 – 10:15
European Identities
Daniel Carawan, Jon Keljik, Elizabeth Onasch, Samantha Pockele

The race in “mixed” race? Reiterations of power and identity
Sue-Je Gage, Rainier Spencer, Nicole Truesdell