Mixed Race Studies

The Face of Japan Is Changing, But Some Aren’t Ready

Kokatu
2015-03-13

Brian Ashcraft

Eriana Miyamoto

Change happens slowly in Japan, but it does happen. You wake up one day, and things that weren’t possible years ago are happening today. Nowhere is that more evident than in the woman who will represent Japan in the Miss Universe pageant—but that’s to the chagrin of some who wanted a more “Japanese” winner.

Eriana Miyamoto is the twenty-year-old selected to represent Japan in the upcoming Miss Universe pageant. As reported by Mainichi News, Miyamoto even expressed uneasiness as to whether or not it would be okay for a hafu [half-Japanese] like her to represent Japan.

When introducing herself to reporters after her selection, Miyamoto said that her mother is Japanese and her father is American. She added that she was born and raised in Nagasaki and that while she doesn’t “look Japanese” on the outside, on the inside, there are many Japanese things about her…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Heritage Week 2015: AIDE Presents: “What Are You?” Exploring Biracial and Multiracial Identity (DICE)

The Ohio State University
Student Life Multicultural Center, Alonso Family Room
3034 Ohio Union, 1739 N. High Street
Columbus, Ohio
Thursday, 2015-03-26, 20:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

This presentation will provide an overview of the changing racial demographics in the United States in relation to multiracial people. This will include identifying issues multiracial college students face, U.S. Census data, examples of multiracial microaggressions, and examples of the use of multiracial identity in modern pop culture…

For more information click here.

Diversity Week Keynote Speaker 2015: “One Drop of Love” perfomed by Fanshen DiGiovanni Cox

Miami University
Oxford-Armstrong Student Center
Harry T. Wilks Theater
550 E. Spring Street
Oxford, Ohio
Thursday, 2015-03-12, 19:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

One Drop of Love produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, performed by Fanshen Cox Digiovanni is a multimedia solo show that tells the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the United States. In addition, Fanshen whom is of mixed race shares personal accounts of how it affected the relationship with her father.

Every spring, specifically in the month of March, the Diversity Affairs Council (DAC) plans and coordinates a week-long program known as “Diversity Week.” This week serves as a campaign that seeks to raise awareness of social differences, promote an appreciation for such differences, and encourage open dialogue about topics involving diversity.

The Diversity Keynote Address provides an opportunity for open dialogue about various diversity topics with students and the speaker.

For more information, click here.

Don’t Starve the Census

The New York Times
2015-03-10

The Editorial Board

Some Republicans in Congress are calling for cuts to the Census Bureau’s budget that would impair the agency’s already strained ability to gather basic data.

An accurate census is essential to determining the correct number of representatives from each state, the effectiveness of voting laws and the allotment of federal aid to states. In fact, information from the census and other surveys by the bureau is crucial to anyone — policy makers and businesspeople, researchers and citizens — who wants to understand the United States, assess where it is headed and influence its course on the basis of hard data.

The White House has requested a slim $1.5 billion for the bureau for fiscal year 2016. Much of that would be for the 2020 census, the planning of which is already behind schedule because of previous budget cuts. Next year is critical for the testing of data-gathering technology; Congress’s failure to provide timely financing to try out hand-held computers before the 2010 census forced a last-minute reversion to paper forms, which proved costlier than an orderly roll out of the computers would have been…

Read the entire article here.

Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014 to 2060: Population Estimates and Projections

United States Census Bureau
March 2015
P25-1143
13 pages

Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman

INTRODUCTION

Between 2014 and 2060, the U.S. population is projected to increase from 319 million to 417 million, reaching 400 million in 2051. The U.S. population is projected to grow more slowly in future decades than in the recent past, as these projections assume that fertility rates will continue to decline and that there will be a modest decline in the overall rate of net international migration. By 2030, one in five Americans is projected to be 65 and over; by 2044, more than half of all Americans are projected to belong to a minority group (any group other than non-Hispanic White alone); and by 2060, nearly one in five of the nation’s total population is projected to be foreign born.

This report summarizes results from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 National Projections, with a focus on changes in the age structure and shifts in the racial and ethnic composition of the population—both the total population as well as the native and foreign born…

…The Two or More Races population is projected to be the fastest growing over the next 46 years (see Table 2), with its population expected to triple in size (an increase of 226 percent). This group is projected to increase from 8 million to 26 million between 2014 and 2060. Its share of the total population is projected to increase from 2.5 percent…

Read the entire report here.

The Ins and Outs of Diversity in the Dominican Republic

Latina
2015-02-26

Cindy Rodriguez

In an attempt to debunk the stereotypes on what exactly a “Dominican looks like,” Twitter user UsDominicans809 posted a photo of a group of beautiful women (er, possibly models?) who are all super diverse in physical identity along with a sassy tweet.

“They’re all dominican; so next time somebody says “you don’t look dominican” tell that dumbass, we’re all unique,” as written by user UsDominicans809.

This comment accurately encompasses the identity struggle Latinos in the U.S. go through day in and day out which is why pieces like “Things You Shouldn’t Say To Latinos,” or Afro-Latinos and the often overlooked pale Latinas do so well. They reflect all the misconceptions that go with the Latino identity.

First, Latinos are not a race, it’s an ethnicity; but you knew that already. Latin America’s diverse racial demographics are the result of a mixed-race background from European, African and indigenous cultures.

But if you didn’t already know… race in the Dominican Republic is way more complicated than in the United States.

Here, you either fall under a handful of categories: Asian, Black, White, India, and so forth but, according to Public Radio International, Dominicans use an array of words to self-identify their degree of “blackness”, for lack of a better term, like: moreno, trigueno, and blanco-oscuro.

Which is odd because “more than 90 percent of Dominicans possess some degree of African descent — and that the very first rebellion of black slaves occurred here in 1522,” according to The Root. But, in the their federal census, most recently, 82 percent designated their race as “indio”, while only 4.13 percent designate themselves as black…

Read the entire article here.

Census categories for mixed race and mixed ethnicity: impacts on data collection and analysis in the US, UK and NZ

Public Health
Published online: 2015-02-25
DOI: 10.1016/j.puhe.2014.12.017

S. A. Valles, Assistant Professor
Lyman Briggs College and Department of Philosophy
Michigan State University

R. S. Bhopal, Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health;Honorary Consultant in Public Health Medicine
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

P. J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Public Health
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent, United Kingdom

Highlights

• The census mixed race/ethnicity classification systems in the US, UK and NZ are reviewed.
• These systems have limited success for monitoring mixed populations’ health.
• Obstacles to successful use are data input problems and data output problems.
• Data input problems include recording practices and fluidity of self-identification.
• Data output problems include data ‘prioritization’ and non-publication of data.

Read or purchase the article here.

One Drop of Love at Iowa State University

Great Hall, Memorial Union
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
2015-03-01, 19:00 CST (Local Time), Doors open at 18:30

One Drop of Love produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, performed by Fanshen Cox Digiovanni is a multimedia solo show that tells the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the United States. In addition, Fanshen whom is of mixed race shares personal accounts of how it affected the relationship with her father.

Admission is free.

For more information, click here.

Pigmentocracies: Educational Inequality, Skin Color and Census Ethnoracial Identification in Eight Latin American Countries

Research in Social Stratification and Mobility
Available online: 2015-02-25
DOI: 10.1016/j.rssm.2015.02.002

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

René Flores
University of Washington

Fernando Urrea Giraldo, Professor of Sociology
Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia

Highlights

• We use two measures of race and ethnicity – ethnoracial self-identification as used by national censuses and interviewer –rated skin color to examine educational inequality in eight Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
• We find that inequality based on skin color is more consistent and robust than inequality based on census ethnoracial identification.
• Census ethnoracial identification often provided inconsistent results especially regarding the afro-descendant populations of Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
• Skin color inequality was particularly great in Bolivia and Guatemala.
• Parental occupation, a proxy for class origins, is also robust and positively associated with educational attainment.
• In other words, both class and race, especially as measured by skin color, predicts educational inequality in Latin America.

For the first time, most Latin American censuses ask respondents to self-identify by race or ethnicity allowing researchers to examine long-ignored ethnoracial inequalities. However, reliance on census ethnoracial categories could poorly capture the manifestation(s) of race that lead to inequality in the region, because of classificatory ambiguity and within-category racial or color heterogeneity. To overcome this, we modeled the relation of both interviewer-rated skin color and census ethnoracial categories with educational inequality using innovative data from the 2010 America’s Barometer from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and 2010 surveys from the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA) for eight Latin American countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru). We found that darker skin color was negatively and consistently related to schooling in all countries, with and without extensive controls. Indigenous and black self-identification was also negatively related to schooling, though not always at a statistically significant and robust level like skin color. In contrast, results for self-identified mulattos, mestizos and whites were inconsistent and often counter to the expected racial hierarchy, suggesting that skin color measures often capture racial inequalities that census measures miss.

Read the entire article here.

Our rising white-black multiracial population

The Avenue / Rethinking Metropolitan America
The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
2015-02-23

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

The fastest growing racial group in the country is those who identify themselves as “two or more” races. Yet, perhaps most encouraging, as discussed in my book Diversity Explosion, is the rise in the population that identifies itself as both white and black. The racial divide in the United States has been so stark that it was not until the 2000 Census that federal statistics allowed multiracial status. For a long period in our history, persons were identified as black according to the “one drop” rule which stipulated that if they had any black ancestors, they could not be classified as white…

Recently, a clear sign of the softening of racial boundaries was the 2010 Census report that persons identifying as black and white were the largest biracial population at 1.8 million—more than double those identified in the previous census…

To read the entire article, click here.