Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2011-01-12 22:05Z by Steven

Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1735-1737
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1735

Mary C. Waters, M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

This commentary reviews recent demographic trends in immigration and intermarriage that contribute to the complexity of measuring race and ethnicity. The census question on ancestry is proposed as a possible model for what we might expect with the race question in the 2000 census and beyond. Through the use of ancestry data, changes in ethnic identification by individuals over the course of their lives, by generation, and according to census question directions are documented. It is pointed out that the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred. All of these changes are posited as becoming more likely for groups we now define as “racial.” While it is acknowledged that race and ethnicity will become increasingly difficult to measure as multiple racial identities become more common and more likely to be reported, it is argued that monitoring discrimination is crucial for the continued collection of such data.

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New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

Posted in Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-01-12 20:42Z by Steven

New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

2010 National Conference on Health Statistics
Omni Shorem Hotel, Washington, D.C.
2010-08-17
46 pages/slides

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
University of Michigan
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

The Multiracial Movement of the 1990s [page/slide 2]

  • After Census 1990, a small social movement developed calling for a fundamental change in the way the federal statistical system classified people by race. Susan Graham played an important role in this.
  • Rather than forcing persons to identify with one single race only, they insisted upon the addition of a “Multiple Races” category.
  • Some leading advocates of this change were white women married to African-American men who found that their children were almost always classified as black by those who collected statistical data or tabulated persons by race. See: Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More Civil Rights in Multiracial America

Who Identifies with Multiple Races? [page/slide 9]

  • Age differences are great. In 2008, 5% of those under 10 were identified with two or more races; fewer than 1% for those over age 64 did so.
  • Race differences are substantial. In 2008, 52% of the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population identified with a second race; 45% of American Indians did so. For whites, it was only 3%
  • Educational Attainment differences in identifying with multiple races were small.
  • Geographic Differences in Identifying with Two or More Races are Large. In 2008, 21% of the residents of Honolulu and 10% in Anchorage identified with 2 or more races. In Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Portland, Maine and Sarasota, Florida; fewer than 1% identified with 2 or more races.

Measuring Race Will Be Increasingly Challenging [page/slide 26]

  • A substantial increase in interracial marriages implies that the multiple race population is growing rapidly
  • There is widespread consensus that race is a social construct. Perhaps, many people wish to construct their own racial identity.
  • Question order and question wording effects are very large

Read the entire presentation here.

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Race: I’m Just Who I am

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-01-12 19:17Z by Steven

Race: I’m Just Who I am

Time Magazine
1997-05-05

Jack E. White, Washington

Tamala M. Edwards, Washington

Elaine Lafferty, Los Angeles

Sylvester Monoroe, Los Angeles

Victoria Rainert, New York

His nickname notwithstanding, professional golfer Frank (“Fuzzy”) Zoeller saw Tiger Woods quite clearly. He gazed upon the new king of professional golf, through whose veins runs the blood of four continents, and beheld neither a one-man melting pot nor even a golfing prodigy but a fried-chicken-and-collard- greens-eating Sambo. Zoeller saw Woods, in short, as just another stereotype, condemned by his blackness to the perpetual status of “little boy.”

Zoeller soon paid a price for saying openly what many others were thinking secretly. K Mart, the discount chain with a big African-American clientele, unceremoniously dumped him as the sponsor of a line of golf clothing and equipment, and he abjectly withdrew from the Greater Greensboro Open tournament. “People who know me know I’m a jokester. I just didn’t deliver the line well,” Zoeller tearfully explained. But his real crime was not, as he and his defenders seem to think, merely a distasteful breach of racial etiquette or an inept attempt at humor. The real crime was falling behind the times. The old black-white stereotypes are out of date, and Zoeller is just the latest casualty of America’s failure to come to grips with the perplexing and rapidly evolving significance of racial identity in what is fast becoming the most polyglot society in history.

If current demographic trends persist, midway through the 21st century whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. Blacks will have been overtaken as the largest minority group by Hispanics. Asians and Pacific Islanders will more than double their number of 9.3 million in 1995 to 19.6 million by 2020. An explosion of interracial, interethnic and interreligious marriages will swell the ranks of children whose mere existence makes a mockery of age-old racial categories and attitudes. Since 1970, the number of multiracial children has quadrupled to more than 2 million, according to the Bureau of the Census. The color line once drawn between blacks and whites—or more precisely between whites and nonwhites—is breaking into a polygon of dueling ethnicities, each fighting for its place in the sun.

For many citizens the “browning of America” means a disorienting plunge into an uncharted sea of identity. Zoeller is far from alone in being confused about the complex tangle of genotypes and phenotypes and cultures that now undercut centuries-old verities about race and race relations in the U.S. Like many others, he hasn’t got a clue about what to call the growing ranks of people like Woods who inconveniently refuse to be pigeonholed into one of the neat, oversimplified racial classifications used by government agencies–and, let’s face it, most people. Are they people of color? Mixed race? Biracial? Whatever they like?…

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