Mixed Race Studies

The melting pot generation: How Britain became more relaxed on race

British Future
2012-12-12
26 pages

Rob Ford, Lecturer in Politics
University of Manchester

Rachael Jolley, Editorial Director and Director of Communications
British Future

Sunder Katwala, Director
British Future

Binita Mehta, Intern
British Future

As the 2011 census results show an ever larger number of Britons from mixed race backgrounds, this new British Future report The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race examines how these changes might affect the way that we think about race and identity.

When the parents of Olympic champion Jessica Ennis, who are from Jamaica and Derbyshire, met in Sheffield in the 1980s, a majority of the public expressed opposition to mixed race relationships. In 2012, concern has fallen to 15%—and just one in twenty of those aged 18–24. Jessica Ennis is from a generation that worry less about race and mixing than their parents did, and who mostly see mixed Britain as the everyday norm that they grew up with.

Inside this report…

• Rob Ford of the University of Manchester traces how the rise of mixed Britain changed attitudes over recent decades;
• Rachael Jolley explores new Britain Thinks polling on what we think about race and relationships today.
• New Oxford University research reports how media coverage of Olympic medal winners Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah balanced their ethnic origins and local identities.
• Binita Mehta selects ten twenty-something stars who reflect the changing face of their generation.
• Andrew Gimson talks to young Britons about how far being mixed race mattered to their experience of growing up.
• Leading thinkers assess the opportunities and pitfalls of changing how we talk about race.
• Sunder Katwala wonders if his children’s generation will see racial identity as increasingly a matter of choice.

Read the entire report here.

2011 Census: Key Statistics for England and Wales, March 2011 (Ethnic Group)

Office for National Statistics (ONS)
Census 2011
Ethnic Group: Part of 2011 Census, Key Statistics for Local Authorities in England and Wales Release
Release Date: 2012-12-11

Figure 3: Ethnic groups by English regions and Wales, 2011

Ethnicity across the English regions and Wales
Figure 3: Ethnic groups by English regions and Wales, 2011

For more information, click here.

Hapa: One Step at a Time

Center for Asian American Media
2001
26 minutes
DVD

Midori Sperandeo, Producer
KVIE-TV

According to 2000 Census statistics, nearly 7 million Americans identify themselves as multi-racial, or ‘hapa.’ This engaging first-person documentary is about marathon runner and TV producer Midori Sperandeo’s struggles to come to terms with her hapa identity. Comparing her personal path toward self-awareness as a hapa to the challenges she faces training for long-distance running, Hapa touches upon a national history of anti-miscegenation laws, increasing rates of interracial marriages and additional census data to provide a context with which to better understand this rapidly growing demographic group. Interviews with individuals from diverse backgrounds call attention to the pressure many feel to “choose” between cultural heritages; their anxieties of feeling like outsiders in their parents’ communities; and the unique ways in which the hapa community is enriching the cultural fabric of our society.

Mixed-race Brits rising fast as prejudice wanes

The Sunday Times
2012-12-09

Dipesh Gadher, Deputy News Editor

MIXED-RACE Britons, epitomised by Jessica Ennis, the Olympic heptathlon champion, are among the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic-minority groups, according to official figures.

New data from the 2011 census to be published on Tuesday is expected to show that at least 1m people were born to parents from different ethnicities.

Academics believe the true number of people from a mixed-race background could be twice this amount, because many of them identified themselves in other categories, such as black or white, on census forms.

The findings coincide with new polling that reveals only 15% of people feel uncomfortable about interracial marriages.

Twenty years ago, 40% of Britons expressed concerns about such relationships…

Login to read the article here.

Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

The New York Times
2012-11-29

Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — Jasmine Lee realizes just how Korean she’s become when she breaks out in the language, forgetting that her Filipino mother on the other end of the phone can’t understand her. But she is reminded of the limits of assimilation when Koreans, impressed by her fluency, comment: “You sound more Korean than Koreans do.”

Ms. Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen — and the first non-ethnic Korean — to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Her election reflected one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country’s modern history, a change Ms. Lee says “Koreans understand with their brain, but have yet to embrace with their heart.”

Only a decade ago, school textbooks still urged South Koreans to take pride in being of “one blood” and ethnically homogeneous. Now, the country is facing the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society. While the foreign-born population is still small compared with countries with a tradition of immigration, it’s enough to challenge how South Koreans see themselves.

“It’s time to redefine a Korean,” said Kim Yi-seon, chief researcher on multiculturalism at the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute. “Traditionally, a Korean meant someone born to Korean parents in Korea, who speaks Korean and has Korean looks and nationality. People don’t think someone is a Korean just because he has a Korean citizenship.”…

…One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although overall numbers of schoolchildren in South Korea have been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birth rates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.

“A multicultural society is not just coming; it’s already here,” Ms. Lee, a member of the governing Saenuri Party, said in an interview at her office in the National Assembly…

…“They bring religious and ethnic strife to our country, where we had none before,” said Kim Ky-baek, publisher of the nationalist Web site Minjokcorea and a critic of the government’s policy of admitting and providing social benefits to foreign-born brides and migrant workers. “They create an obstacle to national unification. North Korea adheres to pure-blood nationalism, while the South is turning into a hodgepodge of mixed blood.”

The challenge for South Korea is whether it can “redefine the nation, embracing people who do not share the same blood into a broader Koreanness,” said Chung Ki-seon, senior researcher at the IOM Migration Research and Training Center…

…And this year, for the first time, South Korea began accepting multiethnic Korean citizens into its armed forces. Previously, the military had maintained that a different skin color would make them stand out and hurt unity…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America

Stanford University Job Market Paper
2012-11-28
53 pages

Roy Mill
Department of Economics
Stanford University

Luke C.D. Stein
Department of Economics
Stanford University

We study the effect of race on economic outcomes using unique data from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which skin color was explicitly coded in population censuses as “White,” “Black,” or “Mulatto.” We construct a panel of siblings by digitizing and matching records across the 1910 and 1940 censuses and identifying all 12,000 African-American families in which enumerators classified some children as light-skinned (“Mulatto”) and others as dark-skinned (“Black”). Siblings coded “Mulatto” when they were children (in 1910) earned similar wages as adults (in 1940) relative to their Black siblings. This within-family earnings difference is substantially lower than the Black-Mulatto earnings difference in the general population, suggesting that skin color in itself played only a small role in the racial earnings gap. To explore the role of the more social aspect that might be associated with being Black, we then focus on individuals who “passed for White,” an important social phenomenon at the time. To do so, we identify individuals coded “Mulatto” as children but “White” as adults. Passing for White meant that individuals changed their racial affiliation by changing their social ties, while skin color remained unchanged. Passing was associated with substantially higher earnings, suggesting that race in its social formcould have significant consequences for economic outcomes. We discuss how our findings shed light on the roles of discrimination and identity in driving economic outcomes.

Read the entire paper here.

ES 3434: Mixed Race Identities

California State University, East Bay
2012-2013

Examination of mixed race peoples—their legal and social status, U.S. Census designations, and identities from the one-drop rule to President Obama and beyond. The social science complement to ES 3430, Interracial Sex and Marriage.

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up

Dog Park: Media Unleased
2012-11-20

Leighton Woodhouse, Founding Partner

As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
 
The story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy’s post-election anointing of the “new governing coalition,” following the second presidential election in a row in which African-Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there’s another demographic category of Americans that’s getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it’s the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
 
That’s not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is “mixed race” really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is “Latino” or “Asian”). As a demographic category, however, it’s going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It’s simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That’s more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more interracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny…

Read the entire article here.

Bolivia’s Census Omits ‘Mestizo’ as Category

The New York Times
2012-11-21

The Associated Press

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia is under a virtual curfew as census-takers count and classify the landlocked Andean nation’s population in its first census in 11 years.

Stirring controversy was the government decision not to include “mestizo” as a category of ethnicity.

People have the option of declaring themselves members of one of 40 ethnic groups, including Afro-Bolivians. But “mestizo,” or mixed-race, is not an option. Critics of President Evo Morales say he is afraid people won’t identify themselves with a particular indigenous group, thus delegitimizing the government…

Read the entire article here.

A few questions from CMRS 2012

Two or More: Mixed thoughts about the Census NAC
2012-11-18

Eric Hamako

Eric Hamako is one of 32 members of the United States Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee (NAC) on Race, Ethnic, and Other Populations, 2012-2014. This blog is intended to 1) share updates and Eric’s perspectives on the NAC, 2) gather community perspectives, and 3) promote discussion about the Census Bureau as it relates to Multiracial people, the Two Or More Races (TOMR) population, and social justice.

At the 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies conference at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, I gave two informal presentations about NAC matters. As with this blog, I intended to share information and to hear people’s questions and concerns. Here are a few of the questions people raised—I offer them as food for thought and discussion.

1. Will the Census Bureau attempt to use Census 2010 data as the Third Party Record of first resort? (Census 2010 complies with OMB Directive 15. However, the racial categories between 2010 and 2020 will likely differ and have areas that don’t match. Further, young people may self-identify in 2020 differently than their parents identified them in 2010.)…

Read the entire article here.