Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

A growing body of evidence from anecdotes, historians, and recent studies suggests that this [racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous] is not always true. In fact, there may be reason to believe that race is, to some extent, a choice made by an individual because of social-economic and political factors. For example, historians have long noted that Americans with African ancestry often chose to ‘pass’ for white to obtain better economic and political opportunities (e.g. O’Toole 2003 and Sharfstein 2011). Mill and Stein (2012) find that amongst mixed-race siblings, those that identify as white later in life earn significantly higher wages. Recent studies have also documented that individuals have responded to political-economic incentives and changed castes in India (Cassan 2013), manipulated their racial appearance for higher wages in Brazil (Cornwell et al. 2014), or have strategically chosen the official ethnicity of mixed children in China (Jia and Persson 2013). More generally, studies of identity, such as the theoretical work of Akerlof and Kranton (2000), argue that “choice of identity may be the most important ‘economic’ decision people make. Individuals may – more or less consciously – choose who they want to be … Previous economic analyses of, for example, poverty, labor supply, and schooling have not considered these possibilities”.

Emily Nix and Nancy Qian, “Is race a choice?” VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal, January 26, 2015. http://www.voxeu.org/article/race-choice.

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Posted in Barack Obama, Course Offerings, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-03 17:45Z by Steven

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Scripps College, Claremont, California
2013

Matthew Delmont, Assistant Professor of American Studies

This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in the U.S. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring historical, literary, and ethnographic writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. We will examine: Relations among Native Americans, whites, and blacks in the colonial era and nineteenth century; the legal formation of race through miscegenation cases; the regulation and representation of multiracial themes in film; the concept of mestizaje; contemporary debates surrounding the Mixed-race/Multiracial movement; and the racial identity of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

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Mixed Race Studies

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

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