Mixed Race Studies

Don’t Erase My Race: 4 Affirmations to Remember When Reclaiming Your Multi-Racial Identity

Everyday Feminism
2015-02-24

Aliya Khan, Contributing Writer

Source: “Navigating Two Different Cultures: A Pakistani Immigrant Girl’s Struggles,” The Brooklyn Ink, (May 16, 2013).

I was walking across campus, on my way to class, when a white man stopped me and asked, “Are you from Bahrain?”

“I’m sorry?” I asked, confused by his question.

“Bahrain? I have a friend who is studying here from there, and you look so similar to her.”

I have a lot of opinions about when and how it is appropriate to ask someone about their race, mostly formed by my early experiences watching my Pakistani father struggle to respond to questions just like that one. But that’s not what first entered my mind this time.

What first entered my mind was, “Oh, he doesn’t think I’m white.”

If I’m not being read as white, people describe me as “racially ambiguous.” Sometimes, my race is ignored completely. Other times, folks make assumptions about my origins, ranging from every continent of the world.

I never understood how or why people developed such diversely varied opinions about my race. Was it my name that gave it away? my skin tone? Did they mistake my Midwest accent for something more “exotic?”

The invalidation of my racial identity from others was confusing growing up. It was a constant reminder that I just didn’t quite fit in.

My experiences growing up with a Pakistani father did not match those of my White friends, but it was also clear that, as someone who was biracial, I didn’t fit in to any other category…

Read the entire article here.

Pigmentocracies: Educational Inequality, Skin Color and Census Ethnoracial Identification in Eight Latin American Countries

Research in Social Stratification and Mobility
Available online: 2015-02-25
DOI: 10.1016/j.rssm.2015.02.002

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

René Flores
University of Washington

Fernando Urrea Giraldo, Professor of Sociology
Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia

Highlights

• We use two measures of race and ethnicity – ethnoracial self-identification as used by national censuses and interviewer –rated skin color to examine educational inequality in eight Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
• We find that inequality based on skin color is more consistent and robust than inequality based on census ethnoracial identification.
• Census ethnoracial identification often provided inconsistent results especially regarding the afro-descendant populations of Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
• Skin color inequality was particularly great in Bolivia and Guatemala.
• Parental occupation, a proxy for class origins, is also robust and positively associated with educational attainment.
• In other words, both class and race, especially as measured by skin color, predicts educational inequality in Latin America.

For the first time, most Latin American censuses ask respondents to self-identify by race or ethnicity allowing researchers to examine long-ignored ethnoracial inequalities. However, reliance on census ethnoracial categories could poorly capture the manifestation(s) of race that lead to inequality in the region, because of classificatory ambiguity and within-category racial or color heterogeneity. To overcome this, we modeled the relation of both interviewer-rated skin color and census ethnoracial categories with educational inequality using innovative data from the 2010 America’s Barometer from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and 2010 surveys from the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA) for eight Latin American countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru). We found that darker skin color was negatively and consistently related to schooling in all countries, with and without extensive controls. Indigenous and black self-identification was also negatively related to schooling, though not always at a statistically significant and robust level like skin color. In contrast, results for self-identified mulattos, mestizos and whites were inconsistent and often counter to the expected racial hierarchy, suggesting that skin color measures often capture racial inequalities that census measures miss.

Read the entire article here.

Our rising white-black multiracial population

The Avenue / Rethinking Metropolitan America
The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
2015-02-23

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

The fastest growing racial group in the country is those who identify themselves as “two or more” races. Yet, perhaps most encouraging, as discussed in my book Diversity Explosion, is the rise in the population that identifies itself as both white and black. The racial divide in the United States has been so stark that it was not until the 2000 Census that federal statistics allowed multiracial status. For a long period in our history, persons were identified as black according to the “one drop” rule which stipulated that if they had any black ancestors, they could not be classified as white…

Recently, a clear sign of the softening of racial boundaries was the 2010 Census report that persons identifying as black and white were the largest biracial population at 1.8 million—more than double those identified in the previous census…

To read the entire article, click here.

235. Paper Session: Racial Dynamics of Dating & Marriage

Crossing Borders: 2015 Annual Meeting
Eastern Sociological Society
Millennium Broadway Hotel
New York, New York
2015-02-26 through 2015-03-01

Saturday, 2015-02-28, 08:30-10:30 EST (Local Time)

Presider: Erica Chito-Childs, City University of New York – Hunter College

• The Role of Race in Dating Among Americans: How “Whiteness” Influences Perception of Interracial Relationships Jennifer Dejesus — Pace University, Andrea Voyer — Pace University
  University
• Marriage Patterns among Multiracial Americans: Upward Amalgamation, Downward Amalgamation, Matching and Hyper-Matching Gregory Eirich — Columbia University, Gracelyn Bateman — Mindshare
• Disappearing Difference, or The Illegibility of Multiracials in Interracial Relationships Melinda Mills — Castleton State College
• Does Intermarriage Blur Boundaries? The Transformation of Racial and Ethnic Boundaries among Interracially and Inter-ethnically Married Filipino Americans and their Families Brenda Gambol — The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• They Don’t Want to Date Any Dark People Chong-suk Han — Middlebury College

For more information, click here.

279. Invited Thematic Session: Crossing Interracial Borders

Crossing Borders: 2015 Annual Meeting
Eastern Sociological Society
Millennium Broadway Hotel
New York, New York
2015-02-26 through 2015-03-01

Saturday, 2015-02-28, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Organizer: Erica Chito-Childs, City University of New York – Hunter College

Presider: Erica Chito-Childs, City University of New York – Hunter College

• Transracial Kin-scription: The Silent Engine of Racial Change? Kimberly McClain DaCosta — New York University
• Emerging Patterns of Interracial Marriage and Immigrant Integration in the United States Daniel Lichter — Cornell University
• Interracial Marriage in the U.S. and Brazil: Racial Boundaries in Comparative Perspective Chinyere Osuji — Rutgers University
• A Global Look at Attitudes Towards “Mixed” Marriage Erica Chito-Childs — City University of New York – Hunter College

Discussant: Amy Steinbugler, Dickinson College

For more information, click here.