Mixed Race Studies

The Correspondence Between Interracial Births and Multiple-Race Reporting

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 92, Number 12 (December 2002)
pages 1976–1981

Jennifer D. Parker, PhD
Office of Analysis, Epidemiology, and Health Promotion
National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, Maryland

Jennifer H. Madans, PhD, OD Co-Deputy Director / OD Associate Director for Science / OPBL Associate Director
Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services
Centers for Disease Control

• Objectives. Race-specific health statistics are routinely reported in scientific publications; most describe health disparities across groups. Census 2000 showed that 2.4% of the US population identifies with more than 1 race group. We examined the hypothesis that multiple-race reporting is associated with interracial births by comparing parental race reported on birth certificates with reported race in a national health survey.
• Methods. US natality data from 1968 through 1998 and National Health Interview Survey data from 1990 through 1998 were compared, by year of birth.
• Results. Overall multiple-race survey responses correspond to expectations from interracial births. However, there are discrepancies for specific multiple-race combinations.
• Conclusions. Projected estimates of the multiple-race population can be only partially informed by vital records. (Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1976–1981)

Eliminating racial disparities is an important national health objective; as a result, many policy and summary reports report race-specific health statistics to monitor trends and identify problem areas. Scientific research papers analyze race-specific data in hopes of understanding the disparities and, ultimately, finding ways to reduce them.

In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a revision to the long-standing directive for the collection of race and ethnicity data within the federal statistical system, known as OMB-15. Among other modifications designed to reflect the changing racial and ethnic profile in the United States, the 1997 standard requires that new data collections allow individuals to report 1 or more race groups when responding to a query on their racial identity. Analysts examining previously available data hypothesized that up to 2% of respondents to surveys or administrative collections would report 2 or more groups under the new standard. About 2.4% of the US population, nearly 7 million people, reported 2 or more race groups in the 2000 decennial census.

The impact of multiple-race reporting on statistics used for health policy and research is not yet known. It is likely that multiple-race respondents differ from each other and from their single-race counterparts on many measures of health and access to care. The extent of these differences will depend on many factors. All considered, multiple-race reporting will influence public health policy for both the newly tabulated multiple-race groups and the remaining single-race groups, which will be changed as a result of a wider choice of racial identification. Interracial births have increased over the past 3 decades. In the early 1970s, 1.4% of infants were born to parents who reported different race groups; by 1998, this percentage had increased to 4.3%. It would be reasonable to assume that individuals with parents of different races would identify with and report more than 1 group when responding to surveys and other data collections. However, how interracial births affect multiple-race reporting is unclear.

This report compares year- and race-specific national estimates of interracial births with year-specific survey estimates of multiple-race reporting. We compared the distribution of parental race for births from 1968 through 1998 with the reporting of more than 1 race for survey respondents in the 1990–1998 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) who were born from 1968 through 1998. If all individuals with interracial parents reported both race groups on the survey, we would expect the distribution of multiple-race responses on the NHIS to coincide with the distribution of interracial births from birth records for the appropriate age–year combination. For example, the race distribution for births in 1970 would correspond to the race reported among the respondents who were aged 20 years in the 1990 NHIS, who were 21 in the 1991 NHIS, and so on. We would also expect that the inclusion of individuals with 1 or both parents who themselves identify with more than 1 race group may increase the percentages of multiple-race responses in the NHIS even more. Although neither the NHIS nor the birth certificate were developed to provide national race distributions, both data sources are routinely used to provide national estimates of races-specific health outcomes…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

Public Health Reports
Volume 81, Number 11 (November 1966)
pages 967-971

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Assistant, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

During the course of routine, periodic examinations of birth certificates for accuracy and completeness, the Bureau of Vital Records in the Baltimore City Health Department has observed an increasing number of interracial births in Baltimore from year to year over the past decade. Although such births do not occur in large numbers, they are indicative of a contemporary social phenomenon which is taking place in numerous U.S. urban areas.

In Baltimore this social phenomenon is manifested by children born to white and Negro parents, white and Filipino parents, and white and oriental parents. These children represent the legitimate issue of interracial marriages and, to a lesser extent, the natural offspring of unwed parents.

The bona fide interracial unions are of special interest because Maryland law prohibits the intermarriage of a white person and a Negro to the third generation, a white person and a member of the Malay race, and a Negro to the third generation and a member of the Malay race. (On March 28, 1966, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated a bill previously passed by the State Senate to repeal the 305-year-old law prohibiting white-Negro marriages and the 1935 amendment which broadened the original statute by further prohibiting marriages between whites or Negroes with members of the Malay race.)

There is no provision in the statute which prohibits Japanese-white, Chinese-white, or Chinese-Negro marriages. Obviously, the marriages prohibited in Maryland were contracted in jurisdictions which have no racial restrictions.

Maryland is 1 of 19 States which have an anti-miscegenation statute, a law prohibiting white-Negro marriages. With the exception of the Union of South Africa, no other country has such a law. The legislation prohibiting the marriage of Malays with white persons or Negroes in Maryland is aimed specifically at Filipinos, who are said to represent many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

Despite this interdiction, resident Filipinos and white women have been intermarrying outside of Maryland with increasing frequency over the past several years. Many of the Filipinos in Baltimore are physicians who have come for postgraduate training in medicine. As for other mixed marriages, white persons and American Indians marry frequently and without any legal restrictions. Also noteworthy are the great numbers of U.S. military personnel who married Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women as well as the numbers of Negro servicemen, particularly those who were stationed in England and Germany, who married white women and subsequently brought their wives to the United States.

This study was undertaken to determine the complete incidence of interracial births in Baltimore from 1950 to 1964 by racial origin, country of birth, ages of parents, occupation of father, and legitimacy status of the child. When an interracial birth occurs in a Baltimore hospital, as did all those reported here, the medical records staff doublechecks to assure the accuracy of the registration…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial marriages in Maryland

Public Health Reports
Volume 85, Number 8 (August 1970)
pages 739-747

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Lecturer, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

A Statistical Report

Nullification of all miscegenation legislation in Maryland became effective June 1, 1967, by action of the Maryland General Assembly in September 1966. Laws were repealed(a) penalizing ministers who had united persons of the white and Negro races in marriage and (b) prohibiting marriages between the white and Negro races and members of the Malay race. The State of Maryland took more than 300 years to remove from its statutes the law banning marriages between whites and Negroes—an act the Supreme Court subsequently held had infringed on an individual’s freedom of choice to marry, which should not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.

Methodology

The data in my report refer to recorded interracial marriages in the State from June 1, 1967, to December 31, 1968. I have emphasized the types of intermarriages occurring most frequently: (a) those between whites and Negroes, (b) between whites and Orientals, and (c) between whites and members of the Malay race.

The following procedures are observed in all marriage license bureaus in the State. Either of the contracting parties may apply for the license. After the couple is sworn in by a clerk of the court, the marriage laws of Maryland are quoted to them, and a series of questions relating to the prospective groom and bride are asked. Their replies are given under oath and entered on the application form for the marriage license by the clerk of the court. The questions include name, residence, age, color, nativity, marital status, and information concerning former marriages, if any.

Criteria used to identify and classify the various races were based on guidelines established for court clerks when issuing marriage licenses to couples of different races. The following racial delineations were contained in a memorandum from a Maryland deputy attorney general to the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Baltimore:

• The white race is made up of the Caucasian peoples of the world.
• The Negro race is the black race.
• The yellow race is made up of the Mongolian peoples and includes the Chinese and Japanese.
• The Malay race is the brown race and includes the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula and Oceania. The Polynesian race is a branch of the Malay race.
• The red race is made up of the American Indians.

The directive also stated that under Maryland law, the following persons may legally intermarry:

• Persons of the white race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the yellow race with persons of the white, Malay, red, and Negro races.
• Persons of the Negro race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Malayans with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the red race with persons of the white, Negro, Malay, and yellow races.
• Persons of the same race.

The following statutory provisions relate to marriages in Maryland: (a) the minimum age at marriage is 18 years for a man and 16 years for a woman except if the woman is pregnant or has given birth to a child and (b) the clerk of any court in which a marriage is licensed or recorded is required to transmit a report of eachmarriage to the State department of health.

Records of marriages filed with the Maryland State Department of Health during the study period were investigated to ascertain the number and types of interracial marriages and to analyze particular characteristics of grooms and brides (age, marital status, and resident status), political subdivision of the State in which the marriage had taken place, and type of ceremony for each such marriage.

Results

Of the 512 interracial marriages in Maryland from June 1, 1967, through December 31, 1968 (table 1), 310 were between whites and Negroes. Twice as many Negro men and white women intermarried as white men and Negro women. For the first 7 months of the study (June 1 through December 31, 1967), the ratio of Negro men marrying white women, compared with white men marrying Negro women, was 2.6 to 1; in 1968 the proportion was 1.8 to 1.

White-Malay marriages occurred 1.6 times more often between Malay grooms and white brides than between white grooms and Malay brides. The ratio between these two types of unions was slightly higher for the 7-month period in 1967 than in 1968. About an equal number of white men married Oriental women (46) as Oriental men (44) selected white women…

Read the entire article here.

Unraveling the Concept of Race in Brazil: Issues for the Rio de Janeiro Cooperative Agreement Site

Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Volume 30,  Issue 3, 1998 
Special Issue: HIV/AIDS Interventions For Out-of-Treatment Drug Users
pages 255-260
DOI: 10.1080/02791072.1998.10399700

Hilary L. Surratt
The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies
University of Delaware

James A. Inciardi (1939-2009), Co-Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies; Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
University of Delaware

Scholars throughout the Americas have spent much of the 20th century studying race and its meaning in Brazil. Racial identities in Brazil are dynamic concepts which can only be understood if situated and explored within the appropriate cultural context. Empirical evidence of the fluidity of racial identification quickly came to the authors’ attention within the context of a prevention initiative targeting segments of the Rio de Janeiro population at high risk for HIV/AIDS. Because the main objective of this program was to slow the spread of AIDS through an intervention designed to promote behavioral change, comparisons of client data at the baseline and follow-up assessments for the core of the analyses. Through quality control procedures used to link client information collected at different points in time, it was revealed that 106 clients, or 12.5% of the follow-up sample, had changed their racial self-identification. The authors’ attempts to engage project staff in a dialogue about the fluidity of racial identity among these clients have provided some insight into what might be called the “contextual redefinition” of race in Brazil. Within the framework of this study, the ramifications of this phenomenon are clear. Racial comparisons of HIV risk, sexual activity, drug use, and behavioral change, which are part and parcel of U.S.-based research, would appear to be of little utility in this setting.

Read or purchase the article here.

When Ethnic Ambiguity Becomes a Privilege

SunDryed Affairs
2011-06-08

Wendell Hassan Marsh

Taking a look at recent box office results, it is the ethnically ambiguous star and ambiguously ethnic films that appear to be making bank.

Ambiguity reaches around and hugs the color line while supporting the weight of overlapping identities. It’s not a question of black or white, but black and white, and Asian, and Latino, and Muslim, and gay ad infinitum.

Take Fast Five for example. The entire Fast and Furious franchise has been celebrated as a celebration of today’s multicultural pluralism. This iteration in particular with its romps in Brazilian favelas practically makes ethnic ambiguity a theme.

The two leading forces at odds in the film are Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, two of the most ethnically ambiguous figures in Hollywood most can think of. Even though the ethnically ambiguous man on the run (Diesel) dukes it out with the ethnically ambiguous G-man (Johnson) in some incredible fight scenes, they eventually put their differences aside long enough to stick it to the unambiguously corrupt (kind of) white power structure in Brazil.

But to make it happen, they have to assemble, you guessed it, an ethnically ambigious team who “can fit in everywhere” as one sequence says showing a tanned Asian guy (Sung Kang) with long, California boy hair. There’s also the sexy former Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent who he falls in love with while flying down the German Autobahn on the way to Tokyo. Then of course you have the two brothers (of both the blood and the black variety), but they are speaking Spanish! Throw in a few more race-bending Latinos and a couple of old-school American Negro types and you have quite the ethnically ambiguous party!…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Identity and the Shadow of Jim Crow in the Black Community

(1)ne Drop Project
2013-10-07

Kimberly Bernita Ross
Michigan State University

My grandmother Bernice was born in New Orleans in 1918 to a Black mother and a White father at a time when interracial marriage was illegal. Her mother, Roseanna, a maid in a White home, had a relationship with her employer’s son. Grandma Bernice was born with blue eyes, straight hair, and white skin, and was raised by a brown-skinned mother in the Jim Crow south. Her life was marred with instances of social confusion, isolation and abuse from others because society was not prepared to handle racial ambiguity. To say however, that Grandma Bernice was merely the iconic tragic mulatto, as depicted in 19th century American literature, like Nella Larsen’s novels, Quicksand and Passing, would simplify her experience and bypass an opportunity to analyze racial identity. These depictions, at times, reduce struggles with racial identity to individual human drama, divorcing this inner conflict, from the racist society that created it. Today, at a time when some people seem to have race fatigue, the truth is, as we continue to become a more cosmopolitan world, it would be to our collective advantage to become more race savvy, beginning by looking at the past. My grandmother’s story reveals the impact of state imposed identity and how in the Black community, racism and Jim Crow still overshadow our relationships and perceptions of racial identity…

Read the entire essay here.

Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26, Number 4, Religion & Genetics (Aug-Oct 2013)
pages 11-13

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed to sample 100,000 indigenous and other traditional peoples to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.” IPCB critiques Genographic, and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it, as the contemporary continuation of colonial, extractive research. The analysis is also a fundamental historical examination of Western science. IPCB foregrounds the intellectual and institutional authority that science, a powerful tool of colonizing states, has to appropriate indigenous bodies – both dead and living – material cultural artifacts, and indigenous cultural narratives in the service of academic knowledge production.

Critics point out that such knowledge rarely serves indigenous peoples’ interests and can actively harm them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries massacre sites and graves were plundered for body parts to be used in scientific investigations that inform today’s anthropological and biological research on Native Americans. Throughout the 20th century, indigenous peoples around the world witnessed the too common practice of “helicopter research” – quick sampling without return of results or benefit to subjects. Indigenous DNA samples and data taken in earlier decades when ethics standards were lax continue to be used and cited in contemporary investigations, bringing those injustices into the 21st century. And new, more ethical research still takes time from other pressing projects and needs. Informed community review and collaboration with researchers will increase community benefit, but informed participation has costs. It takes resources to build capacity to sit at the table as equals instead of as vulnerable subjects – as simply the raw materials for science…

Read the entire article here.

New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

American Medical News
2010-11-08

Kevin B. O’Reilly

Dr. James McCune Smith’s descendants unveiled a new headstone in a ceremony to commemorate his achievements as a physician, essayist and abolitionist.

The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone—one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.

Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.

Greta Blau, Dr. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, learned that she was descended from the doctor after finding his name inscribed in a family Bible. She recognized the name from a history paper she had written years earlier in college.

After confirming the family connection through genealogical research, Blau learned that Dr. Smith’s five surviving children passed, lived and identified as white in society after he died in 1865.

Dr. Smith treated both black and white patients in New York City. He was the first black doctor to write a medical case report—presented to the New York Medical and Surgical Society in 1840.

He also was the first black physician to have a medical scientific paper published, in the New York Journal of Medicine in 1844, and was a prominent essayist who attacked slavery and racial theories positing blacks’ inferiority. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass and wrote the introduction to his 1855 autobiography…

Read the entire article here.

Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs ed. by Fred Bonner II, Aretha F. Marbley, and Mary F. Howard-Hamilton (review)

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 37, Number 1, Fall 2013
pages 122-124
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2013.0074

John A. Mueller

Scott E. Miller

Bonner II, Fred A., Aretha F. Marbley, and Mary F. Howard-Hamilton, eds., Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs (Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC., 2011).

In a pithy and direct manner, the introduction to Diverse Millennial Students in College makes it clear that the book “eschews the tendency to force students into constraining frameworks” (p. 1) that overly simplify college populations. In doing so, the editors challenge the utility and relevance of the defining traits of millennial students (Howe & Strauss, 2000) in describing students of color, multiracial students, and LGBTQ students. The editors and chapter authors also analyze how the Howe and Strauss “generational framework underestimates the potential of these students” (p. 113). After nearly a decade of the ubiquitous “millennials” in student affairs literature, conferences, and coursework, along comes a book that critically examines how diversity impacts generational status.

This book is structured around paired chapters that address particular diverse constituencies of millennial college students: African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, LGBTQs, and bi/multiracials. While this is a fitting approach, the editors do not provide a rationale for their choice of chapter topics, nor do they forecast for the reader the content of each chapter in light of the book’s objective.

Chapter 1 is an extension of the introduction and, as the title suggests, tests our assumptions about generational cohorts. The author points out similarities among all millennials, such as the defining moments that have shaped their lives, their increased focus on social justice and service, and a significant increase in parental influence, among others. The author also identifies ways in which millennial students may experience college differently based on generation status and identity.

Part 2 focuses on African American millennials. Chapter 2 presents data on the differences between today’s African American students and previous generations of African American students with respect to enrollment, financial affluence, and levels of academic achievement. Taking a less quantitative approach, the authors of Chapter 3 provide a narrative analysis of an African American male who grew up in a small, rural town in Georgia from elementary school through graduate school. This narrative illustrates the challenges faced by African American students of rural backgrounds attending a predominantly White institution in a larger city.

Part 3 examines Asian American millennial college students. Chapter 4 presents research that compares Asian American millennial students to both their millennial counterparts and to Asian American students from previous generations. The author also outlines a number of current social and political trends in the United States that are likely to have an impact on Asian American millennials and their experience in higher education.

Chapter 5 expands on the previous chapter and homes in on three specific trends with respect to Asian American millennials: an increase in the diversity of Asian Americans in higher education (i.e., diversification); an increase in the use of technology, particularly among Asian American millennials (i.e., digitization); and the degree to which Asian American millennials are connected to national and global events and to Asian American and Asian communities (i.e., globalization).

The authors in Part 4 examine the Latino/a experience in higher education. In Chapter 6, the authors provide demographic data regarding the increase in the Latina/o population in the United States and compare and contrast this generation of students with those before it across different categories, such as enrollment, parents’ education, family structure and size, religion, technology, motivation, goals and aspirations, career objectives, and civic engagement.

In Chapter 7, the authors use the Howe and Strauss (2000) framework to demonstrate how findings from two studies on Latino/o college students parallel and diverge from the seven characteristics of millennials. In addition, they offer useful insights on how generation status (from an immigrant perspective) can be more useful than generational theory as a predictive theory.

Part 5 focuses on Native American millennial college students. Chapter 8 documents the challenges that Indigenous students face in higher education: a lack of academic preparation, inadequate finances, few higher education faculty as role models, cultural differences between their native home and the university setting, and institutional barriers. Chapter 9 places the millennial generation of Native American college students in a historical context. Examined in some depth are the boarding school era, tribal colleges, and Native American students’ entrance into predominantly White institutions. Complementing this history are…

Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self

Columbia University Press
June 2007
360 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14002-7

Laura Bear
Department of Anthropology
The London School of Economics

Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence.

The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.