Mixed Race Studies

What kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the 2020/21 global population census round: the cases of the UK, USA, and Canada

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2017-07-26
pages 1-19
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1346267

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

In western countries the mixed race/ethnicity population is experiencing a rapid increase in numbers and growing diversity, raising challenges for its capture in censuses and surveys. Methods include exact combinations of interest, multi-ticking, and open response, as exemplified by the censuses of England and Wales, the USA and Canada, and Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. However, investigations of question face validity, reproducibility of findings, and efficacy of capture reveal quality problems with all three approaches. The low reporting reliability of this population urgently requires research and testing to identify optimal strategies. While there is clearly no one gold standard method of capture and current approaches have developed within national contexts, it is timely to review these methods across the three countries and to make recommendations for the upcoming 2020/21 censuses.

Introduction

Throughout much of the twentieth century the salient view in ethnicity data collection was that people belonged in separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories,¹ an approach termed ethnic absolutism (Gilroy 2004). This status quo was maintained by some statistical agencies in the UK through the claim that persons of mixed race/ethnicity preferred to identify with a single group (Sillitoe and White 1992). Moreover, in the USA, the “one drop rule” privileged the minority ethnic component in a mixed person’s racial identity, requiring only one race to be assigned to a person (Davis 1991). Mixed persons who utilized “other” categories or unofficially multi-ticked went uncounted. However, as the mixed population began to increase in recent decades and respondents in censuses and surveys demonstrated their wish to self-identify their mixedness in free-text (Aspinall 2010), this approach was no longer sustainable. In consequence, census and other official organizations across the world and especially in western countries have been faced with the challenge of how to count this mixed/multiple population. This has led to the adoption of a plurality of measures (Morning 2008) that belies the complexities with respect to conceptualization and the proliferation in type of mixes or combinations. Moreover, several countries are now approaching their second or third decennial census in which the mixed population has been measured, yielding an evidence base on optimal strategies. It is therefore timely to take stock of these practices and to explore what kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the upcoming 2020/21 global population census round…

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I Got a Rapper to Take Me to McDonald’s in His Limo

Lenny Letter
Number 96
2017-07-25

Danzy Senna

Melissa Ling

Novelist Danzy Senna on her chance meeting with rapper Doug E. Fresh after a 1985 concert.

Nineteen eighty-four. That was the year my mother discovered she’d given birth to a two-headed monster. Me and my sister. That was the year we turned fourteen and fifteen. We were only one year apart, Irish twins. Like real twins, we moved through the world as one entity. We spoke in code. We dressed in each other’s clothes. My mother referred to us as “the girls.” We didn’t look very much alike, but our voices were remarkably similar. When my father called the house, he couldn’t tell which of us was on the other line. He confused our names so regularly that it became a kind of new, conjoined name. D’anlucien. Or Lu’anzy.

We hadn’t always been that monster. For my mother, an experimental poet, an unreconstructed socialist who had raised us on the poetry of Bernadette Mayer and the music of Patti Smith, what we became in 1984 was a particularly pointed bad joke. As a white woman raising black children, she’d been righteous and conscious, trying to raise two strong black women. She’d surrounded her daughters with powerful black women, godmothers and aunts, womanist trailblazers. She gave me a copy of The Bluest Eye to read when I was ten.

We weren’t coming out the way she’d planned. At those readings she dragged us to at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York all the way from our home base in Boston, we spent our time not listening and instead twisting our Barbie dolls into increasingly pornographic positions, using our little brother’s GI Joe as their soul mate. We found the poetry readings weird as fuck — what kind of gibberish were they spewing up there? All her poet friends seemed drunk to us. We sat side by side in at a dark table at the Ear Inn, sipping our Shirley Temples, giving my mother’s bohemian friends the stank-eye.

My mother looked at us across a table and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered two meaner girls.”…

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