Place, scale and the racial claims made for multiracial children in the 1990 US Census |
Place, scale and the racial claims made for multiracial children in the 1990 US Census
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 32, Issue 3 (March 2009)
pages 522 – 547
Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia
Richard Wright, Orvil E. Dryfoos Professor of Geography and Public Affairs and Geography Department Chair
Dartmouth College
Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington, Seattle
Margaret East, PhD., Independent Scholar
Lexington, Virginia
Multiracial children embody ambiguities inherent in racial categorization and expose fictions of discrete races. Nevertheless, parents of multiracial children were asked for the 1990 US Census to report a single race for their offspring. Using confidential 1990 Census micro-data, we investigate the choices parents made for the three most common racially mixed household types (Asian-white, black-white and Latino-white) in twelve large metropolitan areas. We find that context affects the reporting of children’s racial identity. We examine these effects with models that incorporate three spatial scales: households, neighbourhoods and metropolitan areas. Model estimates reveal that racial claims made by parents of Latino- and Asian-white (but not black-white) children varied significantly across metropolitan area. A neighbourhood’s proportion white increased the probability that parents reported their children as white, while a neighbourhood’s racial diversity increased the probability that black-white parents claimed a non-white race (black or ‘other’) for their children.
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Tags: Ethnic and Racial Studies, geography, Margaret East, Mark Ellis, Richard Wright, Steven R. Holloway