Mixed Race Studies

On College Forms, a Question of Race, or Races, Can Perplex

The New York Times
2011-06-13

Susan Saulny

Jacques Steinberg

HOUSTON — At the beginning of the college application season last fall, Natasha Scott, a high school senior of mixed racial heritage in Beltsville, Md., vented about a personal dilemma on College Confidential, the go-to electronic bulletin board for anonymous conversation about admissions.

“I just realized that my race is something I have to think about,” she wrote, describing herself as having an Asian mother and a black father. “It pains me to say this, but putting down black might help my admissions chances and putting down Asian might hurt it.”

“My mother urges me to put down black to use AA” — African-American — “to get in to the colleges I’m applying to,” added Ms. Scott, who identified herself on the site as Clearbrooke. “I sort of want to do this but I’m wondering if this is morally right.”

Within minutes, a commenter had responded, “You’re black. You should own it.” Someone else agreed, “Put black!!!!!!!! Listen to your mom.”

No one advised marking Asian alone. But one commenter weighed in with advice that could just as well have come from any college across the country: “You can put both. You can put one. You’re not dishonest either way. Just put how you feel.”…

…Some scholars worry that the growth in multiracial applicants could further erode the original intent of affirmative action, which is to help disadvantaged minorities. For example, families with one black parent and one white parent are on average more affluent than families with two black parents. When choosing between two such applicants, some universities might lean toward the multiracial student because he will need less financial aid while still counting toward affirmative-action goals.

“How do we include multiracials in our view of an egalitarian society and not do it in a way that disadvantages other groups?” said Ulli K. Ryder, visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University…

A Growing Category

Rice University in Houston might, given its early history, seem an unlikely place to find admissions officers wrestling with questions of race as they size up their applicants. A private and highly selective institution, it was founded in the early 1900s by a wealthy Houston businessman as an exclusively white institution, a designation it maintained through the late 1960s.

And yet these days, white students are now only 43 percent of the student body at Rice, where an applicant’s racial identification can become an admissions game changer. This can be especially true during the “committee round” in early spring, when only a few dozen slots might remain for a freshman class expected to number about 1,000.

At that stage, a core group of five to seven bleary-eyed admissions officers will convene for debate around a rectangular laminate table strewn with coffee cups and half-eaten doughnuts as the applications of those students still under consideration are projected onto a 60-inch plasma TV screen.

For most of the nearly 14,000 who applied this year, the final decision — admit or deny — was a relatively straightforward one resolved early on, based on the admissions officers’ sampling of factors like test scores, grades, extracurricular activities and recommendations.

But there are several thousand applicants whose fate might still be in limbo by the committee round because their qualifications can seem fairly indistinguishable from one another. This is when an applicant’s race — or races — might tip the balance.

“From an academic standpoint, the qualifying records, the test scores, how many AP courses, they may all look alike,” said Chris Muñoz, vice president for enrollment at Rice since 2006. “That’s when we might go and say, ‘This kid has a Spanish surname. Let’s see what he wrote about.’ Right or wrong, it can make a difference.”…

Read the entire article here.

For the first time, blacks outnumber whites in Brazil

Miami Herald
2011-05-24

Taylor Barnes, Special to the Miami Herald

Brazilians are no longer reluctant to admit being black or ‘pardo,’ experts said.

RIO DE JANEIRO—In the past decade, famously mixed-race Brazilians either became prouder of their African roots, savvier with public policies benefiting people of color or are simply more often darker skinned , depending on how you read the much-debated new analysis of the census here.

A recently released 2010 survey showed that Brazil became for the first time a “majority minority” nation, meaning less than half the population now identifies as white.
 
Every minority racial group—officially, “black,” “pardo” (mixed), “yellow” and “indigenous”—grew in absolute numbers since 2000. “White” was the only group that shrank in both absolute numbers and percentage, becoming 48 percent of the population from 53 percent 10 years ago.

Experts say the shift reflects a growing comfort in not calling oneself white in order to prosper in Brazil and underscores the growing influence of popular culture. Paula Miranda-Ribeiro, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said another factor was the increase in bi-racial unions with mixed-race kids.

While Americans look at race as a question of origin, Brazilians largely go by appearance, so much so that the children of the same parents could mark different census categories, she said…

…Activists and artists here say they’ve seen a greater mobilization for mixed-race Brazilians to call themselves black or pardo in recent years.

“The phenomenon I perceive are people getting out of that pressure to whiten themselves, and assuming their blackness,” says visual artist Rosana Paulino, whose doctoral work at the University of São Paulo focused on the representation of blacks in the arts.
 
She sees a rising self-esteem on the part of mixed-race Brazilians who stop using middle-ground terms like “moreninho” (“a little tan”) or “marrom-bombom” (“brown chocolate”) and simply call themselves black…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls

The Citizen
2011-05-16

Justine Gerardy

Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.

“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”

Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.

The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.

The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…

…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.

The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.

And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…

Read the entire article here.

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

More Minnesotans say they’re multiracial in 2010 Census

TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press
2011-04-17

Richard Chin and MaryJo Webster

Maybe it’s hip to be mixed.

That could be one explanation for Minnesota’s 51 percent increase over the past decade in the number of people who say they are multiracial, substantially higher than the national increase.

According to the recent U.S. census, about 125,000 people in Minnesota identified themselves as being of two or more races, up from about 83,000 in the previous census.

Almost all of that increase took place in the metro-area suburbs and outstate, where the number of multiracial people jumped more than 75 percent.

About 2.4 percent of Minnesota’s population is multiracial, about the same as the nation as a whole.

But multiracial people represent a larger part of the state’s minority population than of the U.S. population. Almost one of six nonwhite people in the state are multiracial, compared with about one in 10 nationwide.

University of Minnesota sociologist Carolyn Liebler, an expert in racial identity, said she thinks three things are driving the increase:

• More children are from interracial marriages, with parents in those marriages increasingly likely to identify their offspring as multiracial.
• Immigration has increased, with people born in another country who have a mixed background more likely to say they come from two or more races.
• More people are deciding to label themselves multiracial because they face increasing acceptance and opportunity to make that choice.

Mixed-race people are nothing new. Most American blacks, for example, have some white ancestry.

But throughout much of American history, mixed-race people were forced legally and socially to identify with just one race…

Read the entire article here.

For some, question of race a struggle

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2011-04-05

Karen Lee Ziner, Journal Staff Writer

Face to face with the question of racial identity, Providence lawyer Kas R. DeCarvalho chose a write-in option under “Other” in the 2010 census form.

“I put in mixed and called it a day,” said DeCarvalho, whose father is from Angola in southwest Africa, and whose mother is an American of Scottish-Irish descent.

“It has been my entire life, something of a struggle to figure out exactly what to do,” DeCarvalho said. “Only in recent years have any sorts of government forms offered an option, mixed race. Until then, you had to pick one or the other, or neither.”

He added, “I could have put white, and I suppose I could have [also] filled in black. I identify as a black American. That’s how I’m perceived but, culturally, I’m much more complicated than that. I don’t think there’s really a way to encapsulate that in some sort of census document.”

DeCarvalho is one of 9 million people, or 2.9 percent of the population, who selected or indicated more than one race on their 2010 Census forms, a roughly 32-percent increase since 2000. Some 3.3 percent of Rhode Islanders did so, slightly above the national average. He said, “I wish we lived in a world where we didn’t have to fill in anything.”

DeCarvalho isn’t alone…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Diverse Future: Initial Glimpses at the U.S. Child Population from the 2010 Census

Brookings
State of Metropolitan American
Number 29 (2011-04-06)
14 pages

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

For some time, Americans have been aware that “new minorities”—particularly Hispanics, Asians, and people of more than one race—are becoming a more important part of our nation’s social fabric. 

Initial results from the 2010 Census now make clear why the contributions of these groups are so important.  With a rapidly aging white population, the United States depends increasingly on these new minorities to infuse its youth population—and eventually its labor force—with needed demographic heft and vitality…

Read the entire report here.

Census data suggests increased acceptance of being multiracial

The Daily Texan
University of Texas, Austin
2011-04-01

Shamoyita DasGupta, Daily Texan Staff

More Americans than ever before identify as multiracial, according to the 2010 census.
 
Of the 9 million people who listed themselves as more than one race, 4.2 million are children. The percentage rose from 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent in the last 10 years.
 
In Texas, the number increased from 514,633 in 2000 to 679,001 in 2010, with the majority of those people identifying themselves as being white and any other race, said Jenna Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Dallas region of the U.S. Census Bureau.
 
The significant increase is not particularly surprising to those who study population trends, said sociology professor Ronald Angel.  “There’s more intermarriage,” he said. “[Being multiracial] just seems to be more accepted, just from the data.”
 
Those who were more likely to list themselves as being of more than one race tended to be Native Hawaiians, American Indians and Pacific Islanders, while blacks and whites were less likely to report being multiracial, according to The New York Times…

GW gives community option to identify as multiracial

The GW Hatchet
George Washington University, Washington D.C.
2011-03-28

Pavan Jagannathan, Hatchet Reporter

The University added a new category for multiracial students, faculty and staff to classify themselves as “two or more races” in University institutional data, moving into compliance with a new federal regulation.

University Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Steven Lerman said the U.S. Department of Education’s new aggregate categories for reporting racial and ethnic data of students and staff went into effect for the 2010-2011 school year.

“GW is complying with a federal mandate to collect race and ethnicity data in a specific way to allow for multiple race codes per person,” Lerman said…

The social and economic circumstances of mixed ethnicity children in the UK: findings from the Millennium Cohort Study

Ethnic and Racial Studies
First Published online: 2011-03-10
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.556745

Lidia Panico, Research Student
Department for Epidemiology and Public Health
University College London

James Y. Nazroo, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research
University of Manchester

The number of people with a ‘mixed’ ethnicity heritage is growing in contemporary Britain. Research in this area has largely focused on implications for cultural and racialized identities, and little is known about associated economic and social factors. Data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a representative panel survey of children born in 2000-2001, are used to examine the circumstances of mixed ethnicity children in comparison with their non-mixed and white counterparts. Findings suggest a cultural location between ‘white’ and minority identities, and socio-economic advantage in comparison with non-mixed counterparts. For example, households of non-mixed white children had poorer economic profiles than households of both mixed white and mixed Indian children. This effect is associated with the presence of a white parent, and the factors underlying it are examined. Although the statistical approach used bypasses a consideration of the dynamics of identity, it provides important evidence on stratification and inequality, and the factors driving this.

Read or purchase the article here.