Mixed Race Studies

Post-Racial America? Multiracial Identification and the Color Line in the 21st Century

Nanzan Review of American Studies
Volume 30 (2008)
pages 13-31

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The United States is more racially diverse than at any point in history. Once a largely black-white society with a distinct color line separating these two groups, the country has moved far beyond black and white due to contemporary immigration. Today, immigrants and their children comprise almost 66 million people, or about 23% of the U. S. population, but unlike the earlier waves of immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America’s recent newcomers have been mainly non-European, with 85% originating from Latin America, Asia, or the Caribbean (Lee and Bean 2004; U. S. Bureau of Census 2002; U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002). The shift in national origins―from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean―is the single most distinctive aspect of the “new immigration” in the United States (Bean and Stevens 2003; Waldinger and Lee 2001).

America’s immigrant newcomers have undeniably altered the racial landscape of the United States. In 1970, Latinos and Asians comprised only 5% and 1% of the U. S. population, but today, they account for 13% and 4%, respectively. The Latino population has grown so rapidly that Latinos now outnumber blacks, and have become the nation’s largest minority group in the United States. While smaller in size, the Asian population is the fastest growing group in the country (Lee and Zhou 2004). America’s Latino and Asian populations are expected to continue to grow so that by 2050, they are projected to constitute 30% and 8% of the U. S. population. Clearly, today’s immigrants have transformed the United States from a largely black-white society to a newly multi-racial one…

…In this paper, I use patterns of multiracial identification as the analytical lens by which I gauge the placement of the contemporary color line in the United States. Multiracial identification speaks volumes about the meaning of race in American society, and in particular, signals where racial group boundaries are fading most rapidly and where they continue to endure. Multiracial reporting is a significant harbinger of racial change because the willingness of an individual to identify in multiracial terms reflects a jettisoning of the exclusive bases of racial categorization that have long marked the construction of race in the United States. It also reflects the diminishing significance of the current American racial scheme, which some sociologists believe will become increasingly less relevant in each generation until it disappears into obscurity….

Read the entire article here.

Brazil: Census “Reveals” Majority of Population is Black or Mixed Race

Global Voices
2011-11-29

Written by: Paula Góes

Translated by: Maisie Fitzpatrick

Statistics On Miscegenation

Franklin Repository
1864-04-27
page 1, column 6

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The Repository details the disproportionate number of “mulattoes” in the South relative to the North.

Full Text of Article:

There were 411,613 mulatto slaves in the south in 1840, of whom 69,979 were in Virginia; 43,281 in Kentucky, and 36,900 in Georgia. These numbers are considerably beyond the legitimate proportion of those States. There were also 176,739 free mulattoes in the United States in 1860, of whom 106,770 belonged to the south, and 69,969 to the free States. Of the free mulattoes Virginia contained 23,485, which number, added to her slave mulattoes makes a total of miscegenated population of 93,824. Her mulatto slaves alone exceeded the total number of mulattoes in the free States.

The whole number of mulattoes, slave and free, in the Union, in 1860, was 588,352, of whom 69,969 belonged to the free States, and 518,383 to the slave States—a number greater than the combined white population of Arkansas, Delaware and Florida—greater than the white population of Maryland—almost twice as great as that of South Carolina, and twice as great as the combined populations of Delaware and Florida. The mulatto population of Virginia alone exceeds the number of whites in Delaware or Florida.

The American Race

Semi-Weekly Dispatch
Franklin County, Virginia
1861-05-17
page 1, Column 3

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Reasons that America’s population has increased by one-third in the past ten years because of the intermarriage in the United States of the races of Celts, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, and North American Indians. This mixing of the races has made the “stock” more “vigorous” and will ultimately produce a peculiar “American race,” which will exhibit the different positive characteristics of all these distinct peoples.

Full Text of Article:

The present census reveals the astonishing fact that the population of the United States has increased thirty-three per cent, within the last ten years. The Roman Empire, approaching the culmination of its power, increased about thirty per cent each hundred years, but no nation in recorded times has afforded any parallel to the advancement of our own. Spain has been depopulating for a thousand years; England is not three times more populous than three centuries ago, and Italy is no more important numerically than she was in the days of Pliny; but within three quarters of a country the population of the United States has risen from three to thirty millions. It is a common error to attribute this vast increase to immigration from foreign countries; but of the twenty-three millions enumerated in ’50, not three millions were of foreign birth. Vast as the annual immigration is, it bears no proportion to the yearly increase by birth, which in itself, independent of immigration, averages thirty per cent, every ten years of the present century. This wonderful fecundity is not unexplained by physical law; it is observed that in populous countries of Europe where the same people continually intermarry, the increase is comparatively insignificant; on the same principle the aristocracy of England is observed to diminish rather than multiply, because interest and pride confine people to intermarriage to people of the same race, and often within the circle of consanguinity. But in the United States various races amalgamate; the stock becomes more vigorous, there is less of disease and early death, and the population consequently increases with a prodigious ratio… …It is computed that at least one-third of the population of the U. States are descendants of the Puritans, who were Anglo-Saxons; this strong-willed, enterprising and indomitable race, intermingling with others, has preserved ascendancy and produced a people superior in physical strength and in those attributes of mind most required in the rapid development of the great Empire of the West. Humiliating as the institution of any analogy may appear to man of the immortal mind, he must submit to the laws governing the rest of animal creation in which the union of distinct stocks produces improvement. Some of the finest examples of physical beauty have resulted from the intermarriage of Europeans and North American Indians; and, indeed, instances are not wanting where the offspring has been endowed with wonderful intellectual strength…

Read the entire article here.

Not as simple as black or white

The Voice
2011-11-21

Elizabeth Pears

How mixed-race Brits are tackling issues surrounding dual heritage

LAST MONTH, the UK’s fastest growing ethnic minority, as part of the BBC’s Mixed Britannia series, reignited the debate of what it means to be ‘mixed-race’.

Demographers have predicted that Britain’s mixed-race population will reach 1.3 million by 2020 – almost double the number recorded in 2001. Of this figure, 45 percent are mixed white and black.

But despite increasing acceptance of inter-racial relationships and more visible mixed-race people such as Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, actress Thandie Newton and Olympian Kelly Holmes, the concept of being mixed-race remains quite literally a grey area – a type of no man’s land where nothing is as simple as black or white.

Some critics find the need for mixed-race people to identify as such divisive, and argue that biologically there can be no such thing. Others argue that by merit of having a collective experience, mixed-race people should be free to align themselves in this way, and subsequently, get their voice heard when it comes to policy and decision-making.

Self-defining

Then there are those who are comfortable self-defining as black in the political sense as a means of navigating British society.

Bradley Lincoln, founder of social enterprise Mix-D, whose aim is to provide a year-round national platform for mixed-race debate, said: “When we talk about being mixed-race there is a danger of either over-celebrating or sounding like a victim.

“Mixed-race people are not foot soldiers for a new racism. It is not a homogenous group. It is not a separate ethnic grouping – but it is time to move the conversation forward, particularly within the education and the social care system where many mixed children are considered just black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial identity and the spatial assimilation of Mexicans in the United States

Social Science Research
Volume 21, Issue 3 (September 1992)
pages 235-260
DOI: 10.1016/0049-089X(92)90007-4

Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Nancy A. Denton, Professor of Sociology
Center for Social and Demographic Analysis
State University of New York, Albany

Mexico’s national ideology holds that Mexicans are mestizos, a racially mixed group created by the union of Europeans and Indians. When Mexicans migrate to the United States, this mixed racial identity comes into conflict with Anglo-American norms that view race dichotomously, as Indian or white but not both. In this paper we examine the process of ideological assimilation by which Mexicans in the United States shift their identities from mestizo to white, and then measure the effect that race has on the level of residential segregation from non-Hispanic whites. Although residential barriers are not as severe for mestizos as for Hispanics of African heritage, we find that mestizos are significantly less likely than white Mexicans to achieve suburban residence and that this fact, in turn, lowers their probability of contact with non-Hispanic whites.

Read or purchase the article here.

Students Break Out of Fixed-Race Box

Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center
2011-11-15

Pamela Cytrynbaum, Instructor of Journalism
Northwestern University

My journalism students were brainstorming topics for their final story projects. I urged them to come up with compelling ideas that relate to their experiences but that push deeply into national trends.

“Stop letting all the midlife writers (like myself) tell your stories,” I pushed. “Tell your own.”

As they went around the room, several pitches swirled around the same theme: the dramatic increase in multi-racial students and the issues of identity and self-definition they face.

The idea caught fire and sparked a fascinating class discussion. Turns out, they identified a trend that is transforming our classrooms—and should transform our teaching as well…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood

Racialicious
2011-10-31

Jen Chau, Guest Contributor

In the past couple of years, I have noticed a certain complacency that I never noticed before, in my eleven years of leading Swirl. The same passion and the same excitement around building multiracial communities had faded a bit. In the one year leading up to the Presidential election, we launched five new chapters (the norm had been a chapter every year or every other year). People were excited by the energy created by Obama’s campaign, and they were motivated and eager to be a part of creating supportive and inclusive multiracial communities.

And then once Obama was firmly placed in the White House, something happened. It got quiet…

Read the entire article here.

How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

American Sociological Review
Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007)
pages 915-939
DOI: 10.1177/000312240707200604

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Jeronimo O. Muniz
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico’s whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting-an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Britannia: Part 3 of 3 (1965-2011)

BBC Two
2011-10-20

George Alagiah, Host

Below is the last episode as four 15-minute videos.