A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race &#038; Difference Colloquium Series)

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Today’s census questions misunderstand both Hispanic and white identity

Right now, census data are distorting one of the most transformative population developments of the early 21st century. A sizable and growing number of young people come from families with one white and one minority parent, as more adults form families across racial and ethnic lines. By far the largest group among them have Hispanic and white European ancestry.

But you wouldn’t know that from the 2000 or 2010 Census results. While 2000 was the first to allow Americans to report a multiracial heritage, neither it nor the 2010 Census allowed people to check off both part Hispanic and part something else.

Why? The culprit is that the census examines race and ethnicity with two questions: first, race; and then Hispanic origins. This format was created in accordance with a 1997 Office of Management and Budget memorandum that defined the standards for collecting and classifying ethnic and racial data to which all federal agencies must adhere.

Richard Alba, “There’s a big problem with how the census measures race,” The Washington Post, February 6, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/06/theres-a-big-problem-with-how-the-census-measures-race.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Emory University
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Monday, 2016-02-15, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Tags: Allyson Hobbs, Emory University, James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2016 at 01:43Z and is filed under History, Live Events, Media Archive, Passing, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

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