Mixed Race Studies

Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) consists of fifty-nine high-precision samples of the American population drawn from fifteen federal censuses, from the American Community Surveys of 2000-2007, and from the Puerto Rican Community Surveys of 2005-2007. Some of these samples have existed for years, and others were created specifically for this database. These samples collectively constitute our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population. However, because different investigators created these samples at different times, they employed a wide variety of record layouts, coding schemes, and documentation. This has complicated efforts to use them to study change over time. The IPUMS assigns uniform codes across all the samples and brings relevant documentation into a coherent form to facilitate analysis of social and economic change.

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In the racial politics of the United States, racial passing refers to a person classified by society as a member of one racial group (most commonly Caucasian / Afro-American heritage) choosing to identify with a different group (usually white) by appearance. The term was used especially in the US to describe a person of mixed-race heritage assimilating to the white majority…

Wikipedia contributors, “Passing (racial identity),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Passing_(racial_identity)&oldid=348052376 (accessed March 9, 2010).

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly “separate but equal” status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages…

Wikipedia contributors, “Jim Crow laws,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term for a belief among some people in the United States that a person with any trace of African ancestry is black.

See also: hypodescent.

Wikipedia

For more information, see Winthrop D. Jordan’s (Paul Spickard, ed.) “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” in the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (Volume 1, Issue 1, 2014).

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

Octoroon means a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genealogically, it means one-eighth black. Typically an Octoroon has one great-grandparent who is of full African descent and seven great-grandparents who are not.

hexadecaroon (1/16th)
dotriacontaroon (1/32)
tetrahexacontaroon (1/64)
octaicosahectaroon (1/128)
hexapentacontadictaroon (1/256)
dodecapentactaroon (1/512)
tetraicosakiliaroon (1/1,024)
octatetracontadiliaroon (1/2,048)
hexanonacontatetraliaroon (1/4,096)
dinonacontahectaoctaliaroon (1/8,192)

See IUPAC numerical multipliers.

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

…Quadroon usually referred to someone of one-quarter black ancestry; that is, with three white grandparents but also refers to a person of one-quarter caucasian ancestry and three-quarters black ancestry.  A quadroon has a biracial (mulatto) parent (black and white) and one white parent or black parent…

From Wikipedia.

The Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports or simply, The Fletcher Report of 1930 was a report sponsored by the Liverpool [England] Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in December, 1927.  The report, released on 1930-06-16, was written by Muriel E. Fletcher a 1920 graduate of the University of Liverpool’s School of Social Science.  She was at that time employed as a probation worker and given the task to investigate the socioeconomic plight of ‘half-castes’.  The social research played particular attention to the family structure of the [so-called] “half-caste” population in Liverpool¹.

The Fletcher Report was written in response to the social tension created by the increased population of black (African) seamen who, via colonization—were deemed British citizens—and their “half-caste” (‘mixed-race’) children of their unions with white (English) women.  This tension culminated with the Liverpool anti-Black riots of 1919.   The report was based on a mere fraction the authors’ purported sample size and had little, if any, concern for the actual well-being of  ‘mixed-race’ children and their families. The report was imbued with the racist “hybrid degeneracy” pseudoscience of the day.  Besides the fact that the Fletcher Report stigmatized ‘mixed race’ individuals for decades, the report owns another ignominious spot in race relations in that it embedded the pejorative term “half-caste” into the British lexicon.

The report is available at the Library of the University of Liverpool (Reference Number: D7/5/5/5).  See: http://sca.lib.liv.ac.uk/ead/html/gb141unirelated-p4.shtml#uni.10.09.01.05.05.02

¹Mark Christian, “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21 Issue 2-3, (2008):  213 – 241.

Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture.  This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science), anti-racism & multiculturalism, and globalization. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.

Hybridity as racial mixing

Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture.  As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans and Asians were racially inferior to Europeans.  The fear of miscegenation that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race.  Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation.  Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit…

Wikipedia

Amalgamation is a now largely archaic term for the intermarriage and interbreeding of different ethnicities or races. In the English-speaking world, the term was in use into the twentieth century. In the United States, it was partly replaced after 1863 by the term miscegenation. While the term amalgamation could refer to the interbreeding of different white as well as non-white ethnicities, the term miscegenation referred specifically to the interbreeding of whites and non-whites, especially African Americans.

The term amalgamation was derived from metallurgy (see amalgam). It has been linked to the metaphor of the melting pot, which also originated in the US, and which described the cultural assimilation and intermarriage of different ethnicities. The intermarriage of whites with African Americans and, to a lesser degree, other non-whites was until recently in social disfavor in the United States, despite the long history of informal liaisons between white men and nonwhite women during the long years of slavery and after emancipation. Until 1967, interracial marriages were prohibited in many US states through anti-miscegenation laws.

Wikipedia

See also book: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory.

In social science research, snowball sampling is a technique for developing a research sample where existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances. Thus the sample group appears to grow like a rolling snowball.  As the sample builds up, enough data is gathered to be useful for research.  This sampling technique is often used in hidden populations which are difficult for researchers to access; example populations would be drug users or commercial prostitutes.

Because sample members are not selected from a sampling frame, snowball samples are subject to numerous biases. For example, people who have many friends are more likely to be recruited into the sample.

It was widely believed that it was impossible to make unbiased estimates from snowball samples, but a variation of snowball sampling called respondent-driven sampling has been shown to allow researchers to make asymptotically unbiased estimates from snowball samples under certain conditions. Respondent-driven sampling also allows researchers to make estimates about the social network connecting the hidden population.

Wikipedia