Mixed Race Studies

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

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Measurement Uncertainty in Racial and Ethnic Identification Among Adolescents of Mixed Ancestry: A Latent Variable Approach

Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal
Volume 17, Issue 1 (January 2010)
pages 110 – 133
DOI: 10.1080/10705510903439094

Allison J. Tracy
Wellesley Centers for Women

Sumru Erkut
Wellesley Centers for Women

Michelle V. Porche
Wellesley Centers for Women

Jo Kim
Wellesley Centers for Women

Linda Charmaraman
Wellesley Centers for Women

Jennifer M. Grossman
Wellesley Centers for Women

Ineke Ceder
Wellesley Centers for Women

Heidie Vázquez Garca
Wellesley Centers for Women

In this article, we operationalize identification of mixed racial and ethnic ancestry among adolescents as a latent variable to (a) account for measurement uncertainty, and (b) compare alternative wording formats for racial and ethnic self-categorization in surveys. Two latent variable models were fit to multiple mixed-ancestry indicator data from 1,738 adolescents in New England. The first, a mixture factor model, accounts for the zero-inflated mixture distribution underlying mixed-ancestry identification. Alternatively, a latent class model allows classification distinction between relatively ambiguous versus unambiguous mixed-ancestry responses. Comparison of individual indicators reveals that the Census 2000 survey version estimates higher prevalence of mixed ancestry but is less sensitive to relative certainty of identification than are alternate survey versions (i.e., offering a “mixed” check box option, allowing a written response). Ease of coding and missing data are also considered in discussing the relative merit of individual mixed-ancestry indicators among adolescents.

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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

Biracial residents boxed in on U.S. census

MSNBC
2010-03-31

Mara Schiavocampo, Digital Correspondent
NBC Nightly News

We’ve asked viewers to tell us how their community has changed since the last census. One viewer from outside Olympia, Washingtonwrote in to tell the story of how diverse her community has become. NBC’s Mara Schiavocampo reports.

Racial Identity and Academic Performance: An Examination of Biracial Asian and African American Youth

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (October 1999)
pages 223-249
E-ISSN: 1096-8598 Print ISSN: 1097-2129
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.1999.0023

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

In the last three decades since the last anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, the United States has witnessed an increase in the number of multiracial persons, prompting a growing awareness of multiracial families.  The U.S. Census recently considered whether to add a multiracial category to the 2000 Census. Despite growing interest in the biracial population, there is little research on their psychological and socioeconomic outcomes. Does biracial status confer a relative disadvantage in psychological adaptation as early theorists warned? In turn, do biracials benefit in their socioeconomic outcomes relative to their ethnic counterparts? Using a nationally representative data set of youth (the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988), this article examines whether biracial youths encounter greater psychological difficulties as previous theorists suggest. I also examine whether the school outcomes of biracials more closely resemble that of their minority or white counterparts.

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Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality

In Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.). Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality
Russell Sage Foundation
November 2007
41 pages

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Mae Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race

In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays. The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested. By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census. Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro; whites no longer had mixed parentage; Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry; and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing. In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell; here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy.

Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro). Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history.

The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it. Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position—what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994). Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. For this reason—and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change—categorizations are unstable and impermanent.

We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States. That period encompassed significant change in systems of classification and their attendant hierarchies; thus we can see how classification and inequality are related, as well as tracing the political dynamics that reinforce or challenge inequality-sustaining policies. From the Civil War era through the 1920s, the Black population was partly deconstructed through official attention to mulattos (and sometimes quadroons and octoroons), then reconstructed through court decisions and state-level “one drop of blood” laws. As of 1930, a clear and simple racial hierarchy was inscribed in the American polity — with all the attendant horrors of Jim Crow segregation. However, the one-drop policy that reinforced racial inequality also undermined it. From the 1930s through the 1970s, that is, the Black population solidified though a growing sense of racial consciousness and shared fate, and developed the political capacity to contest their poverty and unequal status…

Read the entire chapter here.

Home on the Range: Kids, Visual Culture, and Cognitive Equity

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies
Volume 9, Number 2 (April 2009)
pages 141-148
DOI: 10.1177/1532708608326606

Lorna Roth, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This essay focuses on Binney and Smith’s creation and marketing of Crayola fleshtone art products from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, analyzing the company’s shifting nomenclature—from “flesh” to “peach” to its multicultural collection. After reflecting on the significance of Crayola’s color adjustment for children’s sociocultural and aesthetic development and for teacher’s pedagogical repertoires around diversity issues, I introduce an original notion–cognitive equity. I propose this as a refined way of understanding racial and cultural equity issues that don’t just revolve around statistics and access to institutions, but also inscribes a new normative vision of skin color equity directly into technologies, products, and body representations in a range of visual media. At the very early stage of children’s cognitive development when stereotypes and racisms are being formed, this would be a particularly intelligent design strategy in which to reinforce multiculturalism and multiracialism in all aspects of their visual culture and the commodities that are available to them.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracialism & the civil rights future

Daedalus
Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
Pages 53-60
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124406

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

Spurred by a small group of activists in the 1990s, the American system of racial classification changed recently in a conceptually bold way. With moving reference to the self-esteem of their children, along with the moral conviction that multiracial recognition could help the entire nation beyond an impasse, multiracial advocates were astonishingly successful in the 1990s.

Yet at the height of activity, the multiracial movement involved no more than a thousand individuals, mainly living on the East and West Coasts. Only a handful of leaders pushed the multiracial category effort forward, in fits and starts, throughout the decade. Despite its small size, the group that advanced the cause did not agree on much beyond the belief that forcing multiracial Americans into monoracial categories was inaccurate and inappropriate. Still, with only the slightest nudging by this poorly financed and increasingly fractious handful of activists, six states passed legislation between 1992 and 1998 to add a multiracial category to state forms. During the same period, legislators introduced multiracial category bills in five additional states, while two other states added a multiracial designation by administrative mandate.

The multiracialists’ best-known campaign would have added a multiracial category to the 2000 census. While the group did not get exactly what it wanted, its efforts led to the creation of an unprecedented “mark one or more” option, allowing individual Americans to identify with as many racial groups as they saw fit. Throughout the prolonged review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) culminating in this 1997 decision, the priorities of traditional civil rights advocates were twofold. First, they strongly opposed a stand-alone multiracial category, fearing that it would jeopardize civil and voting rights enforcement by diluting the count of minorities. Having successfully averted this outcome, but faced with no alternative to multiple check-offs, civil rights proponents secondly strove to ensure that multiple-race responses would be tabulated to a minority group.

The OMB met both demands. It rejected a stand-alone multiracial category and arrived at a tabulation scheme that has actually increased the tally of minority groups in some contexts, since anyone who checks off boxes for both white and a minority race counts as part of the latter for civil rights purposes. From one perspective, the technical fix adopted by the federal government–intended to balance the tension between growing racial fluidity on the one hand, and on-going racial and ethnic data needs on the other—amounted to symbolic appeasement. Federal-level multiple-race data serve no statutory purpose, and the tabulation guidelines stipulate a systematic process by which to convert multiple-race responses into single-race data. This is necessary because, to enforce civil and voting rights laws, we must be able to distinguish between those who are members of minority groups and those who are not.

Only 2.4 percent of the population, about 6.8 million people, identify with multiple races, as measured in 2000. At first glance, this might seem insignificant. Given that civil rights enforcement depends heavily on patterns, and that ‘multiple-race’ is not a protected class, the consensus has been that the multiple-race option is probably irrelevant to civil rights claims involving the size and the characteristics of minority groups. (1) But is the “mark one or more” format merely symbolic? Is the symbolism politically irrelevant?…

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The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism

Daedalus
Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
Pages 82-87
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124398

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Many Latin American nations have long proudly proclaimed a multiracial ideal: unlike the United States, countries like Brazil and Mexico have celebrated the mixing of races, and claimed to extend equal rights and opportunities to all citizens, regardless of race. As a result of the region’s regnant faith in racial democracy, it has long been widely assumed that Latin American societies are nondiscriminatory and that their deep economic and social disparities have no racial or ethnic component.

Yet new statistical evidence (a byproduct of democratization) suggests that most of the region’s societies have yet to surmount racial discrimination. At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform.

Latin American elites have always been deeply concerned about the racial stocks ol their populations and have always prized the European antecedents of their peoples and cultures—just like their Counterparts in the United States. But at the same time, and unlike their U.S. counterparts, Latin American political and cultural leaders in the first half of the twentieth century viewed their societies as unique products of racial intermingling. Sensing that such racial mingling might help define an emergent nationalism, intellectuals and statesmen argued that extensive racial mixture had resulted in the formation of new, characteristically ‘national’ races.

For example, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1882- 1959) famously celebrated the idea of racial mixture by arguing that all Latin Americans, and not just Mexicans, were a raza cósmica (cosmic race) comprised of both Spanish and indigenous peoples. But his conception of mixture left no doubt as to the…

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Counting Multiracial People in the Census: The Unfulfilled Wish for More Data

Racism Review
2010-03-26

Jenifer L. Bratter, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research
Rice University

People who study the multiracial population are constantly confronted with the problem of small numbers to work with.  A recent article I co-authored on the multiracial health (Bratter, Jenifer and Bridget K. Gorman. Forthcoming. “Does Multiracial Matter? A Study of Racial Disparities in Self Rated Health.” Demography)  required combining seven years of data from a health survey (over 1.7 million cases) to get 20,000 mixed-race folks for analysis.  The 2000 Census, with its “check all that apply” race question, remains the database with the largest number of cases and the 2010 Census will be the first to count race the same way as the preceding installment. While this may sound like a mundane detail, this will allow us to gauge growth, decline, or stability of this population and whether this will affect the population bases of single-race communities.  If the sheer anticipation doesn’t shake you to your core, perhaps you have forgotten the history of introducing this option into the Census…

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