Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…Fleming’s use of the term ‘passing’ is also worthy of comment. Not only does it have the connotation of deceit and disguise, but it also implies that the offspring of mixed heritage could never be truly English, despite their birth in England and their English mothers. To cross racial boundaries (‘race crossing’) had two meanings: crossing the ‘colour line’ in terms of sexual relationships, and crossing races in the sense of being of mixed race. The white women who crossed the colour line and gave birth to mixed race children were not aliens as such, but liminally placed by virtue of their ‘unBritish’, ‘unpatriotic’ behaviour. Where the mothers were Irish, as some were (as Hodson noted) the mixed race children were even less likely to have been permitted the mantle of Englishness, for the Irish were not only ‘not English’, but frequently seen as ‘not white’ either. There was (and is) a hierarchy of whiteness, in which some people were/are white only some of the time, such as Irish, Latinos, and Jews. Fleming’s assumption that mixed race children were not, and implicitly could not, be English, sounds not dissimilar from the ‘one drop of black blood’ rule that was operating at this time in US Deep South. This ‘rule’ proclaimed that even a single black person in ones ancestry deemed one black. The system was a means of policing entry to the privileged category ‘white’. In the context of Britain in the interwar, the Eugenics Society was concerned with classifying and codifying those of mixed race in an attempt to reduce the threat to racial and national boundaries represented by their presence…

Lucy Bland. “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation”, New Formations. 2007, Number 60, pages 66-78.

Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies
Volume 62, Issue 1 (February 2013) (Special Issue on Multiethnic Families)
pages 5-16
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00759.x

Nicholas A. Jones, Chief, Racial Statistics Branch
Population Division
United States Census Bureau

Jungmiwha J. Bullock
United States Census Bureau

The United States’s collection of race data in Census 2000 and the 2010 Census provides a historical and landmark opportunity to compare results from two decennial censuses on the distributions of people reporting multiple races in response to the census. This research provides insights on the number of people who reported more than one race and details on various multiple-race combinations (e.g., White and Black or African American; White and Asian; White and American Indian and Alaska Native). This article presents analyses of the Two or More Races population and the largest multiple-race groups at the national and state level. The results inform data users and the public about an evolving portrait of the multiple-race population in the United States.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Family Relations, Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies, Jungmiwha Bullock, Jungmiwha J. Bullock, Nicholas A. Jones

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Mixed Race Studies

Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

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