Mixed Race Studies

More students identifying as multiracial

Collegiate Times
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
2011-02-17

Sarah Watson, News Reporter

More students pursuing a secondary education identify themselves as multiracial or multiethnic.

Students across the nation and in the Virginia Tech community are checking the box “two or more races” when filling out college applications. However, this increase is not based on more opportunity for multiracial students, a new categorization system for race or any other preconceived ideas alone.

Multiracial and multiethnic movements are not a new phenomenon, according to Wornie Reed, director of the center for race and social policy research.

“This has been going on for some time,” Reed said, adding that multiracial movements have been occurring for the past three decades. 

Reed said the moments were part of a new social context “that race is not a biological construct, but a social construct — but it doesn’t make it any less real.”

According to Ray Williams, director of Tech’s multicultural programs and services, the increase of students identifying themselves as multiracial or multiethnic has been influenced by the post-Civil Rights movement era that encapsulates our society.

“People are more comfortable coming out and saying that they are either one thing or another, or a mix,” Williams said…

Read the entire article here.

Blurring the color line: the new America

The Tufts Daily
Medford, Massachusetts
2011-02-22

Sylvia Avila

Students identify as multiracial more than ever before

Once considered a black and white issue, racial identity is hazier than ever.

According to findings released in June 2010 by the Pew Research Center, the current generation of American college students is the most multi−racial in history. One out of every 19 children born in the United States is the product of parents of different races or ethnicities and one out of every seven marriages today is between people of different races or ethnicities—a particularly noteworthy statistic considering interracial unions were illegal in some states as recently as 1967.

But the marked expansion in numbers brings unique complexities to the lives of mixed−race Americans. Issues can range from the trivial—indicating racial background on documents—to the critical, such as why and how to self−classify one’s race. President Barack Obama, perhaps the most prominent individual of mixed descent in the world, considers himself African−American rather than biracial.

Senior Jeewon Kim said that he doesn’t face a dilemma when asked about his race on paperwork.

“Nowadays you can always do multiple ones, so I always put ‘Caucasian/White’ and ‘Asian−American,’ and specifically ‘Korean’ if it lets me,” he said.

Kim explained that he has been at peace with his dual identity since high school…

…According to Lecturer in Anthropology Cathy Stanton, the reversal of the stigmatization of multiracial identity has been a long time coming.

“It seems like social thinking about this has finally come around to reflecting that fact and a lot of people are just saying, race doesn’t work for me as a category to capture who I am,” Stanton said.

Kim sees the potential for greater awareness of the distinctions and similarities both within and between racial groups.

“I hope that it means that there will be less ignorance… The question of ‘who are you?’ is more complicated than guessing it by sight and you would actually have to stop and learn something about that person,” he said.

Stanton, however, is less optimistic.

“If we’re in a moment where socially people are saying, ‘I don’t need the construct of race anymore to describe who I am politically and in a broader social context,’ are we at a point where we can stop talking about it?” she said. “Probably not, because of the historical injustices and divisions and hierarchies are still in place and their effects are still in place.”

Professor of Sociology Susan Ostrander expanded upon these inequalities.

“Research shows that individuals who are perceived to be black or Latino (whether they actually are or not) get fewer call−backs on job interviews, are arrested more often, have shorter life expectancies, are less likely to go to college,” Ostrander said in an e−mail to the Daily. “You can’t stop any of those events by shouting, ‘But I’m not really black. I’m half−white!'”…

Read the entire article here.

Columns: Racial lines no longer just black and white

The Minnesota Daily
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul
2011-02-21

Lolla Mohammed Nur

Clear-cut racial categories restrict how multiracial Americans identify themselves.

Based on her appearance, you wouldn’t easily be able to guess University of Minnesota sophomore Mary Taylor‘s racial or ethnic heritage. But if you ask the communications studies major what her ethnicity is, she’d tell you she is three-quarters white, 12.5 percent black and 12.5 percent Native American—a heritage she makes sure to represent when filling out surveys.

The current generation of college students encompasses the largest group of mixed-race people to come of age in the U.S., according to a recent New York Times series on multiracial identity.

Although young Americans increasingly identify themselves as multiracial, they often feel that their fluid identities are restricted when asked to self-identify on paper.

Under new requirements set by the U.S. Department of Education, which will take effect this year, multiracial non-Hispanic students who choose multiple races on surveys will be placed in a “two or more races” category. The justification for this is to offer students of mixed heritage more options to self-identify, and some say it demonstrates the U.S.’s greater appreciation of the fluidity of racial identity.

However, many sociologists fear it will lump all multiracial groups into one category, ignoring the different life experiences and the varying levels of discrimination that members of various multiracial subgroups face.

“It’s like the ‘other’ category or the ‘multiracial’ category because everyone get’s glommed together and you can’t even interpret it,” said sociology faculty member Carolyn Liebler. “It’s a battle whenever you’re trying to compile information about people’s race. On the one hand, institutions want to know who you are, they want you to self-identify … but on the other hand, the entities that want to create statistics would really prefer if you could give a simple answer.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Classification Gap

The Huffington Post
2011-02-17

Daniel Arrigg Koh, MBA Student
Harvard Business School

Growing up as a person of Korean and Lebanese descent, I was proud of my heritage and enjoyed discussing it with my peers. While few had ever met anyone with such an ethnic background before, people were always eager to learn more. I always felt that it was a valued part of my identity—something that could happen in few other places but the United States. However, when it came time to apply to colleges, I quickly realized that conveying who I was would not be so easy.

On many of the applications I read, the choices were limited to “Caucasian,” “Black or African-American,” “Asian,” “Native American,” and “Other.” Some offered the opportunity to “write-in” specific races. On the whole, a significant portion of colleges did not allow me to represent myself accurately on the application. This issue symbolizes a significant problem with race identification in America, one that, with the increasing diversity in this country, deserves to be addressed with all possible expediency.

University admissions often state that their reasons for asking demographic information are legal and informational only. From a research and sociological perspective, it is understandable. However, the current system falls far short of the detail that educational institutions could and should collect. For example, many schools prohibit “ticking” more than one race category, or instead provide a category entitled “multiracial.” This forces someone like me to either “choose” a race to be represented as or indicate “multiracial,” which on its own means very little—nearly every person in America is “multiracial” by some standard…

…This “classification gap” has other serious implications. For example, a 2007 study by Princeton and University of Pennsylvania researchers revealed that black students from immigrant families (defined as those who have emigrated from the West Indies or Africa) represented 41% of the black population of Ivy League schools vs. 13% of the black population of 18-19 year-olds in the United States. This information is striking and important in our nation’s focus on closing the achievement gap; however, the status quo of race classification leaves us unable to track such statistics on a uniform, nationwide level…

Read the entire article here.

“Two or More Races” or Just Another Category?

Open Salon
2011-02-20

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.

The Department of Education’s “two or more races” category may appeal to some people but this is a slippery slope towards ignoring race altogether. Race still matters. Combating racism still matters. Acknowledging multiracial identities or agreeing to be placed in a “two or more races” category does not remove our responsibility to fight against the ways race—and racism—have impacted our lives in many, and sometimes violent, ways.

The recent debate about the Department of Education’s “two or more races” category demonstrates both the importance of race today and the absurdity of racial categories. As Rainier Spencer rightly reminds us, racism is alive and well in the 21st century. The only way we have found to combat institutional racism is through the accurate reporting of racial data and our ability to make connections between race, class, gender and other factors such as employment and housing. Without this information we will not be able to measure discrimination or make policies that help create equality for all Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race students, interracial couples become norm as US diversifies

The Flor-Ala (Student newspaper of the University of North Alabama)
Florence, Alabama
2011-02-10

Lucy Berry, News Editor

When some people see UNA students Lauren Kirby and DeForrest Brown together in public, one of the first things they notice about the couple are their racial differences.

But the young duo, who met in 2009 and quickly formed a friendship after sharing a mutual love for music, rarely notice the fact that they are of separate races. Kirby, a Caucasian American, and Brown, an African American, have to remind themselves that they are an interracial couple.

“My father always told me when I was a kid that I could marry any man, no matter what color he is, as long as I was in love with him,” Kirby said. “I don’t worry about what other people around me think. I know there are people who probably don’t secretly approve of our relationship, but that’s their problem.”

The Pew Research Center reported in a 2008 analysis that one in seven new marriages in the United States is between spouses of different races or ethnicities…

…Though more mixed-race students are popping up around college campuses, many U.S. citizens still think of themselves in specific racial terms, making it difficult or impossible for some mixed-race young people to establish their own identity.

“I am who I am and have always been taught that,” said UNA student Lauren Davis, who comes a mixed African American and Cuban background. “There is no reason to ever be confused about who you are. You can be purple or polka dot, but your personality is not based on race.”

The influx of immigration and increasingly relaxed attitudes about interracial marriages have contributed to a more diverse America, but many citizens are skeptical about blending the races and believe it may lead to stratification among racial groups.

Dr. Gabriela Carrasco, assistant professor of psychology, said it’s common for people to classify others in modern society.

“We naturally categorize people and things cognitively, and even if we were to melt all of the races together, humans would probably still find a way to categorize something else,” she said. “I tell my students that categorization is not the negative. It is stereotypes, generalizations and the behaviors in which people act differently toward other groups that are the problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma

The New York Times
2011-02-13

In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues.

Introduction

An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category.

But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.

Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?

Debaters:

“Why Race Still Matters”
Anthony P. Carnevale, Research Professor and Director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
Georgetown University

“‘Check One’ Didn’t Work”
Susan Graham, Executive Director
Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally)

“Identity and Demography”
Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

“The New Color Wheel”
Eric Liu
Author of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998)

“Racism and the Multiracial Label”
Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011)

“Take the Politics Out of Race”
Shelby Steele, Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution

“Race, Poverty and Educational Equity”
Gerald Torres, Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

…The change endangers the accurate monitoring of civil rights compliance in education. Despite the important gains of the civil rights movement, much discrimination still exists, albeit in less overt forms. Civil rights compliance monitoring—the use of racial statistics to uncover suspicious patterns in education, housing, employment, etc.—is our very best means of detecting covert and institutional discrimination. It is the reason for all those “check boxes” for racial identity that no one loves…

…People, including students, are not discriminated against on the basis of being mixed-race, but rather on the basis of being one part of that mixture The federal race categories, crude as they might be, allow us to track how people are treated based on how they are perceived by others. The dangerous result of the Education Department’s provision will be two-fold.

On one hand, the “two or more races” category will provide no useful data for compliance monitoring; while on the other, real racial discrimination against some students will go untracked by the compliance monitoring apparatus because students who check more than one box will not be placed in the categories that are in fact motivating their unjust treatment…

Rainier Spencer

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…But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans), where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade—and where lighter is still usually seen as better.If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America…Eric Liu

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…This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics—or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses…Anthony P. Carnevale

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…All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts. Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group…Susan Graham

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…Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded……The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?…Gerald Torres

Read the entire debate here.

US, MSU see increase in multiracial students

The State News
East Lansing, Michigan
2011-02-02

Emily Wilkins

They call her “blackbean” – half black, half Mexican.

It’s a nickname embraced by Lynette Davidson, a political theory and constitutional democracy and communication sophomore and one of the 710 students at MSU who identifies with two or more races. Davidson’s mother is Mexican, her father is black.

Davidson is part of a growing number of college students who identify as biracial or multiracial.

MSU [Michigan State University] did not offer two or more races as a choice for students on university documents until fall 2010, so it is unknown how this number has changed during the past several years. However, the number of people in the U.S. who identify with two or more races is growing. Data from the U.S. Census shows between 2004-09, 838,000 babies were born with two or more races, an increase of more than 100,000 from the number born between 2000-04, which also increased from the five-year period prior.

Davidson said she does not fully feel like she belongs in black or Mexican student organizations.

“I never really identify with either of them,” Davidson said. “I grew up in a predominately white area.”

Students such as Davidson are not alone, but they do not represent the feeling of all multiracial students…

…Kristen Renn is an associate professor of higher, adult and lifelong education who has written a book about multiracial college students. Renn said not all racial groups are open to multiracial members, and a person’s acceptance and comfort level within a group is based on multiple things.

“Sometimes it has to do (with) a way a student looks,” Renn said. “(For example) it looks to the outside world that they are Asian, but they might have grown up in a household that didn’t celebrate a lot of Asian holidays or have a lot of Asian food. (They) come to campus and find themselves outside (Asian) student culture.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above

The New York Times
2011-01-29

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

Race Remixed: A New Sense of Identity. Articles in this series will explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—In another time or place, the game of “What Are You?” that was played one night last fall at the University of Maryland might have been mean, or menacing: Laura Wood’s peers were picking apart her every feature in an effort to guess her race.

“How many mixtures do you have?” one young man asked above the chatter of about 50 students. With her tan skin and curly brown hair, Ms. Wood’s ancestry could have spanned the globe.

“I’m mixed with two things,” she said politely.

“Are you mulatto?” asked Paul Skym, another student, using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles. When Ms. Wood confirmed that she is indeed black and white, Mr. Skym, who is Asian and white, boasted, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” in affirmation of their mutual mixed lineage.

Then the group of friends—formally, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association—erupted into laughter and cheers, a routine show of their mixed-race pride.

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage…

…No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.

And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

Prof. Rainier Spencer, director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” says he believes that there is too much “emotional investment” in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation’s age-old divisions. “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe,” he said. “A new Balkanization of race.”…

…The Way We Were

Americans mostly think of themselves in singular racial terms. Witness President Obama’s answer to the race question on the 2010 census: Although his mother was white and his father was black, Mr. Obama checked only one box, black, even though he could have checked both races.

Some proportion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans. What has changed is how mixed-race Americans are defined and counted…

Read the entire article here.

Patterns of Situational Identity Among Biracial and Multiracial College Students

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 23, Number 4 (Summer 2000)
pages 399–420
E-ISSN: 1090-7009, Print ISSN: 0162-5748
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2000.0019

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, the author explored the experience of 24 bi- and multiracial students at three postsecondary institutions. Five patterns of racial identification emerged, with peer culture and campus demographics as the major determinants of students’ identity. These findings, with insights into multiracial students’s experiences, can model how to explore other areas of socially constructed identity. It also introduces a conditional model for how students create new identity-based space on campus.

Despite significant and increasing numbers of biracial and multiracial students, almost nothing is known about their development and interactions in the college environment. This topic has special relevance to higher education at a time when multiraciality has become a matter of political and popular interest. A political movement of mixed-race people emerged in the last decade, demanding attention to mixed-race students in K-12 education and changes in data collection by racial group membership on the U.S. 2000 census (Schnaiberg, 1997; Yemma, 1997). For the first time, census respondents will be offered the option of selecting one or more racial categories (Baron, 1998; U.S. Office, 1997).

Prior to the October 1997 change in the census guidelines, studies showed that less than 2% of the population claimed to belong to more than one of the government’s existing racial categories (Schmidt, 1997). While this number is not very large compared to the general population, a change in how these individuals indicated their racial group categorization on the census could significantly influence racial group statistics used to enforce various civil rights laws (Baron, 1998). In the ongoing battle over access, equity, and affirmative action policy in higher education, racial statistics matter. At present there is no accurate count of multiracial students and no systems in place to deal with the new check-as-many-as-apply option.

This study does not attempt to develop such a system, but it begins to explore how multiracial students might see themselves in the context of higher education. While raising larger questions about the use of racial categories in higher education, this study focused on how campus peer culture influenced the ways in which multiracial students made meaning of their racial identity in college. Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, I explored how multiracial students’ interactions with peers, involvement in activities, and academic work influenced the kinds of identity-based spaces they chose to occupy and what caused them to create new, multiracial spaces on the monoracially defined campus landscape. Among 24 students at three institutions who identified themselves as biracial or multiracial, five patterns emerged in how students occupied existing identity-based spaces on campus or created new, multiracial spaces. The major determinants of students’ identity choices were campus racial demographics and peer culture. I developed a conditional model to explain the construction of public multiracial space on campus and ask how it might be applied in other situations.

The results of this study provide insight into the experience of multiracial students and can be used as a model to explore multiracial students’ lives at other institutions, as well as to explore other areas of socially constructed identity (gender, sexuality, class) on campus. The study builds on the multiracial identity development literature and fills a gap in college student development literature. It does not claim to represent the lives of all multiracial students, but it raises issues and questions that transcend institutional boundaries: How do students choose, create, and occupy public space on campus? How does peer culture mediate these choices? How might higher education address the needs of a growing population of multiracial people through programs, services, and policies?…

Read the entire article here.