Mixed Race Studies

Is race a choice?

VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Centre for Economic Policy Research
2015-01-26

Emily Nix, PhD candidate in Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Nancy Qian, Associate Professor of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Race is usually treated as a fixed, exogenous characteristic in academic studies and policy discussions, but a growing body of evidence calls this assumption into question. This column presents evidence from historical US census data that more than 19% of black males ‘passed’ as white, around 10% of whom later ‘reverse-passed’ to being black. Passing was associated with geographic relocation and with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks, providing prima facie evidence that passing was endogenous.

The relationship between a person’s race and/or ethnicity and her economic, political, and social behaviour has been a focal point for numerous policy discussions. This is because the composition of race and ethnicity are often found to be associated with outcomes such as conflict, earnings, educational attainment, and voting. This is true in many different contexts across the world, including rich countries such as the US, middle-income countries such as Brazil and India, and very poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the interpretation that race has a causal impact on the aforementioned outcomes critically depends on whether one believes that race and ethnicity are exogenous and fixed characteristics – i.e. outside the control of an individual and constant over her lifetime.

The literature typically assumes that racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous. For examples, see the reviews of the political economy literature by Alesina and Ferrara (2004) and of studies of the US black-white wage gap by Lang and Lehmann (2012)…

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Fluid Identity Discrimination

American Business Law Journal
Volume 52, Issue 4, Winter 2015
pages 789–857
DOI: 10.1111/ablj.12056

Leora F. Eisenstadt, Assistant Professor (Research)
Fox School of Business and Management
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

According to the most recent Census, the multiracial population of children has increased dramatically in the last decade, and the number of people of any age who identify as both white and black more than doubled in that time. In addition, there is a growing number of increasingly vocal transgender individuals who cannot be defined by existing sexual categories. Nonetheless, most courts have retained a categorical approach to Title VII that demands membership in a protected class even as American society becomes increasingly mixed and less conducive to simple categorization. In light of this new reality, this article considers the jurisprudence and scholarship on multiracial and transgender plaintiffs and argues that scholars and courts in both areas are dealing with discrimination against these increasingly visible individuals in an overly narrow way, leading to incomplete or unsatisfactory solutions. Rather than approach issues of racial identity and sexual identity separately, this article contends that these issues are symptomatic of a larger problem with Title VII, namely, an enduring attempt to fit increasingly amorphous identities into a strict categorical structure that no longer matches the reality of American society. Fluid Identity Discrimination proposes a rethinking of the protected class paradigm in light of a changed American populace with the goal of providing clarity and better alignment between law and social reality.

Read the entire article here.