Mixed Race Studies

The Plight of Mixed Race Adolescents

First Draft: August 2005
This Version: July 2008

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Professor of Economics
Harvard University and NBER

Lisa Kahn, Assistant Professor of Economics
Yale School of Management

Steven D. Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics
University of Chicago and American Bar Foundation

Jörg L. Spenkuch
University of Chicago

Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect, on a host of background and achievement characteristics, mixed race adolescents fall in between whites and blacks. When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. We argue that these behavioral patterns are most consistent with the “marginal man” hypothesis, which we formalize as a two-sector Roy model. Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted. All other models we considered can explain neither why mixed race adolescents are outliers on risky behaviors nor why these behaviors are not strongly influenced by the racial composition at their school.

Read the entire paper here.

Racial Mixture and Affirmative Action: The Cases of Brazil and the United States

The American Historical Review
Volume 108, Number 5
December 2003

Thomas E. Skidmore, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of History Emeritus
Brown University

For me, as a historian of Brazil, North America’s “one-drop rule” has always seemed odd. No other society in this hemisphere has defined its racial types in such absolutist terms. David Hollinger, like many American historians before him, is clearly intrigued by this apparently unique “approach to the question of ethnoracial mixture.” How can we account for it? How could such a different racial classification have arisen in North America and not in any of the many other European colonial experiments in the New World?

Hollinger cites three features that in combination allegedly made U.S. racial evolution different. The first is a regime that tolerated slavery and thereby produced a significant population of slave descent. The second is massive immigration that enriched American society. The third is survival of an Indian population, even if only in token numbers.

But Hollinger examines the influence of these three factors on racial attitudes and behavior in the United States alone. If we add one other country, Brazil, to the picture, we find something rather startling. All three of Hollinger’s conditions also obtained in Brazil. Yet they did not produce the one-drop rule. Something else must have been at work.

If I had been writing this commentary a half century ago, I would have stressed the enormous difference between the two countries in the racial status given to the offspring of mixed unions.  Throughout the United States (multi-racial societies emerged in Charleston and New Orleans, but only temporarily), the one-drop rule defined mixed bloods (even the lightest mulattos) as black. In Brazil, by contrast, racial attribution depended on how the person looked and on the particular circumstances of that person, which led to the racial fluidity for which Brazil is famous…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto Advantage: The Biological Consequences of Complexion in Rural Antebellum Virginia

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 33, Number 1 (Summer 2002)
pp. 21-46
E-ISSN: 1530-9169; Print ISSN: 0022-1953
DOI: 10.1162/00221950260029002

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University

Although historians have long noted that African-Americans of mixed-race in the antebellum Lower South were given economic and social preference over those with darker skin, they have denied that people of mixed race received special treatment in the antebellum Upper South as well. Examination of data on the registrations of free African-Americans in antebellum Virginia, however, reveals that adolescents and adults with lighter complexions tended to have a height advantage, which suggests that they enjoyed better nutrition.

The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America

Social Forces
Volume 84, Number 1
September 2005
pp. 157-180

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor
University of Oregon

Skin tone variation within the United States’ black population has long been associated with intraracial stratification. Skin tone differentials in socioeconomic status reflect both the inherited privileges of a mulatto elite and contemporary preferences for lighter skin. Three influential studies have claimed that such differentials in educational, occupational and spousal attainment have remained strong in the post-Civil Rights era, based on results from large nationally representative surveys. However, these studies used a period conception of change which ignored the potential for changes across cohorts within the same period. I re-analyze the available data and find significant declines in skin tone differentials for younger cohorts, in terms of educational and labor market outcomes, but not in terms of spousal attainment. These declines begin with cohorts born in the mid-1940s. In addition, there is evidence of period declines of skin tone differentials in occupational attainment in the 1980s. I discuss possible explanations for the declines.

Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880

Department Colloquium Series
University of Washington, Department of Sociology
Savery Hall
2009-10-06 15:30 PDT (Local Time)

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor
University of Oregon

Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature. This paper provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom. The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population. Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Students Create Course About Mixed Identities

A&S Perspectives
College of Arts and Sciences
University of Washington
Editor: Nancy Joseph
July 2009

Last fall, students in the UW Mixed Club—a campus group for students of mixed race—discussed how rarely mixed-race issues were being addressed in their courses. Then they decided to do something about it.

That experience whet the students’ appetite for a more formal offering. They developed a proposal for a student-led course, “Mixed Identities and Racialized Bodies,” and floated the idea by several department chairs. The first to respond with an enthusiastic “yes” was Women Studies Chair David Allen, who agreed to offer the course as Women Studies 256, a course number reserved for credit/no-credit student-led courses.

With Women Studies on board, the students moved into high gear. “It was like, ‘Remember that great idea we had? Now we need to follow through,’” recalls Jessica Norberg, one of the students who developed and facilitated the course.

Coming up with assigned readings was particularly daunting. “There’s no mixed-race canon, so we had to come up with that,” says Norberg, who credits classmate Samantha Gonzalez with taking the lead on reviewing the available literature. “Samantha was kind of our librarian,” says Norberg. “The girl can read a book in half an hour. She did a lot of the research.”…

…Of course, everyone in class felt they knew at least one person with a mixed-race identity: President Obama. “This class really came together at an awesome time,” says Norberg, referring to Obama bringing greater visibility to mixed race issues. Norberg is quick to add that mixed race is among the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.

Identity and Health in the Narratives of People of Mixed Race

Center for the Advancement of Health Disparities Research
2nd Annual Teach-In: Health Disparities Awareness
2004-05-21

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, MPH, RN
Nursing Program
University of Washington, Tacoma

…Why Study People of Mixed Race?

• A rapidly growing part of the population
• Seldom acknowledged in studies, though this is improving with new census rules.
• Represent a challenge to existing constructions of race.
• Recent study showed increased health and behavioral risk factors for mixed adolescents. (Udry, et al, AJPH, November 2003)

View the entire presentation here.

Salt-sweat & Tears

Cinnamon Press
March 2007
80 pages
21 x 14 x 0.8 cm
Paperback ISBN 10: 1905614187; ISBN-13: 978-1905614189

Louisa Adjoa Parker

Of Ghanaian-British descent Louisa Adjoa Parker explores issues of identity, belonging, family and relationships in raw, honest, but crafted pieces.

Mulatto Girl

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her
head held high, her skin the colour
of caramel boiling on the stove.  See her smile
in the knowledge she is not the first
to walk this green and pleasant
countryside, she has history stirring within her limbs
she has Africa’s heat and England’s cold rain
pumping through her blood, her
DNA a beautiful mix of gene pools
scattered across continents.  She is strong.
She show Africa in a way the English hide.
She shows an eighteenth century master’s love for slaves.
She shows a slave’s contempt.
She shows twentieth century people brave enough
to cross a line made of different tones of skin,
to love in spite of hate.

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her head
held high, her quadroon baby girls
held on her hips, her hair thick and frizzed, lips
half full, there are no
white men dressing her in robes and jewels,
but see her smile, see her sway, as she walks
with her head held high.

Toward a Sociology of Racial Conceptualization for the 21st Century

Social Forces
Volume 87, Number 3, 2009
Pages: 1167-1192
DOI: 10.1353/sof.0.0169

Ann J. Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York Univeristy

Despite their longstanding interest in race, American sociologists have conducted little empirical research on sociodemographic patterns or longitudinal trends in “racial conceptualization” – that is, notions of what race is, how races differ, and the origins of race. This article outlines key empirical, methodological and theoretical considerations for a research agenda on racial conceptualization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than 50 college students, I describe the variety of race concepts among respondents, illustrate the importance of using multiple measures of conceptualization, and demonstrate the malleability of conceptualization, linking it to demographic context and thereby raising the question of its future evolution in the changing United States of the 21st century.

The color line, “problem of the twentieth century” as Du Bois (1986[1903]) famously put it, has long been a prominent concern of American sociologists (Calhoun 2007).  The ways in which they have engaged the topic of race, however, reflect the preoccupations of their times. Early work on “race relations” (Park 1949) gave way to theories of “racism” in the civil-rights era, drawing new attention to institutional structures of racial oppression (Winant 2000). Large-scale surveys began to track attitudes – toward groups and policies – that might pose obstacles to achieving racial equality (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan 1997). And in the wake of diversifying immigration inflows and rising intermarriage rates, scholars have revisited longstanding assumptions about racial identity and classification, launching new research on the categorization of mixed-race people and immigrant groups (Lee and Bean 2004).  By the end of the 20th century, American sociology had acquired a significant body of knowledge on race relations, attitudes, stratification and classification…

Read the entire article here.

The multiple-race population of the United States: Issues and estimates

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
2000-05-23
vol. 97 no. 11
pages 6230-6235

Joshua R. Goldstein

Ann J. Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

This paper presents national estimates of the population likely to identify with more than one race in the 2000 census as a result of a new federal policy allowing multiple racial identification. A large number of race-based public policies—including affirmative action and the redistricting provisions of the Voting Rights Act—may be affected by the shift of some 8–18 million people out of traditional single-race statistical groups. The declines in single-race populations resulting from the new classification procedure are likely to be greater in magnitude than the net undercount in the U.S. census at the center of the controversy over using census sampling. Based on ancestry data in the 1990 census and experimental survey results from the 1995 Current Population Survey, we estimate that 3.1–6.6% of the U.S. population is likely to mark multiple races. Our results are substantially higher than those suggested by previous research and have implications for the coding, reporting, and use of multiple response racial data by government and researchers. The change in racial classification may pose new conundrums for the implementation of race-based public policies, which have faced increasing criticism in recent years.

Read the entire article here.