Mixed Race Studies

America’s largest multiracial group doesn’t think of itself that way

Vox
2015-06-18

Jenée Desmond-Harris

People who have both white and Native American heritage make up America’s biggest multiracial group. But they’re the least likely to embrace the label.

This is one of the findings of a Pew Research Center study that took an incredibly detailed look at the lives of multiracial Americans. Pew did something unique to get this data: instead of studying only the people who checked off the “multiracial” box on the census, it looked at all the people who have reported having parents and grandparents of different racial backgrounds — a much bigger group…

Read the entire article here.

Census considers new approach to asking about race – by not using the term at all

Pew Research Center
2015-06-18

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

Possible 2020 census race/Hispanic question for online respondents, who would click to the next screen to choose more detailed sub-categories such as “Cuban” or “Chinese.” Credit: U.S. Census Bureau

The Census Bureau is experimenting with new ways to ask Americans about their race or origin in the 2020 census – including not using the words “race” or “origin” at all. Instead, the questionnaire may tell people to check the “categories” that describe them.

Census officials say they want the questions they ask to be clear and easy, in order to encourage Americans to answer them, so the officials can better collect race and Hispanic data as required by law. But many people are confused by the current wording, or find it misleading or insufficient to describe their identity.

Census forms now have two questions about race and Hispanic origin. The first asks people whether they are of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin, and states that “Hispanic origins are not races.” A second question asks, “What is this person’s race?” and includes a list of options with checkboxes and write-in spaces. The U.S. government defines Hispanic as an ethnicity, not a race.

The problem with using the word “race” is that many Americans say they don’t know what it means, and how it is different from “origin.” The agency’s focus group research found that some people think the words mean the same thing, while others see race as meaning skin color, ancestry or culture, while origin is the nation or place where they or their parents were born…

…The content test also will experiment with adding a new Middle East and North Africa category. The test represents the bureau’s final major research effort before locking down its proposed 2020 questionnaire wording…

…“I’m very happy that they are going to test a question which gets away from the language of race and ethnicity because frankly that is just a quagmire, that language,” said Ann Morning, an advisory committee member and New York University race scholar. “No two people seem to be able to agree on what those terms mean.”

In follow-up comments in an email, Morning said she believes “the beauty of simply referring to ‘categories’ is that it avoids that problem of people getting hung up on the terminology. So I would expect this term will allow people to answer the question more quickly, and to feel more free to check more than one box if they wish, and to lead to a lower non-response rate on that question.”…

Read the entire article here.

Study illuminates why multiracial Americans almost never call themselves white

Vox
2015-06-15

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Look up any article about President Obama that focuses on his role as the first black president.

Go ahead, do it now.

Scroll down to the comments.

I promise you, you’ll find earnest inquiries asking why the president is considered black or biracial when his mother is white. You’ll find people who are sincerely saddened by the idea that he would “reject” her contribution to his heritage. You’ll find people who are legitimately confused about why half black plus half white sometimes equals black and sometimes equals biracial, but rarely if ever seems to equal white…

…This is why multiracial people don’t normally identify as white

A new study by Pew Research Center takes a comprehensive look at the experiences of multiracial Americans.  Using a different approach than the census by taking into account people’s parents’ and grandparents’ racial backgrounds in addition to their self-reported race, it concluded that multiracial adults currently make up 6.9 percent of the adult American population.

One of its many findings has to do with multiracial identity, and that age-old question of why mixed-race Americans like Obama and so many others don’t seem to give their white parents’ ethnicity the same weight as their other heritage when it comes to self-description…

The study revealed that people who identify as multiracial say they experience discrimination based on the part of their heritage that is not white. Here’s how Pew explained it in the write-up (emphasis added):

For multiracial adults with a black background, experiences with discrimination closely mirror those of single-race blacks. Among adults who are black and no other race, 57% say they have received poor service in restaurants or other businesses, identical to the share of biracial black and white adults who say this has happened to them; and 42% of single-race blacks say they have been unfairly stopped by the police, as do 41% of biracial black and white adults. Mixed-race adults with an Asian background are about as likely to report being discriminated against as are single-race Asians, while multiracial adults with a white background are more likely than single-race whites to say they have experienced racial discrimination.

This echoes the way Obama has explained why he calls himself black. “I’m not sure I decided it,” he once said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “I think, you know, if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.”

He later told PBS, “If I’m outside your building trying to catch a cab, they’re not saying, ‘Oh, there’s a mixed-race guy.'”…

Read the entire article here.

Is being Hispanic a matter of race, ethnicity or both?

Pew Research Center
2015-06-15

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Research Associate

Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research

When it comes to reporting their racial identity, Latinos stand out from other Americans. In the 2010 census, for example, 94% of the U.S. population selected at least one of the five standard, government-defined racial categories – white, black, Asian, American Indian or Pacific Islander. But among Latinos, just 63% selected at least one of these categories; 37% of Latinos, or 19 million, instead selected only “some other race,” with many offering write-in responses such as “Mexican,” Hispanic” or “Latin American.”

Federal policy defines “Hispanic” not as a race, but as an ethnicity. And it prescribes that Hispanics can in fact be of any race. But these census findings suggest that standard U.S. racial categories might either be confusing or not provide relevant options for Hispanics to describe their racial identity. They also raise an important question long pondered by social scientists and policymakers: Do Hispanics consider their Hispanic background to be part of their racial background, their ethnic background or both?…

Read the entire article here.

How Census Race Categories Have Changed Over Time

Pew Research Center
2015-06-10

Explore the different race, ethnicity and origin categories used in the U.S. decennial census, from the first one in 1790 to the latest count in 2010. The category names often changed in a reflection of current politics, science and public attitudes. For example, “colored” became “black,” with “Negro” and “African American” added later. The term “Negro” will be dropped for the 2020 census. Through 1950, census-takers commonly determined the race of the people they counted. From 1960 on, Americans could choose their own race. Starting in 2000, Americans could include themselves in more than one racial category. Before that, many multiracial people were counted in only one racial category.

Read the entire article here.

Pew: Multiracial Americans Now Make Up 7% Of Population

Wisconsin Public Radio
Thursday, 2015-06-11, 16:35 CDT

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Jennifer Sims, Adjunct Visiting Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, River Falls

According to Census data, only about 2 percent of Americans consider themselves to be multiracial, but a new report out Thursday from Pew suggests that the real number of people with multiracial backgrounds is more than three times that. It also shows that the number of people who identify as…

Listen to the story (00:22:49) here.

Report Says Census Undercounts Mixed Race

The New York Times
2015-06-11

Richard Pérez-Peña, National Desk

The number of American adults with mixed-race backgrounds is three times what official census figures indicate, and the figure is rising fast, according to a survey released Thursday. But most do not call themselves multiracial.

The Pew Research Center survey found that 6.9 percent of adults in the United States were multiracial, based on how they identify themselves or on having parents or grandparents of different races. By comparison, the 2010 census reported 2.1 percent of adults, and 2.9 percent of people any age, as multiracial, based on people’s descriptions of themselves or others in their households. (Hispanics are considered an ethnic group, not a race.)

By any measure, the multiracial population is tracing a steep upward curve, with children being more than twice as likely as adults to meet Pew’s definition. The Census Bureau, which first allowed people to identify with more than one race in 2000, estimates that the number of people doing so will triple by 2060.

Interracial sex and marriage was outlawed in many states until 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down those prohibitions in Loving v. Virginia. Today, the United States is increasingly not only a multiracial country, but also a country of multiracial individuals, including the first biracial president, living in an era of rising acceptance and visibility.

Yet the Pew survey found that 61 percent of the people that it considered multiracial identified themselves by just one race. When asked why, they most often said that it was based on how they looked, how they were raised or knowing only family members who identified as one race…

Note from Steven F. Riley, see: Nikki Khanna, “’If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule,”Sociological Quarterly. Volume 51, Number 1 (Winter 2010).

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of a White Minority
2015-06-11

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
City University of New York Graduate Center

IN 2012, the Census Bureau announced that nonwhite births exceeded white births for the first time. In 2013, it noted that more whites were dying than were being born. In March, it projected that non-Hispanic whites would be a minority by 2044.

But the forecast of an imminent white minority, which some take as a given, is wrong. We will seem like a majority-white society for much longer than is believed.

The predictions make sense only if you accept the outdated, illogical methods used by the census, which define as a “minority” anyone who belongs to “any group other than non-Hispanic White alone.” In the words “group” and “alone” lie a host of confusions.

A report the Pew Research Center is releasing today on multiracial Americans demonstrates how problematic these definitions have become. Pew estimates that 8.9 percent of Americans now have family backgrounds that involve some combination of white, black, Latino, Asian and Native American.

“Mixed” unions — intermarriages and long-lasting cohabitations — have become far more common. According to a 2012 Pew report, 15 percent of new marriages cross the major lines of race or Hispanic origin. Some 70 percent of these relationships involve a white partner and a minority spouse. The most common minority partners for whites are Latinos, followed by Asians, though the frequency of white-black marriage also continues to rise.

But even as the on-the-ground understanding of race and ethnicity becomes more fluid, contingent and overlapping, our public conversation lags…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial in America

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2015-06-11
155 pages

Principal Researchers

Kim Parker, Director of Social Trends Research
Rich Morin, Senior Editor
Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Associate Director, Research
Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research

Research Team

Anna Brown, Research Assistant
D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer
Richard Fry, Senior Researcher
Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Research Associate
Sara Goo, Senior Digital Editor
Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research
Jens Manuel Krogstad, Writer/Editor
Gretchen Livingston, Senion Researcher
Kyley McGeeney, Research Methodologist
Andrew Mercer, Research Methodologist
Eileen Patten, Research Analyst
Renee Stepler, Research Assistant
Wendy Wang, Senior Researcher

Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers

Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.—young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.

As America becomes more racially diverse and social taboos against interracial marriage fade, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of multiracial adults are proud of their mixed-race background (60%) and feel their racial heritage has made them more open to other cultures (59%).

At the same time, a majority (55%) say they have been subjected to racial slurs or jokes, and about one-in-four (24%) have felt annoyed because people have made assumptions about their racial background. Still, few see their multiracial background as a liability. In fact, only 4% say having a mixed racial background has been a disadvantage in their life. About one-in-five (19%) say it has been an advantage, and 76% say it has made no difference…

Read the entire report here.

How Ferguson could be America’s future

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-08-23

John Blake

(CNN) — The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, have been described as a mirror into contemporary America, but they are also something else: A crystal ball.

Look past the headlines — the debates over race and police militarization that have surfaced after the killing of an unarmed black youth by a white police officer — and one can glimpse America’s future, some historians and political scientists say.

No one is talking about an impending race war or a police state, but something more subtle. Unless Americans re-examine some assumptions they’ve made about themselves, they argue, Ferguson could be the future.

Assumption No. 1: Tiger Woods is going to save us

It’s called the “browning of America.” Google the phrase and you’ll get 18 million hits. By 2050, most of the nation’s citizens are expected to be people of color, according to the Pew Research Center.

Dig beneath the Google links and one can detect an emerging assumption: Racial flashpoints like Ferguson will fade in the future because no single race will be dominant. You could call it the Tiger Woods effect. The New American will claim multiple racial origins like Woods, the pro golfer. Demographic change will accomplish what a thousand national conversations on race could never do: lessen the sting of racial conflict.

A dramatic increase in interracial marriages will change the racial landscape as more people cross racial and ethnic lines to marry. But that change won’t be a cure-all, says Rory Kramer, a sociology and criminology professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

He says racial progress is not inevitable with the browning of America.

“I don’t want to deny the optimism,” Kramer says. “I deny the assumption that it will happen without effort.”…

Read the entire article here.