Can the “one-drop rule” tell us anything about racial discrimination? New evidence from the multiple race question on the 2000 Census

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Economics, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-24 03:11Z by Steven

Can the “one-drop rule” tell us anything about racial discrimination? New evidence from the multiple race question on the 2000 Census

Labour Economics
Volume 16, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 451-460
DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2009.01.003

Robert W. Fairlie, Professor of Economics
University of California, Santa Cruz

The inclusion of multiple race information for the first time in the 2000 Census allows for a novel test for the presence of labor discrimination using the “one-drop rule.” Identifying discrimination is straightforward and essentially relies on the discontinuous nature of the one-drop rule, which treats biracial blacks similarly as monoracial blacks. If biracial blacks have levels of unmeasurable and measurable human capital that lie between the levels of monoracial blacks and whites then, absent discrimination, their wages should also lie between the wages of the two groups. Estimates from the Census indicate that biracial blacks have levels of education that lie almost perfectly between monoracial blacks and whites. In contrast, however, biracial blacks have wages that are roughly similar to monoracial blacks after controlling for education and potential work experience. Estimates from the 1980 Census also do not indicate that the parental characteristics and educational outcomes of biracial children differ from what would be expected by having both black and white parents. Several additional factors that potentially affect the human capital of biracial adults are explored. These findings provide some suggestive evidence on the “one drop rule” and the presence of discrimination in the labor market and provide new estimates of wages and educational levels of biracial blacks.

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Mixed-race Americans face wage discrimination

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Social Science, United States on 2010-03-01 02:17Z by Steven

Mixed-race Americans face wage discrimination

New Scientist
Magazine issue 2696
Science in Society
2009-02-22

Luckily for Barack Obama, the US president’s salary doesn’t depend on who gets elected. A study of racial discrimination in the US workplace suggests that mixed-race Americans  are discriminated against just as much as black people in terms of salary.

Economist Robert Fairlie at the University of California at Santa Cruz examined the US census for 2000 – the first to include the “mixed race” option for ethnicity. The census also questioned people about their earnings…

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