Mixed Race Studies

2010 Census Shows Interracial and Interethnic Married Couples Grew by 28 Percent over Decade

United States Census Bureau
Newsroom
2012-04-25

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a 2010 Census brief, Households and Families: 2010, that showed interracial or interethnic opposite-sex married couple households grew by 28 percent over the decade from 7 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2010. States with higher percentages of couples of a different race or Hispanic origin in 2010 were primarily located in the western and southwestern parts of the United States, along with Hawaii and Alaska.

A higher percentage of unmarried partners were interracial or interethnic than married couples. Nationally, 10 percent of opposite-sex married couples had partners of a different race or Hispanic origin, compared with 18 percent of opposite-sex unmarried partners and 21 percent of same-sex unmarried partners.

Read the entire press release here.

Racial/Ethnic Variation in Parenting Styles: The Experience of Multiracial Adolescents

Bowling Green State University
December 2011
57 pages

Amanda N. House

According to the 2009 American Community Survey, 2.4% of the U.S. population consists of individuals who identify as two or more races, or multiracial. Nearly half of this estimate captures children under the age of 18, and the multiracial population continues to grow. There is previous literature on racial identification and friendship networks among multiracials, though little attention has been paid to the family experiences of multiracial children and adolescents. Adolescence is often a difficult life stage, and multiracial adolescents may face more adversity than monoracial adolescents with added identity concerns. Parents may react to these unique challenges by adjusting their parenting behaviors. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 13,395), the present study examines parenting behaviors and parenting styles among monoracial and multiracial adolescents and extends this research by further dissecting the multiracial group. Results show that among levels of parental warmth, there are no significant differences between monoracial and multiracial adolescents. However, on average, Black adolescents report higher levels of parental control than multiracial adolescents. Among multiracial adolescents, no significant differences were found between multiracial White and multiracial non-White adolescents, or between multiracial Black and multiracial non-Black adolescents, with respect to levels of parental warmth or parental control. Results also show that Asian adolescents are more likely than multiracial adolescents to experience authoritarian parenting than to experience authoritative parenting. Among the multiracial group, multiracial White adolescents are more likely than multiracial non-White adolescents to experience neglectful parenting than to experience authoritative parenting. No significant racial differences were found between multiracial Black and multiracial non-Black adolescents with respect to parenting styles.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Growing Diversity Among America’s Children and Youth: Spatial and Temporal Dimensions

Population and Development Review
Volume 36, Issue 1, March 2010
pages 151–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2010.00322.x

Kenneth M. Johnson, Professor of Sociology and Senior Demographer
Department of Sociology and Carsey Institute
University of New Hampshire, Durham

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

This study documents the changing racial and ethnic mix of America’s children. Specifically, we focus on the unusually rapid shifts in the composition and changing spatial distribution of America’s young people between 2000 and 2008. Minorities grew to 43 percent of all children and youth, up from 38.5 percent only eight years earlier. In 1990, this figure stood at 33 percent. Among 0–4-year-olds, 47 percent of all children were minority in 2008. Changes in racial and ethnic composition are driven by two powerful demographic forces. The first is the rapid increase since 2000 in the number of minority children—with Hispanics accounting for 80 percent of the growth. The second is the absolute decline in the number of non-Hispanic white children and youth. The growth of minority children and racial diversity is distributed unevenly over geographical space. Over 500 (or roughly 1 in 6) counties now have majority-minority youth populations. Broad geographic areas of America nevertheless remain mono-racial, where only small shares of minorities live.

AMERICA’S RAPIDLY CHANGING racial and ethnic composition will undoubtedly reshape ethnic identities, electoral politics, and inter-group relations in the foreseeable future. A recent report by the United States Census Bureau projected that racial and ethnic minorities—everyone but non-Hispanic single race whites—will become the majority population in 2042 (US Census Bureau 2008a). The size of the minority population is projected to grow to 235.7 million or 54 percent of the total US population by 2050. Of course, demographers understand that population projections are often not borne out; they rest on demographic assumptions that sometimes prove to be seriously flawed.

We do not need to rely on Census projections or wait until 2042 to observe the putative demographic implications of growing racial and ethnic diversity in American society.2 Our research documents the demographic forces that have placed today’s young people in the vanguard of America’s new racial and ethnic diversity. The seeds of diversity are being sown today by immigration and high fertility, which are revealed in growing racial and ethnic diversity among America’s children and youth. In many parts of the United States, the future is now.

This article has several goals. First, we use up-to-date census population estimates to document recent increases in the racial and ethnic mix of America’s youth, especially its youngest children (i.e., those aged 0–4 years). Predictably, growing racial diversity has been caused by rapid growth of minority children, especially Hispanic children, but perhaps less predictably by absolute numerical declines of non-Hispanic white children. Second, we show how national patterns have manifested themselves unevenly over geographic space. More than 500 US counties in 2008 had “majority-minority” populations of children, a number considerably higher than for the US population overall. Third, we document children’s growing exposure to racial diversity in the areas where they live. We provide new estimates based on the so-called diversity index (Rushton 2008). The frequent claim that we live in an increasingly multiracial or multicultural society—a fact that is both celebrated and feared—does not necessarily mean that national patterns are visible at the local or regional level…

…The uneven geography of racial diversity

How children fare today is a leading demographic indicator of America’s future: its racial composition, health, and social and economic well-being. But an exclusive focus on the national picture also can be misleading. For minority populations, racial and ethnic identities are socially constructed through daily interactions in the places where they live and work (Omi and Winant 1994). The demographic impacts of changing patterns of immigration, fertility, and natural increase are therefore experienced unevenly across the geographical United States (Massey 2008). The so-called Americanization process—the putative weakening of racial and ancestral identities—is shaped by cultural and economic incorporation, patterns of intermarriage, and the growth of immigrant and mixed-race populations, all of which both reflect and reinforce racially divergent residence patterns and inter-group exposure and social interaction (Waters and Jiménez 2005; Lee and Bean 2007)…

…Discussion and conclusion

With the election of Barack Obama as US President, issues of race and racial inclusion have acquired new saliency in the public discourse in America. The influx of roughly 1 million legal immigrants annually—mostly from Latin America and Asia—has further prompted debates about multiculturalism and social, economic, and cultural fragmentation: for example, English-language use, rising intermarriage, growing mixed-race populations, and political and economic power. The Census Bureau’s recent projection of a majority-minority US population in 2042 has sometimes been the source of alarmist rhetoric about America’s future and its essential character. We argue here that the seeds of racial and ethnic multiculturalism are also being sown by recent patterns of fertility, revealed in growing racial and ethnic diversity among America’s children and youth…

Read the entire article here.

Criollo, Mestizo, Mulato, LatiNegro, Indígena, White, or Black? The US Hispanic/Latino Population and Multiple Responses in the 2000 Census

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1724-1727

Hortensia Amaro, Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and of Counseling Psychology
Bouve College of Health Sciences
Northeastern University

Ruth E. Zambrana, Profesor of Womens Studies
University of Maryland

Current dialogues on changes in collecting race and ethnicity data have not considered the complexity of tabulating multiple race responses among Hispanics. Racial and ethnic identification—and its public reporting–among Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is embedded in dynamic social factors. Ignoring these factors leads to significant problems in interpreting data and understanding the relationship of race, ethnicity, and health among Hispanics/Latinos. In the flurry of activity to resolve challenges posed by multiple race responses, we must remember the larger issue that looms in the foreground—the lack of adequate estimates of mortality and health conditions affecting Hispanics/Latinos. The implications are deemed important because Hispanics/Latinos will become the largest minority group in the United States within the next decade.

Read the entire article here.

Invisible citizens?

IDB America: Magazine of Inter-American Development Bank
August 2001

Charo Quesada

Censuses in many Latin American countries omit questions about race, rendering minority groups statistically invisible

If we relied entirely on censuses to understand what the people of Latin America and the Caribbean look like, the picture that would emerge would be a complete fantasy.

While the cities and villages of this part of the world abound with color and vitality thanks to the multitude of ethnic groups that live together on its soil, most of the region’s censuses do not include questions about race or ethnicity. As a result many indigenous communities and, in particular, millions of citizens of African descent, are not officially recognized as such by their governments. In many cases, questions about the respondent’s native language are also absent from census forms.

Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is of indigenous or African descent, less than one-third of the region’s countries gathers information on its population of African descent explicitly. The data collected on indigenous peoples, while somewhat more abundant, tend to be incomplete and flawed.

Since these two groups are not taken into account or are poorly covered in official figures, their particular needs are not reflected by government programs in which resources are allocated for such important areas as health, education, employment, and housing.

The consequences of this fact can be seen in regional statistics on poverty and marginalization, that consistently show indigenous groups and Afro-Latin Americans to be disproportionately disadvantaged. A 1994 World Bank study shows that in Guatemala, where the national poverty rate is 64 percent, the figure climbs to 86.6 percent for the indigenous population. In Peru, the national poverty rate is 49.7 percent, compared with 79 percent for the indigenous population. In Mexico, it is 17.9 percent for the country as a whole, and 80.6 percent among indigenous groups. In general, indigenous and Afro-Latin American communities experience higher infant mortality, illiteracy, and unemployment, and also tend to be less healthy than the white population…

Read the entire article here.

Black-White Marital Matching: Race, Anthropometrics, and Socioeconomics

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6196
December 2011
34 pages

Pierre-André Chiappori, E. Rowan and Barbara Steinschneider Professor of Economics
Columbia University

Sonia Oreffice, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

Climent Quintana-Domeque, Assistant Professor of Economics
Universitat d’Alacant and IZA

We analyze the interaction of race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the U.S. marriage market, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1999 to 2009 for black, white, and inter-racial couples. We consider the anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, together with their wage and education, and estimate who inter-racially marries whom along these dimensions. Distinctive patterns arise by gender and race for inter-married individuals: the black women who inter-marry are the thinner and more educated in their group; instead, white women are the fatter and less educated; black or white men who inter-marry are poorer and thinner. While women in “mixed” couples find a spouse who is poorer but thinner than if they intra-married, black men match with a white woman who is more educated than if they intra-married, and a white man finds a thinner spouse in a black woman.

Read the entire paper here.

A Longitudinal Study of Migration Propensities for Mixed Ethnic Unions in England and Wales

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Bonn, Germany
Discussion Paper No. 6394
February 2012
21 pages

Zhiqiang Feng, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Maarten van Ham, Professor of Urban Renewal
Delft University of Technology and IZA

Paul Boyle, Professor of Geography and Sustainable Development
University of St. Andrews

Gillian M. Raab, Research Fellow
University of St. Andrews

Most studies investigating residential segregation of ethnic minorities ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic unions that involve a minority member and a white member. To our knowledge, hardly any research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on the residential choices of households in terms of the ethnic mix of destination neighbourhoods. Our study addresses this research gap and examines the tendencies of migration among mixed ethnic unions in comparison with their co-ethnic peers. We used data from the Longitudinal Study for England and Wales. Our statistical analysis supports the spatial assimilation theory: ethnic minorities move towards less deprived areas and to a lesser extent also towards less ethnically concentrated areas. However, the types of destination neighbourhood of minority people living in mixed ethnic unions varied greatly with the ethnicity of the ethnic minority partner.

INTRODUCTION

Residential integration is regarded as a measure of structural assimilation of ethnic minority populations and has drawn long-standing interest from academic studies (Park and Burgess 1969; Lieberson 1963; Massey 1985; Allen and Turner 1996). Residential integration is not only an indicator of the degree of ethnic assimilation, but also further enhances social and cultural integration. Conversely, ethnic segregation is deemed to hinder social interaction with majority populations, and to marginalise ethnic minority populations. Hence the British government has increasingly promoted community cohesion and residential integration.

While a body of research has examined aggregate levels of residential segregation of ethnic minority groups and the cross-sectional residential locations of ethnic minority populations at the individual level, few studies have examined the determinants of the actual residential migration of ethnic minorities in relation to characteristics of neighbourhoods of origin and destination (Finney and Simpson 2008). Little is known about how ethnic minority people move between neighbourhoods with different levels of concentration of their own groups and with different levels of deprivation. Most existing studies of ethnic segregation ignore the fact that the majority of adults live in couples. In recent years there has been a growth in the number of mixed ethnic families that involve a minority member and a white member (Feng et al, 2010). However, to our knowledge, almost no research has been undertaken to explicitly examine whether the ethnic mix within households has an impact on tendencies of residential migration between different types of neighbourhood. In the US, a few studies which examined the residential locations (but not mobility) of ethnic populations, have taken the ethnic mix within households into account. Ellis et al. (2006) used cross-sectional data in the US and came to the conclusion that mixed-ethnic households are less likely to live in minority ethnic neighbourhoods. White and Sassler (2000) also used US census data and found that Latinos and blacks who married a white spouse were more likely to reside in higher status neighbourhoods, while in contrast the marriage of a white person to a non-white person seemed to result in them residing in a lower-status neighbourhood than they might otherwise have done. Although Ellis et al (2006) argued that their results are more likely due to mixed-ethnic couples choosing to live in mixed-ethnic neighbourhoods, rather than mixed neighbourhoods ‘creating’ these couples, it is difficult with cross-sectional data to come to any firm conclusion about this. The same is true for the study by White and Sassler (2000) due to the use of cross-sectional data. In their review of geographies of mixed ethnic unions, Wright et al (2003) called for further research on migration of mixed ethnic unions in a longitudinal perspective.

With this study we fill this gap, and use longitudinal data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), to explore whether minority people in mixed ethnic unions were more likely to move to areas which are less concentrated in their own group than ethnic minorities living in mono ethnic unions. In our analyses we also take the level of deprivation of neighbourhoods into account…

…In the past decades Britain has witnessed a growing ethnic diversity in populations. In England, for example, the percentage of ethnic minorities has risen from 4.6 % to 8.6 % between 1981 and 2001 (Rees and Butt 2004). It is estimated that nearly a million people report themselves as having a mixed-ethnic identity in Britain today (CRE 2006). Along with the trend in diversity the number of marriages and partnerships between people of different ethnic groups is also on the rise (Aspinal 2003; Coleman 1985; 2004; Voas 2009; Song 2010). The one per cent census sample from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS) reveals that the total number of mixed ethnic unions reached 5,139 in 2001 in England and Wales, a 46 Per cent increase from 1991 (Feng et al. 2010)…

…The ONS LS was a unique and very rich dataset. However, we acknowledge that the data has some limitations. We did not have information on migration between two censuses. Some couples might move more than once between 1991 and 2001. The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) is a panel dataset which provides annual information for sample couples. However, the number of mixed ethnic unions in the BHPS is too few for a meaningful statistical analysis. The other limitation is the self reported ethnicity can change over time. It is not a big problem for South Asians as they reported their ethnic identity very consistently over time. But the consistency was not high for Black Others who were part of the Black group in our analysis (Platt et al 2005). Therefore our results here should be treated with caution…

Read the entire paper here.

Black people ‘least satisfied of UK population’

BBC News
2012-02-28

Black and mixed-ethnic Britons are less satisfied with their lives on average than the UK population as a whole, a survey suggests.

Some 80,000 people across the UK, polled by the Office for National Statistics, produced an average life satisfaction rating of 7.4 out of 10.

But black Britons averaged 6.6, while mixed-ethnic Britons scored 6.9.

The survey, in April to September 2011, was part of the ONS’s ongoing Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The average rating for life satisfaction was also lower than the national figure for those of Pakistani origin – 7 out of 10 – and Bangladeshis – 7.1.

The four questions posed by the survey also included one seeking ratings for people’s overall happiness, with answers nationwide producing an average of 7.3 out of 10.

Again, black Britons reported the lowest level of happiness – 6.9 on average – followed by mixed-ethnic and Pakistani respondents, with both of those groups averaging 7 out of 10…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Sociology Compass
Volume 6, Issue 4, April 2012
pages 316–331
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00454.x

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self-identified with more than one race on the U.S. Census – a 32 percent increase since 2000. In this paper, I review the growing body of research on this population, with a particular focus on identifying and describing factors important in shaping their racial identities. Factors explored include: social norms regarding racial classification, socioeconomic status, racial composition of one’s neighborhood and community, region, socialization by family, age, cohort, genealogical locus of multiracial ancestry, nativity, and phenotype. I discuss the broader implications of findings to-date, with a particular focus on the ongoing scholarly discourse regarding the collection of race data in the United States.

See the teaching guide to this paper here.

Read or purchase the article here.

2010 Census Shows Asians are Fastest-Growing Race Group

United States Census Bureau
2012-03-21

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a 2010 Census brief, The Asian Population: 2010 [PDF], that shows the Asian population grew faster than any other race group over the last decade. The population that identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races, grew by 45.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, while those who identified as Asian alone grew by 43.3 percent. Both populations grew at a faster rate than the total U.S. population, which increased by 9.7 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Out of the total U.S. population, 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent, were Asian alone. In addition, 2.6 million people, or another 0.9 percent, reported Asian in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups totaled 17.3 million people. Thus, 5.6 percent of all people in the United States identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races…

Read the entire press release here.