Mixed Race Studies

Cross-country variation in interracial marriage: a USA–Canada comparison of metropolitan areas

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 38, Issue 9, 2015
pages 1591-1609
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1005644

Feng Hou

Zheng Wu

Christoph Schimmele

John Myles

While black–white intermarriage is uncommon in the USA, blacks in Canada are just as likely to marry whites as to marry blacks. Asians, in contrast, are more likely to marry whites in the USA than in Canada. We test the claim that high rates of interracial marriage are indicative of high levels of social integration against Peter Blau’s ‘macrostructural’ thesis that relative group size is the key to explaining differences in intermarriage rates across marriage markets. Using micro-data drawn from the American Community Survey and the Canadian census, we demonstrate that the relative size of racial groups accounts for over two-thirds of the USA–Canada difference in black–white unions and largely explains the cross-country difference in Asian–white unions. Under broadly similar social and economic conditions, a large enough difference in relative group size can become the predominant determinant of group differences in the prevalence of interracial unions.

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Mixed Race Okinawans and Their Obscure In-Betweeness

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 35, Issue 6 (November 2014)
pages 646-661
DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2014.963531

Mitzi Uehara Carter

While critical mixed race studies and popular discourse of haafu (half) are proliferating in Japan, the case of mixed race people in Okinawa remains obscure within these studies as exceptional cases of non-serial mixed bodies. Locally mixed Okinawans have been used to demonstrate incompleteness of sovereignty in Okinawa yet globally have been hailed under the haafu boom as ‘bridge people’ under a liberalist ideology of difference, sometimes naturalizing and justifying the controversial US base presence. This paper centers on the lives of mixed Okinawans I interviewed. I analyze how they engage with various mixed race discourses, concepts of Okinawan difference, and security imaginaries. Through their stories, I suggest that in Okinawa, mixed race as situated transnationally ‘in-between’ circulates against rationales of modernity that are embedded in security narratives in ways that the haafu boom does not address and therefore encapsulates mixed Okinawans as obscure. I argue that despite this positioning, many mixed Okinawans have cautiously rooted themselves locally through language, fluctuating imaginaries of citizenship, and diasporic meanings of Okinawan belonging.

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Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations

Haymarket Books
2009
412 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781608460359

Edited by:

Keri E. Iyall Smith, Associate Professor of Sociology
Suffolk University, Boston

Patricia Leavy

Combining theoretical and empirical pieces, this book explores the emerging theoretical work seeking to describe hybrid identities while also illustrating the application of these theories in empirical research.The sociological perspective of this volume sets it apart. Hybrid identities continue to be predominant in minority or immigrant communities, but these are not the only sites of hybridity in the globalized world. Given a compressed world and a constrained state, identities for all individuals and collective selves are becoming more complex. The hybrid identity allows for the perpetuation of the local, in the context of the global. This book presents studies of types of hybrid identities: transnational, double consciousness, gender, diaspora, the third space, and the internal colony.