Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s Presidential (Mixed) Race: Framing and Ideological Analysis of Blogs and News

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
July 2011
217 pages

Iliana P. Rucker

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States brought a heightened awareness to the role of race and produced speculation about the idealized notion of the achievement of a post-racial United States.

This dissertation examined mediated conversations on mixed race identity in response to some of the significant events in the Obama campaign and the first months of the Obama presidency. Specifically, this study examined the ways that newspapers and blogs construct discourses about race, mixed race, and racism. Further, I explored the biological, legal, and social implications as they relate to current constructions of mixed race identity. This dissertation centered the data collection around four pivotal discourses in the Obama era: (1) Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy; (2) Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech; (3) Obama’s election to the presidency; and (4) the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Gates. The parameters of these pivotal discourses allowed me to focus on what bloggers say about the events and how the newspapers reported them. Ideological criticism and framing analysis guided my study on racial identifications and negotiations related to Obama from three newspapers: New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times; as well as four blogs: Mixed Roots, Beige-World, Light-skinned-ed Girl, and Twisted Curlz.

Three dominant frames emerged from the news coverage on the four discursive moments: race, dialogue, and history. I define the race frame as stories about the issues concerning race and racism; the dialogue frame as stories about a conversation, specifically at the national level; and the historical frame as stories about historic events. Three frames also emerged from the framing analysis of the blog posts: awareness, personalization, and racism. The awareness frame consists of postings about news and celebrity in mixed race community; the personalization frame as personal postings; and the racism frame as postings relating to issues concerning racism.

Ideological criticism facilitated the analysis of the news articles and blogs and allowed me to uncover several ideologies about race and mixed race emerge from these discursive constructions. The newspapers perpetuated the invisibility of Whiteness, the Black and White binary, hybrid heroism, and the erasure of racism ideologies. The preference for Obama as President, the salience of mixed race matters, and promotion of anti-racist work are ideologies in the blogs. While the blogs and news articles are different in format, style and purpose, taken together they give a look at the ongoing conversation that impacts discourses on race, racism, and mixed race. The interpretation of the findings explains how the media I examined reveal the social construction of race, the rhetoric of race, and agenda setting in each of the discursive moments in order to discuss current conceptualizations of race in the United States. In addition to an in-depth interpretation of framing and ideological analyses findings, the theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • Personal Perspective
    • Researcher Perspective
    • Rationale
    • Data Collection and Analysis
      • News Media
      • Weblogs
    • Obama, Race, and Identity
      • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
    • Assumptions
    • Research Questions
  • Key Concepts
    • Mixed Race Identity
    • Post-Racial United States
    • Media Conversations
  • Overview
• CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
  • Racial Identity
  • Biological Assumptions
    • One-drop rule
  • Legal Assumptions
    • Social Implications
  • Socially Constructing Race
    • Media Framing
    • Rhetorical and Ideological Framing
    • Rhetoric of Race
    • Terministic screens
      • Mixed Race and Media Representations
• CHAPTER 3: METHODS
  • Discursive Moments
  • Data Collection
  • Research Questions
  • Methods
    • Ideological analysis
    • Locating myself in the research
• CHAPTER 4: FRAMING ANALYSIS
  • Framing Analysis
    • Defining Frames
  • Framing Analysis of Newspapers
    • Race Frame
      • Racialized Obama script
      • Race is biological
      • Progressing past racism script
    • Dialogue Frame
      • National script
      • Debate script
    • History Frame
      • From the past script
      • Witnessing history script
  • Framing Analysis of Blog Posts
    • Awareness Frame
      • Mixed Race News script
      • Celebrity script
      • Questions script
    • Personalization Frame
      • Positionality
      • 2008 election experience
    • Racism Frame
      • Racial divide
      • Racial hatred
      • Challenging stereotyping and racial profiling script
• CHAPTER 5: IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
  • Defining Ideology
  • Ideological Analysis of News Discourse
    • Invisibility of Whiteness
    • Black and White Binary
    • Hybrid Heroism
    • Erasing Racism
  • Ideological Analysis of Blog Discourse
    • Obama for President
      • Defending Barack Obama
      • Acceptance
      • Obama is mixed
    • Anti-Racist Work
• CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATION
  • Social Construction of Race
    • Rhetoric of race
  • Agenda Setting
  • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION
  • Findings
    • RQ1: How do pivotal discourses during Obama’s campaign and early presidency stimulate conversations about race, mixed race identity, racism?
      • RQ1a: How do newspapers frame race and mixed race identity?
      • RQ1b: How do blogs frame race, mixed race, and racism?
    • RQ2: What ideologies about race, racism, and mixed race emerge from newspapers and blogs?
      • Newspapers
      • Blogs
    • RQ3: How do media discourses contribute to constructions of race?
    • RQ4: In what ways do the constructions suggest the possibility of a post-racial United States?
    • RQ5: How do newspapers and blogs set agendas that reinforce and oppose each other?
  • Contributions
    • Contributions to theory
    • Contributions to method
  • Future Research
  • Final Thoughts
  • References

Read the entire dissertation here.

The colour line and the colour scale in the twentieth century

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 7, 2012
pages 1109-1131
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.605902

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Bristol

Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.

Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.

Introduction

In the first year of the century, and then again three years later, W. E. B. Du Bois (2005:x, 10) wrote that ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line
the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea’. His prediction was only partially borne out, for the main problems of the twentieth century were the militarism that stimulated the slaughter of World War I, the dictatorships that led to World War II, the armaments race of the Cold War, the decolonization process, and the problems that the international political system could not grasp, particularly those of population growth and climate change. Colour-consciousness contributed to the fourth of these.

The expression, ‘a colour line’, was a metaphor drawing on Du Bois’ experiences in North America that was very effective for the designation of a political problem. Yet if a name chosen to designate a political problem conveys a thesis about the source, or cause, of the thing in question, it also poses an intellectual problem. In this case the expression ‘colour line’ grasped only one facet of the relations between humans of different colour…

…In the early years of the century there appeared to be a scientific justification for racial classification, even if there was no agreement upon quite which classification to employ, or for what purpose. That is no longer the case, and the educated public is now aware that there is no close correspondence between the social categories identified as races and the classes that assemble genetic similarities and dissimilarities. For example, it has been known for a long time that the social classification of persons in the USA as black or white is biologically misleading. A statistical analysis using historical census data and historical data on immigration and birth rates concluded in 1958 that twenty-one per cent of the white population had black ancestors, and that the majority of the persons with some African ancestry were classified as white (Stuckert 1958). In the aftermath of World War II, and in the international revulsion from the use made of racial doctrines by Nazi Germany, the idiom of race was used, in both international and national laws, to prohibit discrimination on grounds of race, colour, descent, and national or ethnic origin. Racial classifications have since been used in population censuses, in programmes for the promotion of  equality, and, at times, but in a different way, in medical research. The use of the word race in the law will continue, as it may in other parts of the everyday world of practical affairs…

…Though variations in skin colour can be measured objectively by use of a photospectrometer, these measures provide only approximate indications of a person’s genotype. Better indications can be taken from work in molecular anthropology. Such research has found that six genetic loci are involved in the determination of a person’s skin colour, so it is possible for a person to have a fifteen
-twenty per cent African component in his or her genotype without possessing any of the alleles that code for dark skin (Sweet 2004). This makes it easier, in a country like the USA, for a person with African ancestry to ‘pass for white’. For the same genetic reasons, African admixture amongst white Americans can increase without any significant change in skin tone. Conversely, amongst African-Americans, an amount of African admixture is directly correlated with darker skin since no selective pressure is applied; as a result, African-Americans may have a very wide range of African admixture (
>0-
100%), whereas European-Americans have a lower range (2
-20%). As there is a small overlap, it is possible that a man who identifies himself as white may have more African admixture than a man who identifies himself as black…

…This essay reviews the political problems of the twentieth century, at the same time calling attention to the intellectual problem posed by the multidimensionality of difference. Why is it that, in given circumstances, certain dimensions acquire a particular significance? This is the explanandum that has to be approached step by step. Starting from Du Bois’ prediction, it is argued here, firstly, that use of the word colour concentrates attention upon what serves as a visible sign of a social difference; secondly, that sociologists have to account for how it comes to be used as such a sign; and thirdly, that when sociologists use race as if it were a synonym for colour (as English-speaking sociologists often do) they make it more difficult to identify what has to be explained. As the essay’s title suggests, it also contends that the notion of a colour scale helps consideration of the function of colour as a social sign…

Read or purchase the article here.

Black and white twins

The Guardian
2011-09-23

Joanna Moorhead

James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black—and the differences don’t end there, as Joanna Moorhead discovers

The two teenage boys sitting on the sofa opposite are different in almost every way. On the left is James: he’s black, he’s gay, he’s gregarious, and he’s academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel, sitting beside him, is white. He’s straight, he’s shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all. He left after taking GCSEs, and hopes that his next move will be an apprenticeship in engineering.

So, given that they are diametrically opposed, there is one truly surprising thing about James and Daniel. They are twins. They were born on 27 March 1993, the sons of Alyson and Errol Kelly, who live in south-east London. And from the start, it was obvious to everyone that they were the complete flipside of identical. “They were chalk and cheese, right from the word go,” says Alyson. “It was hard to believe they were even brothers, let alone twins.”…

Read the entire article here.

Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Speigel Online International
2009-10-13

Stephanie Siek

Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name.

For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.

Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.

Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…

…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.

“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?'” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Cosmic Race in Texas: Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 2 (September 2011)
pages 404-419
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar338

Benjamin H. Johnson, Associate Professor of Global Studies and History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

In the early twentieth century, a number of Latin American intellectuals embraced racial fusion and predicted that it would one day undo the white supremacy represented by the United States. These ideas influenced Mexican American civil rights advocates in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, who found the embrace of hybridity to be a realistic description of their own racial backgrounds and an effective rejoinder to Jim Crow’s emphasis on racial purity. Attacking the consensus that an aspiration for whiteness drove these civil rights claims, Benjamin H. Johnson finds deep ties between Mexican American and Mexican political cultures and concludes that borderlands histories can take a transnational approach without obscuring the influence of nation-states or denying the emancipatory potential of claims to national belonging.

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,” proclaimed José Vasconcelos in 1925, “are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for a new period: the period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.” Vasconcelos wrote these words in Mexico as his four-year tenure as the secretary of the nation’s public education system came to a close and as his quest for an elected position (first the governorship of the state of Oaxaca and then the presidency) began. They appeared in La raza cósmica, an enormously influential work that circulated across the hemisphere. Whereas the U.S. intellectual and civil rights crusader W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century, Vasconcelos confidently predicted its erasure. The struggles of a country such as Mexico, which had just emerged from a decade of revolution and civil war, were for Vasconcelos at the center of global dynamics, as they heralded the rise of the cosmic race of his title, first in Latin America and then across the globe.

Although Vasconcelos was not well known in the United States, where his predictions would have surely struck both the architects and victims of a particularly brutal phase of white supremacy as ludicrous, he did have a profound influence there. His ideas, and the postrevolutionary political and social order of which they were a part, provided Mexican American civil rights leaders in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly those involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a reflection of their own racial self-conception and a set of arguments with which to critique white supremacy.

This article examines the connections…

Read or purchase the article here.

The “Common Sense” of Race

Southern California Law Review
Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010)
pages 441-452

Neil Gotanda, Professor of Law
Western State University College of Law, Fullerton California

In What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, Ariela J. Gross provides a compelling and nuanced account of race in America. Through her examination of “racial trials”—litigation in which racial identification plays a crucial role—Gross ties together the personal, social, and political dimensions of racial identity and classification. This discussion provides an important new perspective on the study of race in this country.

Earlier studies of racial classification have focused on the meanings of statutory racial categories. Gross, however, centers her analysis on the formation and reaffirmation of racial categories as a primarily social process. Gross draws from numerous racial trials—spanning slavery in the antebellum South to modern-day Mexican Americans grappling with “whiteness”—in order to survey the origins and history of “black” and “white” as categories in American life.

Read the entire essay here.

Mixed Indians, Caboclos and Curibocas: Historical Analysis of a Process of Miscegenation; Rio Negro (Brazil), 18th and 19th Centuries

Chapter in: Amazon Peasant Societies in a Changing Environment (2009)
Springer
Part I
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9283-1_4

Décio de Alencar Guzmán

The author analyses the process of mixing (mestiçagem) in the Rio Negro region during the 18th and 19th Centuries. After presenting the main features of this mestiçagem’s components (the Amerindian, the European and the African), the author concentrates on the inter-racial marriage policies prescribed by the Portuguese Crown, as part of a group of projects geared towards the exploitation of human resources in Portuguese America. Guzmán believes that one of the main hindrances to the advance of the studies about the Amazonian caboclo societies is the belief that they are independent and self-regulated social systems. Such a conception has prevented a more accurate understanding of such societies as a product of historical transformations.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race

National Bureau of Economic Research
Working Paper 9962
September 2003

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

Christopher S. Ruebeck, Associate Professor of Economics
Lafayette University, Easton, Pennsylvania

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is potentially endogenous because racial and ethnic identities are fluid. We look at the free African-American population in the mid-nineteenth century to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting alternative racial identities. We model the choice as an extensive-form game, where whites choose to accept or reject a separate mulatto identity and mixed race individuals then choose whether or not to adopt that mulatto identity. Adopting a mulatto identity generates pecuniary gains, but imposes psychic costs. Our empirical results imply that race is contextual and that there was a large pecuniary benefit to adopting a mixed-race identity.

1. Introduction

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity adopted in response to the costliness of maintaining a specific identity (Hechter, Friedman, and Appelbaum 1982; Stewart 1997; Mason 2001; Akerlof and Kranton 2000; Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2002). These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is contextual because racial and ethnic identities are fluid (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson, undated). Harris and Sim (2001) report recent evidence of this fluidity among contemporary mixed black-white youth. Although 75 percent of today’s mixed black-white children self-identify as black, 17 percent self-identify as white, and the remaining 8 percent prefer not to select a single racial designation. About 10 percent of mixed-race youth adopt one racial designation at school and a different one at home. It is evident that among modern mixed race youth racial identification is contextual.

Racial and ethnic self-identification have economic consequences because the choice of self-identity is likely to be entwined with the acceptance of and acculturation into dominant social norms. If race or ethnicity is endogenous in certain circumstances, a self-identity may or may not be selected to distance oneself from a subordinate group or to improve one’s standing with or acceptance into the dominant group. In a study of people of Mexican descent, Mason (2001) tests a model in which acculturation is a dominant strategy, and finds that light-complected people of Mexican descent may acculturate more easily. Murguia and Telles (1996) report different educational opportunities for Mexicans of light and dark complexion and argue that these may result from conscious choices. Phenotypic differences, they argue, influence individual strategies. Light-skinned people of Mexican descent learn early in life that by assimilating or acculturating they can defuse negative stereotypes and attain more than their dark-complected counterparts. Later in life, light-skinned Mexicans are able to increase their incomes by adopting a non-Hispanic white identity (Mason 2001). Yet there may also be situations in which members of the subordinate group decide to maintain identities separate from the dominant group.

Our study considers the choices and life chances of black and mixed black-white individuals residing in the urban U.S. South prior to the Civil War. The experience of mixed black-white individuals in this period is particularly germane to the study of the social and economic consequences of racial identification because the so-called one-drop rule was not yet firmly established. Most Upper South states legally adopted a one-fourth rule separating black from white. But the line was not as sharply drawn because the dominant white culture accepted mixed-race people as a separate class. As Williamson (1984, p. 13) notes for Virginia, “there were some people who were significantly black, visibly black, and known to be black, but by the law of the land and the rulings of the courts had the privileges of whites.” Lower South states generally adopted no formal definition of “whiteness,” and were even more accepting of a separate mixed-race or mulatto class. “Known and visible mulattoes could by behavior and reputation be ‘white’” (Williamson 1984, p. 19). Acculturation was an option for at least some mixed-race people living in the antebellum South.

We first model a mixed-race individual’s choice of self-identity. Acculturation brought a degree of acceptance from the dominant white community, which opened the door to a wider set of economic opportunities, but acculturation carried an implicit cost, namely that by adopting the norms of the dominant white culture (dress, language, mannerisms, religious affiliation, group membership, etc.), the individual alienated himself or herself from the black community. To the extent that the recognition of an individual’s heritage generates utility, the rejection of black culture was costly.

We then test the model empirically. We find that African Americans were more likely to identify as mulatto when there were already a substantial number of other mulattos who had formed social networks and established a community. Yet, the probability of declaring a mulatto identity declined with the size and extent of the African-American community. We interpret this to mean that if blacks ostracized mulattos for separating themselves socially and economically, then the larger the black community (holding the number of mulatto households constant) the more costly it was to be ostracized. Similarly, whites became less accepting of a mulatto’s distinctiveness as the city became increasingly African American and thus showed mulattos fewer preferences.

Once we demonstrate that the choice of a mulatto identity was associated with racial composition of the individual’s neighborhood and city, we then investigate the economic consequences of adopting a mulatto identity.  We estimate differences in wealth between blacks and mulattoes and find that mixed-race householders, both male and female, accumulated more wealth than black householders. Regression decompositions suggest that a substantial portion of the wealth gap was due to racial identification and to community factors. Consistent with our model, we find that mixed-race people realized smaller advantages relative to blacks as the size of the African-American community increased both absolutely and relatively. Thus, mixed-race people benefited when they could form a distinct intermediate racial class, standing between the dominant white and subordinate black communities…

Read the entire paper here.

Colourism and African-American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South

Journal of Population Economics
Volume 20, Number 3 (July 2007)
pages 599-620
DOI: 10.1007/s00148-006-0111-x

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

Christopher S. Ruebeck, Associate Professor of Economics
Lafayette University, Easton, Pennsylvania

Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 US federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate relationships between wealth and recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps to examine the returns to racial characteristics. The analysis reveals a distinct racial hierarchy. Black wealth was only 20% of white wealth, but mulattoes held nearly 50% of whites’ wealth. This advantage is consistent with colourism, the favouritism shown to those of lighter complexion.

Read the entire article here.