Mixed Race Studies

There’s a big problem with how the census measures race

The Washington Post
2018-02-06

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Activists hold signs during a news conference in front of the Supreme Court in 2015. (Getty Images)

Will the 2020 Census be accurate? A number of observers have been worrying about that question for several reasons. For instance, the Justice Department has been trying to insert a citizenship question on the census form; such a question could discourage many immigrants from completing the form. As a result, cities and regions with large numbers of immigrants could see their populations seriously undercounted, with troubling results for political representation, services and funding.

But there’s another reason to be worried, one that hasn’t gotten much attention. The Census Bureau just announced that its 2020 form will not fundamentally change the questions it uses to ask about ethnic and racial origins. This may seem like a minor technical issue — but it will have major real-world implications. If it does not incorporate already-tested improvements into these questions, the census will deliver a less accurate picture of the United States.

And as a result, census statistics will continue to roil the public discussion of diversity, by exaggerating white decline and the imminence of a majority-minority United States. Political figures and pundits who oppose immigration and diversity could exploit that, peddling an alarmist narrative that doesn’t fit with the long-standing reality of mixing between immigrant and established Americans….

Read the entire article here.

50 Years of Loving: Interracial Romantic Relationships and Recommendations for Future Research

Journal of Family Theory & Review
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2017
Pages 557–571
DOI: 10.1111/jftr.12215

Natalie S. de Guzman
Department of Human Development
University of California, Davis

Adrienne Nishina, Associate Professor of Human Development & Family Studies
University of California, Davis

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (1967), the landmark civil rights case that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the United States, this review describes the field’s past and future directions for studying interracial romantic relationships. We briefly present history, theories, and research about interracial and interethnic romantic relationships, and provide suggestions for future research. We also highlight the need for flexible racial and ethnic categories as demographics and distinctions shift in the United States by proposing the use of adaptable panethnic (a set of related ethnic groups that have been combined and collectively labeled) categories, rather than racial categories, or the use of more specific ethnic or nationality categories depending on a variety of factors. Finally, we discuss multiracial and multiethnic individuals in the research on romantic relationships, acknowledging that multiracial and multiethnic individuals are both the offspring of such unions and a rapidly growing demographic.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Loving Generation: A Topic Original Documentary Series

Topic
February 2018

Directed and Produced by Lacey Schwartz and Mehret Mandefro
Executive Produced by Ezra Edelman and Anna Holmes

4 films | 10 min

In 1967, the Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia overturned all laws outlawing interracial marriage. The Loving Generation tells the story of a generation of Americans born to one black parent and one white parent. Their narratives provide a fascinating and unique window into the borderland between “blackness” and “whiteness”, and, in some cases, explode fixed ideas about race and identity.

View the films here.

Black With (Some) White Privilege

Sunday Review
The New York Times
2018-02-10

Anna Holmes, Editorial Director
Topic.com

Credit Illustration by Anthony Gerace; Photographs by SensorSpot, via Getty Images

When I was in my early 30s, I started making a list of every child I could think of who had a black parent and a white parent and was born between 1960 and the mid- to late 1980s. It was a collection of people like me, who grew up and came of age after the Supreme Court decision in 1967 that overturned the laws in more than a dozen states that outlawed interracial marriage.

I was thinking of people I knew or had heard of, so of course the list included actors like Tracee Ellis Ross (born 1972) and Rashida Jones (1976); athletes like Derek Jeter (1974) and Jason Kidd (1973); singers like Mariah Carey (1969) and Alicia Keys (1981); and, eventually, politicians and public servants like Adrian Fenty (1970) and Ben Jealous (1973).

It occurred to me, looking at the names I’d gathered, that what I was making was not just a snapshot of a particular generation but an accounting of some of the most notable, successful, widely recognized black people in American public life — cultural, political, intellectual, academic, athletic.

It made sense: The people I could think of were the people who were the most publicly visible. But what did it mean about race and opportunity in the United States that many of the most celebrated black people in American cultural life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries happened to have been born to one white parent? What if my and my cohort’s achievements as African-Americans, especially in fields to which we historically had little access, were more about how we benefited from having one white parent in a racist society than our hard work?…

…Of course, to be a black American is to be, by definition, mixed: According to a study released in 2014, 24 percent of the genetic makeup of self-identified African-Americans is of European origin. Colorism, which places black people in an uncodified but nevertheless very real hierarchy, with the lighter-skinned among us at the top, was a fact of American life long before Loving v. Virginia. Light-skinned black Americans, even those with two black parents, have, for centuries, been considered to be closer to white people, closer to white ideals about, well, most everything…

Read the entire article here.

2020 Census To Keep Racial, Ethnic Categories Used In 2010

National Public Radio
2018-01-26

Hansi Lo Wang, National Correspondent

A map shows the locations of the U.S. Census Bureau’s regional offices for the 2020 census. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

A Census Bureau announcement about the race and ethnicity questions for the 2020 census suggests the Trump administration will not support Obama-era proposals to change how the U.S. government collects information about race and ethnicity, census experts say.

If approved, the proposals would change how the Latino population is counted and create a new checkbox on federal surveys for people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa. Research by the Census Bureau shows these revisions could improve the accuracy of the upcoming national headcount in 2020. Any changes would carry wide implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws and health statistics.

So far, though, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which sets the standards for race and ethnicity data for federal agencies, has not released any decisions. OMB has also not responded to NPR’s request for comment…

Read the entire article here.

Census Bureau Statement on 2020 Census Race and Ethnicity Questions

United States Census Bureau
2018-01-26
Release Number: CB18-RTQ.02

Public Information Office
Telephone: 301-763-3030
E-Mail: pio@census.gov

REPSONSE TO QUERY

Jan. 26, 2018 – The 2020 Census race and ethnicity questions will follow a two-question format for capturing race and ethnicity for both the 2018 Census Test and the 2020 Census, which adheres to the 1997 Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (Statistical Policy Directive No. 15) set by the Office of Management and Budget. The Census Bureau will not include a combined question format for collecting Hispanic origin and race, or a separate Middle Eastern or North African category on the census form. The upcoming 2018 Census Test in Providence County, R.I., which begins on March 16, will reflect the proposed 2020 Census race and ethnicity questions.

The Census Bureau remains on schedule as it implements the operational plan and will provide the planned 2020 Census questionnaire wording to Congress by March 31, 2018, as directed by law. The Census Bureau will continue to further its extensive research on how to collect accurate race and ethnicity data across its surveys.

For more information, click here.

Who Can Call Themselves Métis?

The Walrus
2017-12-29

Chris Andersen, Dean of the Faculty of Native Studies
University of Alberta

iStock / selimaksan

With the latest census surge in the Métis population, it’s time to start talking about how we define the term

The Métis are an Indigenous people that originated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century on the northern plains of what is now southern Manitoba. Centred historically in and around Red River (now Winnipeg) and intimately tied to the buffalo-hunting economy, the Métis became a powerful force by the middle of the nineteenth century, pushing back against the Hudson’s Bay Company’s claims to economic monopoly and later leading two armed resistances against the Canadian state. Despite this powerful historic presence and the fact that the 1982 Constitution Act enumerated the Métis, along with First Nations and Inuit, as one of three Aboriginal peoples in Canada, the term has, in recent years, largely fallen into racialized disrepute.

Today, many people understand “Métis” not as an Indigenous nation but as denoting people with a mixture of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestry. The Government of Canada has used the term in this manner in multiple policy contexts. Inconsistent usage of Métis has produced confusing and even contradictory results in the heart of some of Canada’s most powerful institutions, including the census. This has exacerbated an already-confusing state of affairs in the minds of the general public and many policy actors about who the Métis people are and the kinds of relationships with government to which we aspire…

Read the entire article here.

Hispanic Identity Fades Across Generations as Immigrant Connections Fall Away

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2017-12-20
34 pages

Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Senior Researcher

Gustavo López, Research Analyst

11% of American adults with Hispanic ancestry do not identify as Hispanic

More than 18% of Americans identify as Hispanic or Latino, the nation’s second largest racial or ethnic group. But two trends – a long-standing high intermarriage rate and a decade of declining Latin American immigration – are distancing some Americans with Hispanic ancestry from the life experiences of earlier generations, reducing the likelihood they call themselves Hispanic or Latino.

Among the estimated 42.7 million U.S. adults with Hispanic ancestry in 2015, nine-in-ten (89%), or about 37.8 million, self-identify as Hispanic or Latino. But another 5 million (11%) do not consider themselves Hispanic or Latino, according to Pew Research Center estimates. The closer they are to their immigrant roots, the more likely Americans with Hispanic ancestry are to identify as Hispanic. Nearly all immigrant adults from Latin America or Spain (97%) say they are Hispanic. Similarly, second-generation adults with Hispanic ancestry (the U.S.-born children of at least one immigrant parent) have nearly as high a Hispanic self-identification rate (92%), according to Pew Research Center estimates…

Read the entire report here.

Brazilians defining themselves as black has grown 15%; while pretos and pardos are considered black, pretos are those defining themselves as simply black

Black Women of Brazil
2017-12-12

Source: Jornal Floripa, Tudo que Preciso Saber “Nº de pessoas que se declara preta ou parda cresce 14,9%”

Note from BW of Brazil: So what does today’s report really mean in plain English? It’s a topic that’s been discussed here since the debut of this blog back in 2011. Depending on how you look at it, Brazil could have as many 112.7 million black people, which would be 54.8% of the country’s total population of 205.5 million people. Or, looking at it from another perspective, the black population could be around 16.8 million people, which would represent about 8.2% of all Brazilians. Why such a huge discrepancy? Well, again, it depends on how you see it. To come to a figure of 112.7 million black people, one has to include the population of people who define themselves as “pardos”, loosely meaning ‘brown’ or ‘mixed’. At almost 96 million people, they make up about 46.7% of the Brazilian population. For decades, due to quality of life and socioeconomic statistics, black activists have defined the country’s população negra (black population) as the combination of self-declared pretos (blacks) and pardos. The question here would be, how many of those pardos have a phenotype that most would consider black? The world may never know.

The number of Brazilians who declare themselves pretos (blacks) has increased 14.9% to 16.825 million people between 2012 and 2016, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which announced on Friday the “Características gerais dos moradores 2012-2016” (General characteristics of residents 2012 -2016), raised by the National Continuous Household Sample Survey (PNAD).

According to the survey, the number of Brazilians who declared themselves pardos (or were declared pardos by the resident interviewed) also grew between 2012 and 2016, by 6.6%, to 95.9 million people. This is the largest group, accounting for 46.7% of the population, a condition it assumed from 2015.

The number of Brazilians declaring themselves brancos (whites) in turn continued to shrink: they were 90.9 million in 2016, 1.8% less than in 2012. Of 46.6% of residents in the country in 2012, the declared white population accounted for 44.2% of the total in 2016. Those declared black were 8.2%.

According to Maria Lucia Vieira, research manager, the data indicate an increasing miscegenation in Brazil. There are basically three possible explanations, according to her: increased self-assertion of pretos e pardos (blacks and browns); marriage growth between races; higher fertility rate among pretos and pardos…

Read the entire article here.

In an increasingly mixed-race America, who decides what we call ourselves?

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2017-12-18

Valerie Russ, Staff Writer

(Andy Stenning/Pool Photo via AP) Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle speak with teachers at the Nottingham Academy Dec. 1.

Last week, the Meghan Markle controversy was her anticipated visit with Prince Harry to Queen Elizabeth’s estate at Sandringham for Christmas, an unprecedented invitation for an unmarried couple.

Before that, the debate was about Markle’s mixed-race identity: Do her African American mother and white father make her white, black, or biracial? After her engagement to Harry, some women celebrated the notion of a “black princess” — although she’ll actually be a duchess — while others argued she should be described as biracial, not black.

How to define, describe, and label mixed-race identity has been a brewing controversy in recent decades as the country becomes more racially diverse. Since the 2000 census, when Americans were first able to choose more than one race, the Census Bureau reported that people of color will be the majority in the nation by the 2040s and that more than half of American children will be part of a minority race or ethnic group by 2020. In fact, as of last year, the census said minority or ethnic-group children under the age of 1 are already in the majority.

The sociologist Herbert Gans blamed Census Bureau data for the increase in white nationalism and alt-right fear “that they are being threatened and overwhelmed by a growing tide of darker-skinned people.” He predicted that mixed-race Latinos and Asians will eventually identify themselves as white.

Camille Z. Charles, the director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of an African American mother and a white father. Charles identifies as black. She is working on a book exploring the intra-racial diversity among black Americans who identify either as African American, mixed-race/biracial, or black immigrant, tentatively titled The New Black: Race-Conscious or Post-Racial?…

Read the entire article here.