Mixed Race Studies

On race, Obama sticks to a game plan of seeking steady progress within the system

The Washington Post
2015-01-18

Steven Mufson, White House correspondent, financial staff writer

During racially tense moments that have beset the nation recently, many Americans have longed for President Obama to display some of the passion and soaring rhetoric that made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 86 last week, a civil rights legend.

But the messages of restraint Obama has given in response to outcry over police violence are the same ones he has been dispensing for 20 to 30 years, echoes of thoughts he has had ever since he was a young community organizer in Chicago. His central tenets: Don’t give in to anger and violence; work to improve, not destroy, the legal system; and accept that change will come and things are getting better, albeit more slowly than many would like.

Though Obama’s views have evolved on issues such as gay marriage and national security during his six years in office, his views on race have remained remarkably consistent, and recent events appear to have affirmed rather than altered those views.

The president is likely to touch on race again Tuesday in his State of the Union address, and if so, he will probably acknowledge that on race, as on the economy, a “resurgent America” has made great progress but still requires greater inclusiveness.

Rather than making pressing demands for economic justice like those that defined King’s crusade, Obama will make a pitch for a tax package that will aid lower- and middle-class households and serve as modest tools for economic advancement for both whites and blacks…

Read the entire article here.

How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America

The Diane Rehm Show
WAMU 88.5 FM
Washington, D.C.
2015-01-05

Diane Rehm, Host

Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research
Pew Research Center

Jim Tankersley, Economic Policy Correspondent
The Washington Post

William Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program (author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America)
Brookings Institution

Jamelle Bouie, Staff writer covering politics, policy, and race
Slate

America is becoming a country with no racial majority. In 2009, for the first time in U.S. history, more minority than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most American children will be racial minorities. The nation’s diversity surge played a key role in Barack Obama’s election as president. Many see these trends as necessary as a much-needed younger minority labor force is already boosting an aging baby boom population. But challenges loom, including clashes over public resources, overcoming a cultural generation gap, and fears over losing privileged status. Diane and her guests discuss how new racial demographics are remaking America.

Listen to the show (00:51:40) here.

Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions

The Upshot
The New York Times
2015-01-03

Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics
Harvard University

The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.

Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers. As it turns out, an impressive body of research spanning decades addresses just these issues — and leads to some uncomfortable conclusions and makes us look at this debate from a different angle.

The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than whites. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.

But we can isolate the effect of race to some degree…

Read the entire article here.

Our real police/race problem: Diverse forces, white resentment, and America’s persistent divides

Salon
2015-01-02

Jim Sleeper

Why diverse police forces can’t seem to trump the economics of racism, or the twisted politics of white resentment

Nearly two decades before last month’s murders of New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a black man, the murder of a black NYPD officer, Charles Davis, anticipated claims we’re hearing that police-community problems aren’t really “black and white” and the only color that really counts is blue.

Yet the problems do remain “black and white” for reasons of economic exploitation and isolation that run deeper than race itself and that are gathering force, despite rising numbers of white/Asian and white/Hispanic marriages and of multiracial children, even in the families of police officers themselves. Unless we can face the reasons why more “diversity” in police ranks is a far-from-sufficient condition of justice, American society will remain more racist than many others, and thereby hangs my tale…

Read the entire article here.

Census Bureau’s Plan to Cut Marriage and Divorce Questions Has Academics Up in Arms

The New York Times
2014-12-31

Justin Wolfers, Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.

also: Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan

If the Census Bureau proceeds with a recently released plan, then in a few years’ time, we will know very little about how the contours of family life are changing.

We will not even know whether marriage and divorce rates are rising or falling. For all the talk of evidence-based policy, the result will be that important debates on issues including family law, welfare reform, same-sex marriage and the rise of nontraditional families will proceed in a statistical void.

Much of what I, an economist who has studied family issues, and my colleagues in this field have learned about recent trends in marriage and divorce has come from questions in the American Community Survey. It asks people whether they have given birth, married, divorced or been widowed in the past year. Their answers allow demographers to track marriage and divorce rates by age, gender, race and education.

These data have revealed many important social trends, including the rise of sharply different marriage and divorce patterns between rich and poor, and the increase in divorce among older Americans, even as it has fallen for younger people. And they have provided the only statistical window into the adoption of same-sex marriage.

The Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate these questions. It would follow a series of steps taken over recent decades that have collectively devastated our ability to track family change. This isn’t being done as a strategic policy choice but rather is the result of a series of isolated decisions made across several decades by statisticians scattered across various government agencies who have failed to understand the cumulative effect of their actions…

Read the entire article here.

Researchers have been thinking about race all wrong

Vox
2014-12-15

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Studies on race are a dime a dozen: researchers examine its relationship to everything from elementary school test scores to who’s most likely to develop diabetes to which groups are overrepresented in ethnic militias to who Americans vote for, and we read about the results in news stories that are supposed to help us makes sense of the world.

But two Ivy League scholars say race is actually much more complicated than decades of social science research has acknowledged, and they’re working to change that.

In their paper, “Race a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics,” which will be published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Harvard’s Maya Sen and Princeton’s Omar Wasow explain that people who do quantitative research on race typically treat it as a single, fixed trait — what scientists call an “immutable characteristic.”

Instead, they argue, quantitative researchers should acknowledge that any one person’s racial identity is more like a collection of many different factors — from skin color, to neighborhood, to language, to socioeconomic status. With this insight, it becomes possible to study race not as a single, unchanging variable, but rather as a “a bundle of sticks” that can be pulled apart and carefully examined one by one…

Read the entire article here.

Race as a ‘Bundle of Sticks’: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics

Annual Review of Political Science
Number 19 (2016)
2014-10-05
49 pages

Maya Sen, Assistant Professor
Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard University

Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor
Department of Politics
Princeton University

Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something “immutable.” At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operationalized as a “bundle of sticks” that can be disaggregated into elements. With elements of race, causal claims may be possible using two designs: (1) studies that measure the effect of exposure to a racial cue and (2) studies that exploit within-group variation to measure the effect of some manipulable element. These designs can reconcile scholarship on race and causation and offer a clear framework for future research.

Read an advanced copy of the entire article here.

The Half Has Never Been Told with Edward E. Baptist, Ph.D.

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2014-12-18 21:00 EST (Friday, 2014-12-19, 02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Producer and Host

Historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.

Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end—and created a culture that sustains America’s deepest dreams of freedom.

Edward E. Baptist is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and House Professor and Dean at the Carl Becker House at Cornell University.

For more information, click here.

Is Parental Love Colorblind? Human Capital Accumulation within Mixed Families

The Review of Black Political Economy
2014-07-04
DOI: 10.1007/s12114-014-9190-1

Marcos A. Rangel, Assistant Professor
Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Studies have shown that differences in wage-determinant skills between blacks and whites emerge during a child’s infancy, highlighting the roles of parental characteristics and investment decisions. Exploring the genetics of skin-color and models of intrahousehold allocations, I present evidence that, controlling for observed and unobserved parental characteristics, light-skinned children are more likely to receive investments in formal education than their dark-skinned siblings. Conscious parental decisions regarding human capital acquisition for their children seem to contribute for the persistence of earnings differentials and socio-economic stratification in Brazil.

Read or purchase the article here.

Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America

University of North Carolina Press
October 2014
320 pages
59 figs., 4 maps, 23 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-1783-1

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

and

The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)
Princeton University

Pigmentocracies—the fruit of the multiyear Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)—is a richly revealing analysis of contemporary attitudes toward ethnicity and race in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, four of Latin America’s most populous nations. Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America.

Edward Telles, PERLA’s principal investigator, explains that profound historical and political forces, including multiculturalism, have helped to shape the formation of ethnic identities and the nature of social relations within and across nations. One of Pigmentocracies’s many important conclusions is that unequal social and economic status is at least as much a function of skin color as of ethnoracial identification. Investigators also found high rates of discrimination by color and ethnicity widely reported by both targets and witnesses. Still, substantial support across countries was found for multicultural-affirmative policies—a notable result given that in much of modern Latin America race and ethnicity have been downplayed or ignored as key factors despite their importance for earlier nation-building.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA): Hard Data and What Is at Stake
• 2. The Different Faces of Mestizaje: Ethnicity and Race in Mexico
• 3. From Whitened Miscegenation to Triethnic Multiculturalism: Race and Ethnicity in Columbia
• 4. ¿El pals de todas las sangres? Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Peru
• 5. Mixed and Unequal: New Perspectives on Brazilian Ethnoracial Relations
• 6. A Comparative Analysis of Ethnicity, Race, and Color Based on PERLA Findings
• Notes
• References
• About the Authors
• Index