Mixed Race Studies

Results from the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment

U.S. Census Bureau
Technical Briefing
2012-08-08
62 pages

What is the AQE?

The 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) focused on improving the race and Hispanic origin questions by testing a number of different questionnaire design strategies…

Overview of Technical Briefing

• (AQE) Goals and Research Strategies
• Methodology
• Race and Hispanic Origin Questionnaires
• Reinterview Study
• Focus Groups
• Major Findings
• Recommendations

Goals and Research Strategies

• Increase reporting in the standard Office of Management and Budget (OMB) race and ethnic categories
• Lower item nonresponse to the race and Hispanic origin questions
• Improve the accuracy and reliability of race and ethnic data
• Elicit the reporting of detailed race and ethnic groups

…Detailed Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Maintains all original race and Hispanic origin checkboxes

…Streamlined Approach

• Includes examples and write-ins for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Removes specific national origin checkboxes; presented as example groups
• Streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories…

…Very Streamlined Approach

• Part 1 – Very streamlined presentation of OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Part 2 – Examples for all OMB race and Hispanic origin categories
• Write-in areas for specific race(s), origin(s), or tribe(s)

…

Read the entire report here.

JANM Show Looks at Mixed Ancestry

Los Angeles Downtown News
2013-04-15

Richard Guzmán

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – The very title of the new Japanese American National Museum exhibit indicates the complex factors at play in a single community.

The show, Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History, examines the diverse history of the Japanese American community as well as the still evolving notion of family and race. It opened April 7 and continues through Aug. 25 at the Little Tokyo museum.

Through photos, videos, artifacts and paintings, the shows traces the history of mixed-race Japanese American families — hapa is a term for a person of mixed race who is part Asian or Pacific Islander — going back to the late 1800s. It also looks at the challenges these families faced due to segregation and laws that criminalized mixed race marriages.

It’s a history, said Duncan Williams, the exhibit co-curator, that is often plainly visible in the faces of biracial individuals. However, he said the topic is also invisible, since it is rarely discussed in open forums.

“One of the major points we’re trying to make is that increasingly the Japanese American community is changing,” said Williams, who is also director of the USC Center for Japanese Religion and Culture.

He said that by the next U.S. Census in 2020, it is expected that more than half of the members of the Japanese American community will identify themselves as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

The New Normal

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-04-11

Mia Nakaji Monnier, Rafu Staff Writer

Hapa Japan Festival and JANM exhibit celebrate mixed Japanese and Japanese Americans

Outside the newest exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum hangs a banner. Up close, visitors can make out individual pictures—each about the size of a postage stamp. These are family photos: grinning kids in kimono, extended families three rows deep posing in the yard, teenagers gathered around Grandpa and his birthday cake. But take a few steps back, and the photos disappear like the strokes of an impressionist painting. Together, they add up, to make enka star Jero.

Why Jero?

Duncan Williams, one of the curators of the exhibit, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” says Jero represents the future: not just the of Japanese America, but of America in general. Born Jerome White in Pittsburgh, Pa., Jero is mixed— three quarters African American, one quarter Japanese. Yet he’s become famous in Japan for singing traditional enka songs, which he grew up hearing from his Japanese grandmother.

Jero, to Williams, represents the complex identity of a growing group of Americans, whose looks and cultural identifications don’t fit into neat or expected categories. Up close, in those stamp-sized family photos, the kids in kimono have light skin, dark hair; black, white, Latino features. They don’t fit the typical image of Japan, or Japanese America, and yet, statistically, they’re fast becoming the new norm.

“The Japanese American community is now on the cusp of becoming majority multiracial,” said Williams, while leading a tour of the exhibit. By the 2020 Census, the majority of Japanese Americans will be mixed, or Hapa, making “Visible & Invisible” relevant—and, to many Japanese Americans of mixed race or ethnicity, a moving affirmation of their place in the community…

Read the entire article here.

The Puzzling Whiteness of Brazilian Politicians

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Center for Latin American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2012
pages 30-32

Jean Spencer, Outreach and Publications Coordinator
Center for Latin American Studies

Is Brazil really a racial democracy? The idea of racial democracy, originally put forth by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, holds that racial discrimination is much more moderate in Brazil than in countries like the United States, due in part to widespread racial mixing. If Brazil is truly a racial democracy, however, why are the city council members in both Salvador and Rio de Janeiro significantly whiter than their electorates? Thad Dunning, an associate professor of Political Science at Yale University, designed a study to discover the reason for this lack of descriptive democracy.

The first problem Dunning faced was a basic one: defining terms. In Brazil, black, white, and brown are in the eye of the beholder. To get “a quick and dirty” baseline for how different politicians are perceived, he conducted an internet survey where participants were asked to assess the race of a random sample of elected officials and unelected candidates using several different scales. In one, candidates were evaluated on a zero-to-10 scale with zero being the lightest and 10 being the darkest; in another, respondents located candidates in one of multiple color categories; and in a third, participants were asked to place the candidates in one of the five categories used by the Brazilian census: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigena (indigenous). In general, Dunning found that there was a good match between the results of the scales, with the pardo category generating the most heterogeneous responses. Comparing the codings of politicians with census data on residents of Salvador and Rio, he also found that whites were heavily overrepresented on the city councils of both cities, just as he had suspected.

But why? Dunning considered three main possibilities: whites hold racist attitudes toward other groups; black and brown voters have internalized disparaging attitudes about their own groups; or voter preferences are more influenced by class than race. To test these hypotheses, Dunning ran an experiment designed to tease out voters’ underlying racial biases. He hired black and white actors to create videos that followed the same format as the free hour of coverage that Brazilian television gives to candidates for city council. In order to compensate for differences in the personal appeal of individual “candidates,” he hired six black and six white actors for each city…

Read the entire article here.

Performing ‘Race’ and Challenging Racism

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval
Blog Updates
2013-04-08

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

It is an exciting time to be an actor, when the notion of ‘performance’ is taking on new meanings and has the potential to change the way we view the art form. Traditional definitions of ‘performance’ include the act of staging or presenting a play; a rendering of a dramatic role. Now scholar/activists like Judith Butler are exploring a new definition of performance, or ‘performativity’—looking at how we use language and behavior to construct identity.

In my solo show, One Drop of Love, I get to meld these two understandings of performance. I am an actor who portrays several different characters: my Jamaican/Pan-Africanist father, my Blackfeet–Cherokee-Danish mother, candy and fruit vendors from East and West Africa, Census Workers from the 1790s to the present, racist cops from Cambridge, MA and many others. At the same time, in taking on these roles, I explore the construction of  ‘racial’ identity, and how these identities are created through speech and acts—and not through biology…

Read the entire article here.

TEDxNorthwesternU – Rick Kittles – The Biology of Race in the Absence of Biological Races

TEDxTalks
2011-01-25

Rick Kittles, Professor of Medicine
University of Illinois, Chicago
College of Medicine

Defining “race” continues to be a nemesis. Knowledge from human genetic research is increasingly challenging the notion that race and biology are inextricably linked, engendering tremendous ramifications for human relations, identity and public health. It has become fashionable for geneticists and anthropologists to declare that race is a social construction. However, there is little practical value to this belief since few in the public believe and act on it. Thus race is mainly a social concept which in the US has been based on skin color and ancestry. Yet biomedical studies continue to examine black/ white differences. Kittles discusses why using race in biomedical studies is problematic using examples from U.S. groups which transcend “racial” boundaries and bear the burden of health disparities.

Rick Kittles, PhD, received a BS in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989 and a PhD in biological sciences from George Washington University in 1998. He then helped establish the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. Currently, Kittles is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as well as the associate director of the UIC Cancer Center.

Kittles is well known for his research of prostate cancer and health disparities among African Americans. He has also been at the forefront of the development of ancestry-informative genetic markers, and how genetic ancestry can be used to map genes for common traits and disease. His work on tracing the genetic ancestry of African Americans has brought light to many issues, new and old, which relate to race, ancestry, identity, and group membership.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.

So, What Are You… Anyway?: 2013 Conference on Multiracial Identity

Hosted by the Harvard College Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2013-04-05 through 2013-04-06

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its fifth annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, April 5, 2013 and Saturday, April 6, 2013 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by author Pearl Fuyo Gaskins, Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild, and Eric Hamako, as well as discussion groups led by experts on modern race relations. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the US.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner^* in honor of the 2013 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, Pearl Gaskins, author of the book What are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People…

For more information, click here.

Opinion: Why Future Politicians Must Embrace Our Composite Nation

The Next America: How Demography Shapes the National Agenda
National Journal
2012-11-14

Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

America is becoming browner—and the ability to harness the changing electorate has become the gold standard for any aspiring politician.

As Republican nominee Mitt Romney thanked his supporters last week in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he was speaking to a mostly white nationwide audience–nearly nine out of 10, according to exit polling from Edison Research. Over in Chicago, President Obama was preparing to give his victory speech to a multiracial coalition that offered a glimpse of what America may look like in the coming years: 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 2 percent other races.

This election confirmed a trend that many have suspected but some have chosen to ignore at their peril. Obama won a second term because he maintained or increased his share of racial and ethnic minority votes in swing states, particularly the black vote. The NAACP recently commissioned a swing-state poll of black voters that shows how both parties can connect with this rising electorate…

…In an 1869 speech called “Our Composite Nationality,” Frederick Douglass wrote that America’s unique geography and government destined us to be “the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.” Since then, our great national experiment has thrived when we chose to embrace our diverse talents and perspectives, and it has failed when we chose to build walls between each other…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Sociology Compass
Volume 6, Issue 6 (June 2012)
pages 519–525
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2012.00463.x

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

This guide accompanies the following article: Nikki Khanna, ‘Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data’, Sociology Compass 6/4 (2012): 316–331, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00454.x.

Author’s introduction

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self-identified with two or more races on the United States Census – a 32 percent increase in the last decade. President Barack Obama, the son of a white Kansas-born mother and Kenyan father, was not one of these self-identified multiracial Americans. In fact, Obama chose only to check the ‘black’ box, illustrating that multiracial ancestry does not always translate to multiracial identity. Since the 1990s, there has been a growing body of research examining the multiracial population and key questions have included: How do multiracial Americans identify themselves? And why? This paper reviews this research, with a focus on the factors shaping racial identity and the implications regarding the collection of race data in the US Census.

Author recommends

Khanna, Nikki. 2011. Biracial in America: Forming and Performing Race. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Looking at black-white biracial Americans, this book examines the influencing factors and underlying social psychological processes shaping their multidimensional racial identities. This book also investigates the ways in which biracial Americans perform race in their day-to-day lives…

Online materials

Race: Are We So Different?

http://understandingrace.org/

This website explores the common misconceptions about race through several interactive activities.

Race: The Power of an Illusion

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

This website explores the question ‘What is Race?’ through several interactive activities.

Mixed-Race Studies

http://www.mixedracestudies.org/

This website is a useful resource for anyone interested in mixed-race studies. Included here is information about articles, books, dissertations, videos, multimedia, and other resources related to multiracial people…

Read the (entire?) guide here.

“Multiracial” Today, but “What” Tomorrow? The Malleability of Racial Identification Over Time

Paper presented at the Population Association of America 2005 Annual Meeting
2005-03-31 through 2005-04-02
Philladelphia, Pennsylvania
27 pages

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the change in racial identification among Multiracial Adolescents and Monoracial Adolescents as they make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In general, we find that Multiracial youth exhibit more volatile racial identities than Monoracial youth. Youth who reported Native-American & White in Wave I were the least likely to maintain this identity (22%), while about 50% of Asian-white and black-white youth maintained their identities. In empirical analyses, we find that youth with more highly educated mothers have more stable racial identities between two waves of the survey. Physical appearance, as described by the interviewer at Wave I, is an important predictor of change between Wave I and Wave III responses. Our results suggest that while racial identity is malleable, it is still conditioned on variation in physical appearances.

Read the entire paper here.