Mixed Race Studies

Counting The People

San Francisco Call
Sunday, 1890-06-01
page 6, column 7
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Some of the Inquires to Be Made by the Census Enumerators in June

The eleventh census of the United States will be taken during the month of June. The census enumerators will begin their work on to-morrow, and will visit every house and ask questions concerning every person and every family in the United States. The questions that will be asked call for the name of every person residing in the United States on the first day of June, with their sex and age, and whether white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, or Chinese, Japanese or Indian. Inquiry will be made also of every person as to whether they are single, married, widowed or divorced and, if married, whether married during the year. The place of birth of every person, and the place of birth of the father and mother of each person, will also be called for, as well as a statement as to the profession, trade or occupation followed and the number of months unemployed during the census year. For all persons 10 years of age or over a return must be made by the enumerator as to the number able to read and write, and also the number who can speak English. For those who cannot speak English the particular language or dialect spoken by them in will be ascertained. For children of school age, also, the number of months they attended school will be recorded by the census enumerators. In the case of mothers an inquiry will be made as to the number of children they have had, and the number of these children living at the present time. This inquiry is to be made of all women who are or have been married, including all who are widows or have been divorced. Foreign-born males of adult age, that is, 21 years of age or over, will be asked as to the number of years they have been in the United States, and whether they are naturalized or have taken, out naturalization papers. Of the head of each family visited the question will be asked as to the number of persons in the family, and whether his home is owned or hired; also, if owned, whether the home is free from mortgage incumbrance. If the head of the family is a farmer, similar inquiries will be made concerning the ownership of the farm. In addition to these inquiries, all of which are made on the population schedule, the law under which the census is taken makes provision for special inquiries concerning such of the population as may be mentally or physically defective in any respect, that is insane, feeble-minded, deaf, blind, or crippled, or who may be temporarily disabled by sickness, disease, or accident at the time of the enumerator’s visit. Certain special inquiries will also be made concerning inmates of prisons and reformatories and of charitable and benevolent institutions. Besides this, a statement will be called for concerning all persons who have died during the census year, giving their name, age, sex, occupation and cause of death.

This official count of the people comes but once in ten years, and every family and every person should consider it to be a duty to answer the questions of the census enumerators willingly and promptly, so that definite and accurate information may be gained concerning the 65,000,000 people living within the bounds of this great country.

Race doesn’t fit in a checkbox

Arkansas Times
Little Rock, Arkansas
2013-05-02

Gene Lyons

Lamentably, the Boston Marathon bombing re-opened some of the most poisonous arguments in American life. Specifically, are the Tsarnaev brothers “white”? It’s a meaningless question.

Some hotheads couldn’t wait to declare all Muslims suspect. Certain thinkers on the left (David Sirota, Salon) argued against collective guilt while oddly lamenting that “white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated” for the crimes of Caucasian psycho killers.

Should they be?

Anyway, I’d previously treated the theme of ethnicity as destiny in a column about which racial ID boxes President Obama should have checked on his 2010 census form.

Everybody knows Obama’s mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father an exchange student from Kenya. But there’s no box labeled “African-American.” So the president checked “black.” He could also have checked “white,” but chose not to.

This decision disappointed a unique student group at the University of Maryland, although most understood it. Recently profiled in the New York Times, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association could with equal accuracy be called “Students Whose Mothers Were Asked Insulting Questions by Busybodies at the Supermarket.”…

…But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Maryland group strikes me as entirely benign. Asked which boxes she checks, vice-president Michelle Lopez-Mullins, age 20, says “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”…

…Anyway, back to President Obama, who’s written books about his mixed inheritance. It appears to me that along with his great intelligence, Obama’s mixed background helped make him an intellectual counterpuncher — watchful, laconic, and leery of zealotry, a born mediator.

Like a man behind a mask, Obama watches people watch him.

Checking the “black” box on the census form, however, was the politically canny choice. Americans aren’t far from the days when absurd categories like “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” could determine people’s fate. Sadly, had he checked the “white” box too, many voters would have resented it.

My own choices were simpler. Raised to think of myself as Irish before American — all eight of my great-grandparents emigrated during the late 19th century, hunkering down in ethnic enclaves within walking distance of salt water — I was taught that there was a proper “Irish” opinion on every imaginable topic…

Read the entire article here.

What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

Princeton University Press
June 2013
296 pages
6 x 9; 5 line illus. 3 tables.
Cloth ISBN: 9780691157030
eBook ISBN: 9781400846795

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001

America is preoccupied with race statistics–perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different “race” line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government’s “statistical races.” Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.

Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical “Asian race.” One that once tried to divide the “white race” into “good whites” and “bad whites,” and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?

What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It’s not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today’s race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part I What Are Statistical Races?
  • Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview
  • Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
• Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces
  • Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation’s First Statistical Race
  • Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census
  • Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There?
• Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
  • Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool
  • Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
• Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale
  • Chapter 8 Pressures Mount
  • Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line
• Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need
  • Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly?
  • Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be
• Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad–Brazil, France, Israel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Rise of Ethnic Pride for Multicultural Americans

TheGuyOnSports
2013-04-13

Damien Haynes

In America, race and skin color are some of the most critiqued and analyzed issues within our society. For some people, growing up of mixed race decent can either be a detriment or a blessing. It can separate you from the rest of society or educate you to aspects of society that (for most people of a monoracial background) would go unlearned. People who are of mixed race decent is considered to be the fastest growing populous in the United States with a 32 percent increase as of 2010 on the U.S Census, according a CNN report. Although asking someone “What are you”, or “Where does your family come from,” is not lost in the consciousness of American conversation. The acceptance of persons who are of mixed race decent and those who identify as bi-racial or mixed, is on the rise.

To be of a multiracial background, a person has to be categorized as having the racial makeup of two or more ethnic groups. In a world where checking one box on a job application or census report is all that is offered, some people are caught between choosing one race over the other, not only on paper, but in some cases, all together within society.

The analysis of the United States population shows that multiple race groups such as White and Asian combinations, and White and Black combinations are the highest contribution to the change in the United States Census reporting since 2000…

…According to Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor and Chair of the American Indian Studies Department of San Francisco State University, more and more individuals are identifying themselves as multiracial due to an overall sociological acceptance and shift in perception….

Read the entire article here.

How to update census’ race question

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-05

Clarence Page

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page prefers an America where diversity and unique ethnicities are celebrated, not homogenized.

A notable example of how Americans fall through the cracks in census data-gathering caught my eye recently. It appeared on the black-oriented TheRoot.com website under this intriguing headline: “I found one drop; can I be black now?”

The “one drop” is a reference to the old oddly American racial rule that one drop of “black blood” in your veins makes you black. As a full-fledged black American, I wondered who is so eager to join the club?

The answer turned out to be a white woman who had written to The Root’s “Race Manners” advice column. Through genealogical records she uncovered an African-American ancestor who long ago had passed for white. Now faced with census forms, among other documents that ask us Americans for our race, she was wondering which box to check.

“Do I check both, and come across as a liar to those who don’t know my history?” she asked. “Or do I check just white, and feel like a self-loathing racist?”

I sympathize with the woman’s confusion. In changing times, government forms are often the last to catch up.

It has only been since 2000, for example, that mixed-race people are allowed to check more than one racial box on the U.S. census. And that’s just one area of government forms not keeping up with America’s changing demographics…

…More extensive questions of ethnicity and ancestry have been asked since 2000 by another set of longer forms, the American Community Survey. Unlike the 10-year census, the survey is conducted among a sample of 250,000 people every month.

That’s a good model, some experts, say, for how the 10-year census could give a more complete and realistic picture of America’s changing demographic landscape.

“We shouldn’t be governing in the 21st century by a race classification given us by a German doctor in 1776,” former Census Director Kenneth Prewitt wrote to me in an email…

Read the entire article here.

Solo Show at UCSB’s MultiCultural Center Examines Notions of Racial Identity

Public Affairs & Communications
University of California, Santa Barbara
News Release
2013-05-01

Contact: Andrea Estrada: 805-893-4620; George Foulsham: 805-893-3071

Multimedia performance is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

(Santa Barbara, Calif.)—When actress and playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni married the love of her life in 2006, her father did not walk her down the aisle. In fact, he declined to attend the wedding altogether.

Seeking to understand why he chose not to participate, DiGiovanni began a trek through family history—and time and space—that ultimately led to her M.F.A. thesis project: the multimedia one-woman play, “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval.”

DiGiovanni will perform the hour-long show at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center Theater on Tuesday, May 7. The performance begins at 6 p.m. and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with G. Reginald Daniel, professor of sociology at UCSB. Daniels is a leading expert in the field of critical mixed race studies…

…A leading activist on issues related to mixed race, DiGiovanni is an actor, comedian, producer, and educator. She developed “One Drop of Love” as the thesis project for her Master of Fine Arts degree in film, television, and theater from California State University Los Angeles. She will use footage from her performances—the most recent was at the University of Maryland—to produce a documentary film…

Read the entire news release here.

New Demographic Perspectives on Studying Intermarriage in the United States

Contemporary Jewry
Published Online: May 2013
pages 1-17
DOI: 10.1007/s12397-013-9103-9

Bruce A. Phillips, Professor of Jewish Communal Service
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles

The study of Jewish intermarriage has largely ignored the measurement conventions prevalent in the field of demography such as using first marriages (as opposed to current marriages) and not controlling for mixed parentage. I re-analyze the NJPS 2000–2001 using first marriages and controlling for parentage and find evidence that intermarriage has leveled off among single ancestry Jews. Jewish intermarriage is placed in an American context by (1) putting in Kalmijn’s conceptual schema and (2) using the odds-ratio to compare intermarriage in controlling for group size. Single ancestry Jews are surprisingly endogamous compared with other groups in America. Two new directions for further research in a demographic context are discussed: including non-jewish spouses in population studies and thinking about mixed ancestry Jews in the context of multi-racial persons.

Within this Article

• What’s Missing in the Measurement of Intermarriage
• Considering Jewish Intermarriage in the American Context
• Discussion
• References

Read or purchase the article here.

Double-Checking the Race Box: Examining Inconsistency between Survey Measures of Observed and Self-Reported Race

Social Forces
Volume 85, Issue 1
pages 57-74
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0141

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Social constructivist theories of race suggest no two measures of race will capture the same information, but the degree of “error” this creates for quantitative research on inequality is unclear. Using unique data from the General Social Survey, I find observed and self-reported measures of race yield substantively different results when used to explain income inequality in the United States. This occurs because inconsistent racial classification is correlated with other respondent characteristics such as immigrant generation, educational attainment and age.

Read or purchase the article here.

In a first, black voter turnout rate passes whites

Associated Press
2013-04-29

Hope Yen

WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November’s exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.

The analysis also used population projections to estimate the shares of eligible voters by race group through 2030. The numbers are supplemented with material from the Pew Research Center and George Mason University associate professor Michael McDonald, a leader in the field of voter turnout who separately reviewed aggregate turnout levels across states, as well as AP interviews with the Census Bureau and other experts. The bureau is scheduled to release data on voter turnout in May.

Overall, the findings represent a tipping point for blacks, who for much of America’s history were disenfranchised and then effectively barred from voting until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

But the numbers also offer a cautionary note to both Democrats and Republicans after Obama won in November with a historically low percentage of white supporters. While Latinos are now the biggest driver of U.S. population growth, they still trail whites and blacks in turnout and electoral share, because many of the Hispanics in the country are children or noncitizens…

Read the entire article here.

‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 80-97

Kate Riddell
Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington

IN 1996 THE CENSUS gave a total of 3,681,546 New Zealanders, of whom 524,031 were self-described as Māori or of Māori descent — thus, around 14%. The 1896 census gave 743,214 New Zealanders, and of that figure only 39,854 were described by the enumerators as Māori — around 5%. The closest thing to the category ‘of Māori descent’ in that census was the 5,762 ‘half-castes‘ described either as living as Pākehā or Māori. The New Zealand population in 1769 has been estimated as perhaps 100,000, and was 100% Māori.

These figures expose vast changes in the Māori population in size and compilation, from 100% of the population to a nadir of 5%, and back to an increasingly significant percentage of the overall New Zealand population at the close of the twentieth century. But the figures alone tell a small part of the revival of a supposedly ‘dying race’. This article explores the ideology of the censuses and the enumerators who contributed to them. At the core of this investigation is a belief that the prevalence of intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā directly affected popular views of whether or not the Māori population would survive the experiment of contact.

In 1896, with the Māori population at around 5% of the total population (and thought to be dropping), many did not believe that Māori would survive. That belief, however, flew directly in the face of much contemporary evidence to the contrary. Perhaps in one aspect, however, it was not so very wrong. Even some of the most ardent ‘fatal impact’ protagonists allowed that intermarriage with Pākehā would slow the extinction of the Māori. Others, perhaps best characterized as ‘assimilationists’, promoted intermarriage as the tool to save the Māori from themselves. To such people, the ‘half-caste’ product of intermarriage would improve the Māori ‘race’, both in terms of their statistical significance and as a people — rather like European husbandry would improve the land.

‘Half-caste’ is a problematic term. In New Zealand it has been used to describe both cultural and physical forms of the fruits of intermarriage. But it has almost never been used in a strictly biological sense. Once contact between Māori and Pākehā became widespread, ‘half-caste’ was never either a legal definition or a precise term for measuring blood-mixture. This is in direct contrast with strict legal and biological definitions in other New World colonies. In the censuses, the term came to be closely linked with the idea of ‘improving’ the Māori, like the land, by degrees. Intermarriage and the production of half-castes became synonymous with clearing away the native and planting the introduced…

…The Māori censuses to 1921 will be explored through three related myths. The myths are not easily separated, but each has some distinctive features. The first is an ambiguous one: the idea that Māori were better off either in close contact with or in isolation from Europeans. This myth expressed the belief that Māori were dying whether in close contact with Europeans or not, but that some factors could temporarily ameliorate or limit the effects of that contact. The second myth was that Māori were not worthy possessors of their own land. If they did not use it as Pākehā believed land was ordained to be used, then Māori would lose it. In this view, ‘improving’ the land and ‘improving’ the Māori went hand in hand. The third myth was that ‘half-castes’, the physical product of Māori and Pākehā intermarriage, were the only possible future for Māori (if Māori were to have a future at all). This explanation will be followed by a discussion of how the myths remained intact, despite the numerical evidence of the censuses to the contrary, and despite Māori opposition to the ideology of assimilation through intermarriage…

Read the entire article here.