Mixed Race Studies

New Evidence of Skin Color Bias and Health Outcomes Using Sibling Difference Models: A Research Note

Demography
Volume 56, Issue 2 (April 2019)
pages 753-762
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-018-0756-6

Thomas Laidley, Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Behavioral Science
University of Colorado

Benjamin Domingue, Assistant Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Sociology
Stanford University

Piyapat Sinsub
Princeton University

Kathleen Mullan Harris, James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina

Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology
Princeton University

In this research note, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to determine whether darker skin tone predicts hypertension among siblings using a family fixed-effects analytic strategy. We find that even after we account for common family background and home environment, body mass index, age, sex, and outdoor activity, darker skin color significantly predicts hypertension incidence among siblings. In a supplementary analysis using newly released genetic data from Add Health, we find no evidence that our results are biased by genetic pleiotropy, whereby differences in alleles among siblings relate to coloration and directly to cardiovascular health simultaneously. These results add to the extant evidence on color biases that are distinct from those based on race alone and that will likely only heighten in importance in an increasingly multiracial environment as categorization becomes more complex.

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Genetic Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Racial Classification in Social Surveys in the Contemporary United States

Demography
September 2013
32 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0242-0-0

Guang Guo, Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Yilan Fu

Hedwig Lee

Tianji Cai

Kathleen Mullan Harris

Yi Li

Self-reported race is generally considered the basis for racial classification in social surveys, including the U.S. census. Drawing on recent advances in human molecular genetics and social science perspectives of socially constructed race, our study takes into account both genetic bio-ancestry and social context in understanding racial classification. This article accomplishes two objectives. First, our research establishes geographic genetic bio-ancestry as a component of racial classification. Second, it shows how social forces trump biology in racial classification and/or how social context interacts with bio-ancestry in shaping racial classification. The findings were replicated in two racially and ethnically diverse data sets: the College Roommate Study (N = 2,065) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 2,281).

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Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17

Guang Guo, Odum Distinguished Term Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Yilan Fu
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kathleen Mullan Harris, James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Two sharply divided perspectives concerning the nature of racial distinction have developed over the past two decades. On one hand, the consensus has long been established among academics that racial and ethnic categories are the invention of social construction. On the other, a number of genetic studies point to a bio-ancestral base for the major racial/ethnic categories used in the contemporary United States. Instead of treating the two perspectives as diametrically opposed, this application proposes to examine evidence for the coexistence of socially-constructed and bio-ancestrally-rooted racial identity in the contemporary United States.

The overarching goal of this application is to investigate whether adding estimates of bio-ancestry will significantly advance our understanding of social construction of race and ethnicity. In previous studies of social construction of race, racial identities have been considered socially constructed. In this application, we investigate whether and why self-reports of race and ethnicity depart from bio-ancestry. The project will draw on decades of scholarship in race and ethnicity, recent advances in human genetics, and data resources from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Harris, Florey, Tabor et al. 2003) and the Human Genome  Diversity Project (HGDP) (Cann, de Toma, Cazes et al. 2002).

This proposed project has two broad objectives. First, we assess the accuracy of a panel of 186 genetic ancestral informative markers in predicting self-reported race/ethnicity in the contemporary United States using a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 17,000 individuals from Add Health. Previous studies of bio-geographic ancestry were carried out for the purpose of understanding the history of human evolution (Li, Absher, Tang et al. 2008; Rosenberg, Pritchard, Weber et al. 2002) or population admixture in the context of genetic association studies (Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. 2005). These studies did not directly address the relation between bio-ancestry and racial/ethnic identity using a US-based racially- and ethnically-diverse population sample. Second, we take advantage of estimated bio-ancestry and use it in an investigation of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the US. We examine to what extent self-reports of race and ethnicity follow the one-drop rule—the century-old social practice of treating individuals with any amount of African ancestry as black in the US. We address whether and why individuals change their racial/ethnic identity under different social circumstances. We then examine the relationship between bio-ancestry and friendship social network in a school context.