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The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) published 20 articles on Diversity and the Census in What Census Data Miss about American Diversity, Richard Alba and Kenneth Prewit.

 

Based on the title of the articles, none of the articles directly dealt with African Americans or DAEUS.  The articles address Latino, Asian, Native American, immigration and multi-racial. The articles dealt with descendants of immigrants and descendants of Native Americans. The articles dealt with census and civil rights issues of Asian Americans. While reference to Black Americans occurs in most of the articles, the fact that the journal doesn't overtly address the issues of DAEUS (Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States) is problematic.

Given that one of the editors, Kenneth Perwitt, is the former director of the census bureau. this is extremely troubling because others will look to this edition to sett the framework for discussing the census and race. As Professor Perwitt said in the editor's note:

". . . [A] failed census. . .has consequences. “Demography is destiny” is not a cliché at this juncture in our history. It aptly captures a moment when many millions of Americans are struggling to comprehend and adjust to the fast-moving diversity of their country. Flawed data lead to flawed conclusions and, it follows, ill-informed actions." 

The way AAPSS has structured the discussion around African Americans is, at best, flawed and will fail  Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS) because the discussion fails to recognize that being DAEUS is much more about history, culture and community than it is about ancestry and color. 

 

 

What Census Data Miss about American Diversity, Richard Alba and Kenneth Prewit Journal Content and Word Count	Total Words	Pages (300 words per page)	African or Black word Count
Introduction
Editors' Note	878	2.9	1
The Census Race Classification: Is it Doing its Job?	8598	28.7	38
I: The Significance of Ethno-Racial Mixing
The Rise of Mixed Parentage: A Sociological and Demographic Phenomenon to Be Reckoned with	5615	18.7	34
Ethnic/racial Identity: Fuzzy Categories and Shifting Positions	4448	14.8	10
Establishing the Denominator: the Challenges of Measuring Multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American Populations	4494	15.0	20
The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and its Implications for Racial Self-identification	5306	17.7	30
Multiracial Identification and Racial Gaps: A Work in Progress	5400	18	33
Boundary Blurring? Racial Identification among the Children of Interracial Couples	6187	20.6	46
II: Change across the Generations after Immigration
Finding the Lost Generation: Identifying Second-generation Immigrants in Federal Statistics	4132	13.8	2
Social Mobility Across Immigrant Generations: Recent Evidence and Future Data Requirements	5469	18.2	17
Tracking a Changing America Across the Generations after Immigration	5140	17.1	7
Identifying the Later-generation Descendants of U.S. Immigrants: Issues Arising from Selective Ethnic Attrition	3531	11.8	0
III: Diversities within Major Populations
Measuring Hispanic Origin: Reflections on Hispanic Race Reporting	5065	16.9	16
Latinos, Race, and the U.S. Census	5891	19.6	76
Estimating the Characteristics of Unauthorized Immigrants Using U.S. Census Data: Combined Sample Multiple Imputation	6537	21.8	0
Counting America's First Peoples	4712	15.7	3
Accurately Counting Asian Americans Is a Civil Rights Issue	4722	15.7	6
IV: Some Ramifications of Diversity
Racial and Political Dynamics of an Approaching “Majority-minority” United States	5196	17.3	9
Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity	6183	20.6	9
Growing U.S. Ethno-racial Diversity: A Positive or Negative Societal Dynamic?	5489	18.3	56

 

 

 Keywords

 These are the keywords for each article as identified by the author.

Note African American or Black is not a keyword while Afro-Latino and white Nationalism are.

 

Editors' Note
Richard Alba and Kenneth Prew

NOTES

1. The phrase “failed” census has crept into current media coverage.. . . It is equally unfair to miscount whites as it is BLACKS, to miscount gated communities as Indian reservations.

 

 The Census Race Classification: Is it Doing its Job? (Kenneth Prewitt)

ABSTRACT

1. Aligning census ethnoracial categories with America's changing demography is a never-ending task and becomes more difficult when identity claims are rationales for altering categories. We examine four current problems: (1) the Census Bureau projects a population more nonwhite than white by midcentury-- social demographers document trends pointing to a different racial future; (2) the census inadequately measures second- and third-generation Americans, limiting the nation's understanding of why some immigrant groups are “racialized” while others are “whitened”; (3) on health, education, and employment, there is more intra-race than between-race variability, which is better measured for Asians and Hispanics than it is for whites and BLACKs; and (4) consistency in racial self-identification is stronger for whites, BLACKs, and Asians than for Hispanics, Native Americans, and biracial groups, lowering the reliability of race data. These measurement problems weaken policy choices relevant to economic growth, social justice, immigrant assimilation, government reforms, and an enlightened public.

2. Keywords: majority-minority; assimilation; intrarace variability; identity rationales; white nationalism; statistical races

NOTES

3. America's racial classification can be traced to 1735, when Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, briefly shifted his attention from flora and fauna--he was a botanist--and fearlessly divided the human species into four subspecies: Americanus, Asiaticus, AFRICANus, Europeaeus. A few decades later, the classification was slightly modified by a German doctor, Johan Blumenbach, in his influential On the Natural Varieties of Mankind. He divided the Asians into the Mongolian and Malaysian; he also took care to rank-order the races, Europeans being superior as the most civilized, and AFRICANs inferior and uncivilized.

4. These five races--though not the rank-order--structure America's racial numbers today. It invited Native American Indians to write in their tribal affiliation, which mixed up a civil status (membership in a federally recognized tribe) with culture (community belonging). It made extensive use of national origin subcategories for two races--Asians and Pacific Islanders--but neither whites nor BLACKs have subcategories. The latter two races are uniquely denoted by color, which, of course, has never been measured by the census. I doubt that it ever will be.

5. To understand those consequences, I briefly trace familiar history, dating to America's founding fathers. The War of Independence they led was justified as a war against tyranny and a proclamation of liberty and equality. This posed a tricky question: How could a new nation reject tyranny but simultaneously impose it on the indigenous Native Americans in forceful removal from their homelands and, even more comprehensively, on the AFRICAN slave? The answer-- impose a citizenship test in the new republic, conveniently tethered to who was civilized and who was not. The Europeans wrote the rules, declaring themselves civilized and fit for citizenship, but of course not the uncivilized Indian and AFRICAN. A white superiority narrative was born. It haunts our history, very often finding in the census a convenient tool: a Jim Crow apartheid regime, a whites-only melting pot, second-class citizenship for Asian and Hispanic labor, continuing in current times in gerrymandering and voter suppression, and, today, unexpectedly, in the revival of white nationalism that shows traces of the eighteenth-century fixation on white superiority.

6. The civil rights era took on the white superiority narrative when the census, previously an aid to exclusion, shifted 180 degrees to serve as a tool of racial inclusion. Its most telling early achievement was statistical proportionality--groups matter proportionate to their share of the total population. This idea was anticipated by the constitutionally protected decadal census reapportionment process, but in 1787 none could have imagined its mid-twentieth-century application.

7. The research led to various mode, wording, and framing improvements and then, much more consequentially, to two ambitious category recommendations: (1) the 2020 census should introduce a race category that the botanist and the doctor had missed--Middle-Eastern North AFRICAN (MENA); and (2) it should merge what had been a separate Hispanic question into a single ethnoracial classification with the primary races.

8. I. The majority-minority future now being much discussed, with significant political consequences, is highly likely to be more distant than has been asserted. Under reasonable assumptions, it may be postponed indefinitely as assimilation “whitens” some nationality groups. It did so for the once alien Irish, Italian, and Polish “races” and is now under way, if very selectively, among Asians (especially the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean-Americans), Hispanics (especially from the Caribbean Islands), Native Americans (especially those living in cities rather than on reservations), well-educated AFRICAN immigrants who started arriving in the 1970s, and multiracials.

9. Alba adds that partly BLACK persons are an exception, either remaining multi-race or identifying as BLACK only. There is a prominent example, underscoring that inviting identity expression in census practice has consequences for the making and unmaking of groups.

10. The Obama rule
a. When President Obama returned his census form in 2010, the New York Times reported:
b. is official: Barack Obama is the nation's first BLACK president.
c. A White House spokesman confirmed that Mr. Obama, the son of a BLACK father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, checked AFRICAN American on the 2010 census questionnaire. (Roberts and Baker 2010)
d. The phrase, “It is official,” is hyperbole. Ticking a census box does not make anything about an individual “official”--it is just a tick on a form that is then aggregated with millions of other ticks to give an estimate, in this case, of the size of the AFRICAN American population group. Other ticks, biracial BLACK and white ticks, for instance, in that same census give us an estimate of the size of a mixed-race population group--now, we see in Obama's census decision, one person fewer than it might have been (and the BLACK race one person more).
e. The Census Bureau did not say of Obama “we know this person to have a white mother and AFRICAN father, making him (and his daughters) biracial and will so be recorded statistically.” No such thing happened or was even contemplated. This was not timidity because Obama was president. His census self-identification stands because, in the census, you are in the category you choose, or in the case of children, is chosen for you. If you are in some other category a decade later, and millions are, you have changed your mind. Racial identity in the census is not whether a taxi stops for you, or what is on your birth certificate, or what your grandparents thought they were. It is a tick in a box. Call that the Obama rule, and recognize that statistical races are every bit as real as socially constructed or identity races. And in the arena of public policy, only statistical races are real, and we cannot be surprised if they then are forcefully deployed in political battles over those policies.
f. If Obama was signaling that he feels closer to his AFRICAN than to his European heritage, he is joined by many AFRICAN AMERICANS. Alba presents relevant data, as he does for the fact that other mixtures, especially white-Asians and white-Hispanics, tend to relate more easily to their European than their minority heritage. We see that similar patterns occur when mixed-race parents, for various reasons, describe their children as monoracial.

11. it matters if America measures races, and then, of course, how the government decides what those races are. It matters because law and policy are not about an abstraction called race but are about races as they are made intelligible and acquire their numerical size in our statistical system. When we politically ask why BLACK men are jailed at extraordinarily high rates, whether undocumented Mexican laborers are taking jobs away from working-class whites, or whether Asians have become the model minority in America, we start from a count of jailed BLACKs, the comparative employment patterns of Mexicans and whites, and Asian educational achievements. When our political questions are shaped by how many of which races are doing what, and when policies addressing those conditions follow, we should worry about whether the “how many” and the “which races” tell us what we need to know about what is going on in our polity, economy, and society.

12. Yet the third generation--grandchildren of the post-1965 immigrants--“will write the next chapter in the contemporary American immigrant assimilation story,” writes Jimenez. Their “social, political, and economic fortunes will reveal the extent and kind of assimilation among the DESCENDANTs of today's largely non-European immigrants.”.

13. Though variability within America's broad race categories is a long-standing research interest, its relevance to public understanding and to policy was muted in the melting pot decades, when European nationality groups gradually assimilated, adding numeric strength to the white population and reinforcing the white/Black color line.

14. Porter and Snipp, for example, note that only a few Asian countries--China, Japan, South Korea--supply the high percentage of technology workers immigrating with H1(B) visas, whose language skills, education levels, and career opportunities significantly differ from Vietnamese or Laotian immigrants. Today's immigrants from Ghana or Ethiopia differ from, and in some cases try to avoid contact with, AFRICAN AMERICANS whose ancestors arrived as slaves. Telles's complaint, cited above, that the Census Bureau is “out of step with popularly held notions of race and ethnicity,” is developed in his analysis of Latinos, where he emphasizes a racial hierarchy based on “phenotypic and color gradients.” This hierarchy leads some to treat their “Blackness as an identity to be avoided.”

15. A takeaway lesson from Section III. Policy tied to the primary race categories, whether five or seven, makes little difference, seriously misses what a more granular measurement system provides, one making greater use of national origin categories and immigration status. Particularly problematic is the absence of AFRICAN American and white subcategories in the current census classification scheme. This results, for example, in forcing recent immigrants from Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria into the all-inclusive BLACK category, despite significant educational, employment, or family structure differences from the AFRICAN AMERICANS whose ancestors most certainly did not voluntarily migrate to America (Prewitt 2013, 165-66). It is equally important to unpack white nationalism. When and how does it vary by national origin, religion, social class, or geography, and with what consequences?

16. Or, as Bratter notes, at any given time, those “who choose to mark more than one box are a nonrandom subset of those who could do so” (italics added). Those “who could do so” constitute a denominator that is not captured in the census. Roth makes a similar observation when she calls for “determining the denominator,” that is, all the people who could identify in the multiracial group. However useful this might be for the research community, there is no realistic way the Census Bureau could determine that hypothetical denominator. Should the bureau have coded Obama as BLACK and white so he would be in the correct denominator? If so, what of the unknown number of the multiracial who reported only one race in the 2010 census, but neglected to tell the New York Times they had done so.

17. How mixed-race couples identify their children adds a further level of complexity and confusion. Lichter and Qian find that a sizable share “of America's children from mixed-race marriages are identified by their parents as monoracial.” More than 25 percent of the BLACK-white and Asian-white couples do so. And there is negotiation by parents in deciding which race to favor, with various factors having an influence: the educated parent prevails or the composition of the neighborhood serves as a reference point. Overall, there is a drift in favor of whiteness, underscoring Alba's doubts about the majority-minority future.

18. Compounding this problem is the tendency for people to make strategic choices. Deaux writes that people present different racial identities as their social settings shift. The extent to which this occurs varies from one racial group to another. We are beginning to understand that race groups differ in the strength of their respective classification norms. Whites, BLACKs, and Asians have comparatively stronger, more stable norms. Hispanics and Native Americans have weaker norms and, thus, are more likely to shift depending on context. The multiracial identifiers are least likely to give consistent responses across time or settings.\

19. When we reach the endpoint, the census will be making less use of the eighteenth-century primary races, with the possible exception that the AFRICAN American and Native American populations will still be better served by retaining their identity as such. They uniquely experienced centuries of punitive and cumulative disadvantage; it does not get fixed in decades, even when there is a will to do so.

20. The Hispanics, Asians, Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders, and, if a separate race, the Middle-Eastern North AFRICANs, will, I suggest, benefit from measurement more attuned to their variability and diversity based on national origin and linguistic differences. They also, more recently arrived, will assimilate differently from one national origin to another, a process that will occur across the rest of the century (maybe beyond, depending on immigration rates in the decades ahead).

21. David Hollinger has made clear that this loosening need not come at the expense of robust racial measurement. The design can be sufficiently flexible that the analyst, advocate, and policy-maker can have it both ways (Hollinger 2005). The proposal now under review in the OMB is a major step in this direction. It allows data to be disaggregated by national origin/tribal affiliation. It also allows the data to be reaggregated into the primary races, be they five or seven. It also allows special purpose groups to be constituted for academic or policy purposes. For example, all national origin/tribal groups with limited education could be assembled--white Appalachians, inner-city AFRICAN AMERICANS, Hispanic migrant workers, Native American Indians on impoverished reservations, selected Asian nationalities. Today's race borders need to be porous. This is happening in the lived experience of millions of Americans; it needs to happen in the statistics that try to capture the lived experience. The articles that follow make a compelling case for greater granularity and flexibility in federal statistics, led by the Census Bureau

 

 I: The Significance of Ethno-Racial Mixing

 

 The Rise of Mixed Parentage: A Sociological and Demographic Phenomenon to Be Reckoned with (Brenden Beck and Duygu Basaran Sahin)

ABSTRACT

1. Ethno-racially mixed parentage is rising in frequency, creating a strong challenge to both census classification schemes and, indeed, to common conceptions of ethnicity and race. Majority (white) and minority (nonwhite or Hispanic) parentage predominates among individuals with mixed-family backgrounds. Yet in public presentations of census data and population projections, individuals with mixed backgrounds are generally classified as nonwhite. We analyze 2013 American Community Survey data and summarize the results of important studies to argue that individuals from mixed majority-minority backgrounds resemble whites more than they do minorities in terms of some key social characteristics and experiences, such as where they grow up and their social affiliations as adults. Those with a BLACK parent are an important exception. An implication of this analysis is that census classification practices for mixed individuals risk distorting conceptions of the current population, especially its youthful portion, and promoting misunderstandings of ethno-racial change.

2. Keywords: ethnicity and race; ethno-racial mixing; population change; diversity; census data; population projections

NOTES

3. Ethno-racial mixing is nothing new in the United States--it was observed as early as the colonial era (Gordon 1964). In the post--World War II period, the rise of marriage on a large scale across ethnic and religious lines among whites played a leading role in the story of mass assimilation, which forged a white mainstream that included the DESCENDANTs of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century immigrants from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe (Alba and Nee 2003). Throughout American history, moreover, whites' dominant status has been expressed in sexual encounters across racial lines, particularly between white men and minority women, which have produced children. When these children were mixed white and BLACK, they were consigned to the AFRICAN American population by the so-called one-drop rule. When the children were mixed white and American Indian, they had a greater chance of being absorbed into the white population (see Liebler, this volume)

4. We find that 14 to 15 percent of U.S.-born infants have parents of different races or one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic parent. . . .Children who are white and Asian or white and BLACK are each about a ninth of the total. Among the remaining majority-minority mixtures, the dominant combination involves a white parent paired with a partly white (i.e., mixedrace) parent--in other words, these are children who may have three white grandparents. This combination constitutes about an eighth of the total.

5. The mixed-family backgrounds of these infants are not always reflected in the ways their parents report them on the census or the Census Bureau treats them in their reports. . . . In the case of children who are BLACK and Hispanic, the distribution is even more lopsided: more than 80 percent appear as Hispanic, and 13 percent are reported as non-Hispanic BLACK.

6. The children who have a white and a BLACK parent are the least likely to be reported as white. Children who have one white and one partly white parent are the most likely to be reported as white, but only 30 percent are.

7. The growing population of mixed children is creating heterogeneity within major ethno-racial populations, especially the minority ones. For instance, of the children with an Asian parent, about 30 percent also have a non-Asian parent. The figures are similar for children with BLACK or Hispanic parents.. . .

8. The social identities, affiliations, and contexts of Americans from mixed majority-minority backgrounds are on the whole closer to those of whites than to those of minorities, with partly BLACK persons an exception

9. To begin, partly white infants appear on the whole to be growing up in circumstances similar to those of infants with only white parents; infants of white and BLACK parentage are the major exceptions to this generalization.. ..

10. Families with the combination of white and Asian parents are the most affluent of all types, with median family incomes (above $100,000 regardless of which parent is white and which Asian) higher than those of either white- or Asian-only families ($72,800 and $90,000, respectively). By contrast, families with BLACK fathers and white mothers, the most common BLACK-white pairing, are only slightly advantaged in income terms compared to families of two BLACK parents ($45,000 vs. $40,000).

11. Since income is related to housing, this broad profile of similarity to the situations of white families, with variations according to the precise mix of the parents of the infants, carries over into residential space. Distinguishing crudely between “outer-urban and suburban homeowners” versus “inner-city renters” (we are limited by the categories available in microdata; see Alba, Beck, and Sahin 2018), we find that white families are much more concentrated in the former--about half there versus a fifth in the latter category. For the BLACK and Hispanic families with infants, the proportions are reversed.

12. The mixed white and Asian families are even more concentrated in the outer-urban and suburban owner category than are the all-white families. White and Hispanic families and also white and racially mixed ones are found considerably more in these advantaged contexts than in urban renter ones, but their distribution between the two is not as lopsided as in the all-white case. White and BLACK families are more often in the urban renter category than in the other, and when the father is BLACK--the more common case--their distribution between the two is no different from that of all-Black families.

13. Individuals who are partly BLACK are quite distinct in these ways (see also Rocquemore and Brunsma 2007). Individuals who are white and BLACK show a stronger sense of identity and affiliation with BLACKs than with whites. These mixed BLACK individuals believe they have a lot in common with other BLACKs and feel very accepted by them. They think that casual observers are more likely to see them as BLACK than as white or multiracial. The distinctiveness of BLACK ancestry for mixing highlights the continuing power of antiBlack racism in the United States (Alba and Foner 2015).

14. The Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults is also informative about social milieus of adults from mixed racial backgrounds. Most individuals who are white and American Indian live in white-dominated social worlds. Almost three-quarters say that all or most of their friends are white, and two-thirds live in largely white neighborhoods. Those who are white and Asian appear to inhabit more diverse worlds, but ones in which whites still are likely the majority. Nearly half say that most or all their friends are white, compared to just 7 percent who say this about Asians; and nearly two-thirds say that all or most of their neighbors are white. Individuals who are white and BLACK are in rather different milieus. Half of them say that all or most of their friends are BLACK. However, just a third claim to live in mostly BLACK neighborhoods; more than 40 percent live in mostly white neighborhoods.

15. This inconsistency over time makes mixed-race reporting especially unstable; moreover, when it shifts to a single race, that race is most likely to be white. For instance, of those who are reported as mixed white and Asian on either census, 63 percent are reported as being single race on the other; and white responses outnumber Asian ones by 60 percent in this group (see Table 1). An even more extreme version of this pattern appears for individuals who are reported as white and American Indian on either census. Among the almost 90 percent who appear as single race on the other census, whites outnumber American Indians by a margin of four to one. A mixed-race combination that shows a different pattern is--unsurprisingly--that of white and BLACK. The inconsistency between the 2000 and 2010 censuses is about\\

16. Also consistent with older social realities is a binary division of the population between majority (white) and minority, a division that guides many public presentations of demographic data about the growing diversity of the United States. The classification practices of the Census Bureau, which assign all individuals who report ethno-racially mixed backgrounds (whether these involve multiple racial origins or mixes of Hispanic and non-Hispanic ancestries) to the minority side of this division, distort the social realities of contemporary mixing. As we have shown, most ethno-racial mixing involves both white and minority parentage. The available evidence strongly suggests that individuals from majority-minority backgrounds--with the important exception of those with BLACK parentage--resemble whites more than they do minorities in key social characteristics and experiences.

 

 Ethnic/racial Identity: Fuzzy Categories and Shifting Positions (Kay Deaux)

ABSTRACT

1. Demographic changes and increasing diversity in the United States bring about changes in how people define themselves and how they categorize others. I describe three issues that are relevant to the labeling and self-definition of ethnic groups in U.S. society: (1) the creation and definition of identity categories, (2) the subjectivity of self-definition, and (3) the flexibility of identity expression. In each case, substantial research from social psychology and related disciplines supports a socially constructed definition and use of ethnic categories, wherein identities are subject to the influence of local and national norms and are amenable to change across situations and over time.

2. Keywords: categorization; ethnic identity; identity expression; multiple identities; social construction

NOTES

3. The history of the U.S. census provides a fascinating look at how changing demographics, understandings, and priorities have defined and redefined the adopted principles of categorization over time. From an early quantification rule used in the first 1790 census, that is, that BLACKs would be counted as three-fifths of a white, to later revisions that were concocted to deal with an increasing number of immigrants from Asia and later from Latin America, the census has represented the current thinking of those responsible for counting the citizenry.. . . From 1850 to 1920, for example, mulatto was an official census category, reflecting both the increased recognition of interracial unions (many the repercussion of the SLAVERY SYSTEM) and an unsupported belief that those of mixed race were inferior to pure cases of either race, and thus needed to be separately identified. Steady increases in immigration from Latin America in the latter part of the twentieth century spurred a move to distinguish immigrants and their DESCENDANTs from established whites of European heritage; hence the term non-Hispanic white emerged to characterize the “true whites” from a sometimes browner version.

4. However, the match of category to person is not always a good fit. The person answering “Black, AFRICAN American, or Negro” on the census form, for example, might be an immigrant from Haiti, Jamaica, or Senegal, or could be a native-born BLACK with generations of U.S.-born ancestors. . .

5. . . .Research findings indicate that people in the United States rely on categories of BLACK versus white and are less prone to use a multiracial category even when the available physical evidence supports the use of that combination. . .

6. social psychological research has shown generational differences, for example, in the performance of West Indian immigrants on academic tasks, in Latinos' beliefs in meritocracy, and in patterns of self-esteem in both BLACK and Latino immigrant groups.

7. The immigrant from Jamaica, for example, may shift from an identification with specific country/ethnic origin to a more general West Indian or BLACK label when presented with or assumed to be part of a larger generic group (Waters 1999). . . Similarly, Dominican immigrants may use the readily available panethnic category of Hispanic as a way of placing themselves in a category distinct from BLACK and white.

Establishing the Denominator: the Challenges of Measuring Multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American Populations (Wendy D. Roth)

ABSTRACT

1. For multiracial, Hispanic, and Native Americans, norms for racial and ethnic self-identification are less well established than they are for other population groups. There is considerable variation and fluidity in how multiracial, Hispanic, and Native Americans self-identify, as well as how they are classified by others. This presents challenges to researchers and analysts in terms of consistently and accurately estimating the size and population dynamics of these groups. I argue that for analytic purposes, racial/ethnic self-identification should continue to be treated as a statistical numerator, but that the challenge is for researchers to establish the correct denominator--the population that could identify as members of the group based on their ancestry. Examining how many people who could identify with these groups choose to do so sheds light on assimilation and emerging racial classification processes. Analyses of the larger potential populations further avoid bias stemming from nonrandom patterns of self-identification with the groups.

2. Keywords: race; ethnicity; measurement; mixed race; identity; census; statistics

NOTES

3. Ethno-racial mixture is on the rise in the United States. . . These changes reflect an understanding that people with multiple racial ancestries often identify with more than one of them, but they also reveal that the norms for how these populations self-identify are less well established than for those who consider themselves solely BLACK or White. 1

4. Current estimates of ethnic and racial groups from the U.S. Census are based on individuals' ethno-racial self-identification or classification by a member of their household who fills out the census form, presumably a relative or someone who knows them well. Yet relative to White, BLACK, and Asian populations, 2 there is considerable fluidity in how multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American populations self-identify. In their comparison of individually linked responses in the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Liebler and colleagues (2014) found that 97 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, 94 percent of non-Hispanic BLACKs, and 91 percent of non-Hispanic Asians had the same self-identification in both censuses, but all other groups had much greater fluidity in their responses.

5. These findings are consistent with a number of other studies that show much greater fluidity in racial self-classification for multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American individuals, and greater stability in self-classification for non-Hispanic Whites, BLACKs, and . . .

6. These studies found the highest rates of consistency among self-reported Whites (91-98 percent) and BLACKs (90-99 percent. . . Observers tend to classify multiracial individuals as monoracial. More observers classify those with mixed BLACK backgrounds as only BLACK, while there is greater diversity in how they classify those with any other racial mixtures.

7. What is particularly notable is that inconsistencies persist even when the observer knows the person he or she is classifying. In one study, people who previously self-identified their ancestry but died before a follow-up study were identified by both a proxy--a next of kin or a nonrelative who knew them--and by funeral directors.. . .. They found high consistency between the household reports and proxy reports for Whites (98 percent), BLACKs (94 percent), and Asians (88 percent).

8. The greater fluidity of multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American self-identification, and greater inconsistency between their self-identification and observation by others, indicates that norms of classification are less well formed for these groups than they are for Whites, BLACKs, and Asians.. . .. Furthermore, when the individual in question is not the one filling out the household report for the census or ACS, there is likely to be greater discrepancy between what the household member reports and the individual's self-identification than for groups with more established norms of racial classification, such as Whites, BLACKs, and Asians.

9. These types of contextual factors are likely to matter more in the racial classification of ethno-racially mixed populations than for Whites, BLACKs, or Asians because of the greater fluidity in their identification and in the norms for how enumerators might classify the person.

 

The Generational Locus of Multiraciality and its Implications for Racial Self-identification (Ann Morning and Aliya Saperstein)

ABSTRACT

1. Estimates of the size of the multiracial population in the United States depend on what prompts people to report multiple races on censuses and surveys. We use data from the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracial Adults to explore how racial self-identification is shaped by the generational locus of an individual's multiracial ancestry--that is, the place in one's family tree where the earliest interracial union appears. We develop the theoretical rationale for considering generational heterogeneity and provide its first empirical demonstration for U.S. adults, by estimating what shares of the population identify multiracial ancestry in their parents' or grandparents' generation, or further back in their family tree. We find that multiracial generation is related to--and likely confounded with--the ancestry combinations that individuals report (e.g., white-Asian, black-American Indian). Finally, we show that later generations are less likely than their first-generation counterparts to select multiple races when they self-identify. Consequently, we argue that generational locus of multiracial ancestry should be taken into account by demographers and researchers who study outcomes for multiracial Americans.

2. Keywords: demography; racial classification; multiracial population; generation; ancestry

NOTES

3. Enumerating the Multiple-Race Population. . . Given the long reach of the “one-drop rule,” a custom by which Americans with any AFRICAN ancestry are considered solely as BLACK, there are many Americans for whom “mixed race” is not a plausible identity, regardless of their ancestral background.

4. The consequences of multiracial status have varied in the United States, as attitudes, legal discriminations, and classificatory practices toward interracial couples, mixed-race people, and nonwhites generally have changed over time. The legal persecution, media interest, and social opprobrium that Mildred and Richard Loving faced for their 1958 marriage, for example, would not be the lot of a white man and BLACK woman married in 2008.

5. The period effects related to the generational locus of multiracial ancestry also likely contribute to what are usually interpreted as effects of specific racial combinations (e.g., white-Black, white-Asian, etc.). Gullickson and Morning (2011) suggested as much after finding that individuals reporting mixed Asian ancestry were more likely than those reporting mixed AFRICAN ancestry to self-identify using more than one race; they hypothesized that this reflected the more generationally recent characteristic of mixed Asian people, as opposed to the more genealogically distant source for mixed BLACKs, which was grounded in earlier beliefs about “one-drop” racial classification. In short, the period-specific social treatment of both interracial unions and their multiracial offspring is likely to have implications for later generations and should not be conflated with the impact of particular combinations of racial ancestry.

6. Regarding the second dimension, we hypothesize that genealogical distance is associated with weakened or broken kinship ties, particularly those that span perceived racial divides. Accordingly, we expect that in the contemporary united states, being the “biracial” daughter of a white father and BLACK mother entails stronger social ties to the white community than does being the seventh-generation “BLACK” descendant of a white slave owner and black slave.

7. More generally, we see that groups combining white, BLACK, and/or American Indian ancestry have the largest third-generation shares, likely reflecting many seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century unions under conditions of slavery and territorial conquest.

8. the breakdown by ancestry combination also demonstrates how variation in overall propensities to identify with more than one race--say, 58 percent for respondents with white-Asian ancestors versus 15 percent for those reporting white-Black ancestors--may not reflect ancestry combination-specific tendencies so much as distinct generational compositions. In this example, first-generation white-Asian and white-Black respondents are more similar in their propensity to identify with more than one race (at 77 and 66 percent, respectively), so the different shares of the first generation in each population is likely a key factor that explains the wide divergence in multiple-race self-identification overall.

 

Multiracial Identification and Racial Gaps: A Work in Progress (Jenifer L. Bratter)

ABSTRACT

1. For nearly 20 years, the U.S. Census has allowed respondents to report multiple races, offering new opportunities to assess the well-being of multiracial groups. Multiple-race reporting provides much-needed nuance for assessing the racial stratification of social outcomes as the distinctions between racial groups is less clear. Here, I explore the promises and the pitfalls of working with multiple-race data in studies of race inequality. I begin with a discussion of prior work using multiple-race data, showing how they inform our understanding of race-based patterns, and also consider issues raised by the conceptual and methodological fuzziness inherent in using multiple-race responses. I then provide a brief picture of current racial differences in adult poverty rates for single- and multiple-race groups, revealing that some multiracial groups experience parity with single-race groups while others occupy a space in between. While these patterns are meaningful, multiple interpretations are possible given the nature of multiple-race data.

2. Keywords: multiracial identity; racial inequality; U.S. Census; racial identification; poverty

NOTES

3. Other groups' experiences reveal the continued salience of minority status. Some argue that BLACKness may operate as a master status in the lives of BLACK-white individuals, reflecting a departure from the experiences of other multiracial groups (Lee and Bean 2010). The evidence for this is mixed. Multirace BLACKs stand apart from BLACKs in their lower exposure to segregated neighborhoods and lower rates of poor health and poverty (Bratter and Damaske 2013), pointing potentially to fewer racialized disadvantages. BLACK-white multiracials, like BLACK-white interracial families, live in more integrated and diverse areas (Bennett 2011; Ellis et al. 2012). Also, while they are slightly more likely, compared to other multiracials, to partner with their single-race minority counterparts (i.e., other AFRICAN AMERICANS), most BLACK-white adults have white partners (Miyawaki 2015). A similar pattern emerges in dating preferences (Currington, Lin, and Lundquist 2015). Ultimately, minority status remains salient for multiracial adults in the realm of mate selection (Song 2016); however, their experiences remain distinctive from minority counterparts.

4. Where do multiple-race adult householders fit into these patterns? Beneath each nonwhite single-race group are the patterns for adults who combine this group with white. BLACK-white adults have a poverty risk that trends below, but close to, single-race BLACK/AFRICAN AMERICANS in 2005 (0.163 vs. 0.173), although this gap is significantly different by 2015 (0.145 vs. 0.179).

5. Ultimately, mixed-race groups experience a variety of gaps that are not neatly predictable given the experiences of either single-race group. Asian-white adults are the only group at near-parity with whites at any year, while BLACK-white poverty risks reflect the relatively high poverty of BLACKs. American Indian--white households also face substantial poverty risks, largely falling between whites and American Indians.

6. The current analysis of adult poverty risks across race echoes prior work by revealing that multiple-race groups are not easily collapsible into broader racial categories. BLACK-white respondents face substantial poverty risk that is mostly (though not entirely) parallel to BLACK adults; meanwhile, Asian-white adults face substantially less poverty than their Asian peers, at rates that parallel the experiences of whites in certain years.

7. Yet the patterns lend themselves to multiple interpretations. On one hand, they add support to general contentions of simultaneous hardening and softening of racial boundaries. While racial boundaries appear more permeable for non-Black multiracials, BLACK-white adults face a fairly rigid BLACK/nonBlack divide: their heightened poverty risks are generally commensurate with those of other BLACK adults; this was true particularly around the time of the Great Recession.

 

Boundary Blurring? Racial Identification among the Children of Interracial Couples (Daniel T. Lichter and Zhenchao Qian)

ABSTRACT

1. This article uses data, pooled annually, from the 2008 to 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) to document (1) recent fertility patterns among interracially married couples and (2) the racial or ethnic identification of the children from interracial marriages. We find that a sizable minority of America's children from mixed-race marriages are identified by their parents as monoracial, which suggests that mixed-race children are seriously underreported. Moreover, the assignment of race is highly uneven across interracial marriages comprising husbands and wives with different racial backgrounds. For America's children, their reported racial identities in the ACS reflect a kind of racial “tug-of-war” between fathers and mothers, who bring their own racial and cultural identities to marriages. The status or power of parents is often unequal, and this is played out in children's racial identification. For example, parents from minority populations in interracial marriages often have fewer claims on the race of their children. The racial and ethnic identities of children from these marriages, at a minimum, are highly subjective and complex.

2. Keywords: intermarriage; race; ethnicity; diversity; racial identity; family; children

NOTES

3. The share of all U.S. marriages involving partners with different racial and ethnic backgrounds has risen sharply over the past few decades (Qian and Lichter 2011; Lee and Bean 2010). According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 17 percent of all newly married couples were interracial or interethnic (Livingstone and Brown 2017). The clear implication of this finding is that racial and ethnic boundaries are weakening. In the case of interracial marriage, partners presumably define one another as equals, even if they occupy different places in America's racial or ethnic hierarchy. This has been defined historically along a white-Black continuum (Frank, Akresh, and Lu 2010) or by a tripartite classification with America's nonBlack, nonwhite populations occupying a middle category (Bonilla-Silva 2004). Rising interracial dating, cohabitation, and marriage are thus seen as evidence both of improving racial and ethnic relations and declining social distance between the white majority and different minority populations (Qian and Lichter 2007; Lichter, Qian, and Tumin 2015). The past several decades have been marked by a new openness in attitudes and receptivity to interracial marriages (Herman and Campbell 2012).

4. In the case of America's children, the fluidity of racial and ethnic identity is further complicated by the fact that parents initially define their children's racial and ethnic identity (Brunsma 2005; Qian 2004; Gullickson and Morning 2011). Children's racial identity, at least how it is measured in government reports, may depend heavily on situational or contextual circumstances that have little or nothing to do with how children are perceived by others (on the basis of phenotype) or even how children see themselves as they grow up (Vargas and Kingsbury 2016). For example, the classification of children's racial identity may depend on the idiosyncratic race and sex combinations of parents (e.g., BLACK male and white female parents as opposed to white male and BLACK female parents). The commonplace reference to racial self-identification is a misnomer for children if parents assign racial designations. Who answers the race and Hispanic origin questions on government surveys clearly matters not only in defining whether the children of interracial couples are classified as monoracial or multiracial, but which racial group or groups are imposed upon them. This racial designation may or may not correspond to how these children define themselves later as adolescents or young adults (Liebler et al. 2017).

5. We also restrict the sample to interracial couples, where ethnoracial categories include Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites (hereafter whites), non-Hispanic BLACKs (hereafter BLACKs), American Indians, Asians, and persons who self-identify as multiracial. For our purposes, we first distinguish Hispanics (of all races) from other racial groups as defined broadly by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These are parents who self-identify as Hispanic; the remaining non-Hispanic populations are defined as white, BLACK, Asian, and American Indian. By cross-classifying the race of each parent in a 5x5 table, we compare the percentage having a child in the past year and number of children born by marriage type (defined by each cell of the table). The cells on the diagonal of the table comprise the children of racially homogamous unions, while the off-diagonal cells identify children of interracial marriages. Our sample is restricted to children who were born after their parents married (i.e., age of children is less than or equal to marital duration in years). This ensures that the children are the biological children of both spouses. The ACS provides a unique opportunity to evaluate how intermarried parents identify the race and ethnicity of their biological children.

6. Overall, these data suggest that fertility is moderately lower in white-minority marriages, except when white women marry men from high-fertility groups. 1 This pattern is also apparent among BLACK women who intermarry. They have lower fertility than in BLACK-Black marriages, except in the case of marriages to Hispanic and American Indian men. Asian homogamous marriages have the highest rates of past-year fertility (19.4 percent). When Asian men are married to Hispanic women (20.4 percent) and American Indian women (30.8 percent), past-year fertility is especially high.

7. In fact, the data in Table 2 show that when minority spouses are listed as the householder or are male, the children of interracial marriages are more likely to be identified as minority than white. For example, among BLACK-white couples, 17.8 percent of the children are identified as BLACK when the minority spouse is male versus only 10.8 percent when the minority spouse is female. When the BLACK spouse is listed as the householder, 19.1 percent of children are identified as BLACK compared with only 12.8 percent when the householder is white. For children, marital power--as measured by householder status and gender--seemingly influences how children are identified and classified by their parents. This is a potentially important issue given that interracial pairings are asymmetrical in the shares of minority men (e.g., BLACK men married to white women, versus the opposite pattern). 3

8. Mixed-race minority spouses may have less personal stake in identifying their children's race, especially if they have a white spouse (the sample we focus on here). Indeed, biracial spouses (who are in most cases partially white) in interracial marriages are far more likely to identify their children as monoracial white than as a racial minority (columns 5-6, Table 2). In the case of BLACK-white marriages, for example, 29.0 percent of the children were identified as white if their minority parent was biracial. This compares with only 8.3 percent if the BLACK minority parent was monoracial. A similar pattern of racial identification was evident regardless of white-minority pairings. In each racial pairing, roughly 30 percent of the children were identified as monoracial white. Still, biracial Indian and Hispanic parents are far more likely to report their children as mixed-race in comparison to their monoracial counterparts. This reporting pattern may have roots in the long history of conquest and oppression that has brought added racial and cultural awareness and sensitivity to miscegenation among America's Indian and Hispanic populations.

9. A more general lesson drawn from these data (last column, Table 2) is that surprisingly large shares of American children are identified by their interracially married parents as monoracial. By definition, these children should be reported as multiracial, with the races of both parents listed. However, 72.5 percent of children born to BLACK-white interracial couples are identified as multiracial. The other 27.5 percent are classified as monoracial BLACK (15.7) or monoracial white (11.8 percent). Whether these children will similarly define themselves as mixed-race as adults is an empirical question. Similarly, 25.9 percent of children born to Asian-white couples are classified as either monoracial Asian (8.0) or monoracial white (17.9). The contrast from BLACK-white couples is that Asian-white couples are more likely to identify their children as white than as minority. In contrast, the children of Indian-white couples have the lowest percentage classified as biracial. More than one-half are either classified as American Indian or white only.

10. in this section, we examine the ambiguous or fluid nature of racial identity of the children of interracially married couples. Our results suggest that children's racial and ethnic identity is “negotiated” by parents, who bring different racial backgrounds and interpersonal resources that influence assigning race or ethnicity to their children. Indeed, patterns of racial assignment of children differ across couples with different racial mixes. For example, the results in Table 3 highlight high percentages of BLACK-white couples who identify their children as monoracial BLACK rather than white, regardless of education level (a result consistent with the “one-drop” rule, whereby partly BLACK Americans historically have been regarded as part of the BLACK population). This pattern contrasts with other minority-white racial pairings, where children are more likely than the children of BLACK-white couples to be identified as white at each education level (of the minority spouse).

11. se that higher educational attainment of minority spouses (Black and Asian spouses in particular) is associated with larger percentages of children classified as biracial rather than monoracial white or minority. For the children of Asian-white marriages, for example, roughly one-quarter are identified as monoracial white if the Asian spouse is poorly educated, compared with only 15 percent if the Asian parent has a postgraduate degree. This pattern is also true for BLACKs in interracial marriages with whites. More education of the BLACK spouse is associated with larger percentages of children identified as biracial. There is little if any evidence that increases in education among the BLACK spouses are associated with larger percentages of children identified as monoracial BLACK. For Hispanics, a college education is strongly linked to identifying children as “white.” This clear educational gradient in white racial reporting is also observed among American Indians who are married to whites.

12. Racial identity may also be contextual; that is, parental reports on race may depend on the racial composition of the cities and communities in which they live. Racial and ethnic diversity is much greater in metropolitan than non-metropolitan areas, despite large increases in diversity throughout America (Lee and Sharp 2017). One possibility is that interracial couples may report their children as mixed-race or even monoracial minorities if they live in metropolitan areas. But evidence for this hypothesis is equivocal. For example, as expected, the children of BLACK-white marriages are more likely to be defined as mixed-race if they live in metropolitan areas; and among the children who are identified as monoracial, a slightly larger share in metropolitan than nonmetropolitan areas (i.e., 57 to 53 percent) were identified as BLACK. Among Asian-white marriages, however, the opposite pattern was true: smaller shares of children were identified as monoracial in metropolitan areas than nonmetropolitan areas; and very similar percentages of all monoracial children in metropolitan area (7.9/25.4, or 31 percent) and nonmetropolitan areas (9.3/32.5, or 29 percent) are identified as Asian only.

13. Our analyses, based on data for newborn children from the ACS, suggest several specific conclusions. Interracial marriages--and subsequent fertility--are clearly making the measurement of mixed-race populations an increasingly important task. The mixed-race population of children is underestimated by conventional approaches based on parents' own reports. Indeed, as we have shown here, substantial shares of America's children from mixed-race marriages are identified by their parents as monoracial. On its face, this suggests that mixed-race children are seriously underreported, as it has always been in the past. The full extent, of course, is largely unknown because parents themselves often underestimate (e.g., the “one-drop” rule in the case of AFRICAN AMERICANS) or misrepresent racial mixing in their own family backgrounds or genealogies (Perez and Hirschman 2009). Moreover, how parents classify their children's race is highly uneven across intermarriages distinguished by the differing ethno-racial combinations of husbands and wives. Our results seemingly suggest that children's racial identity reflects a kind of racial “tug-of-war” between parents who bring their own racial and cultural identities to marriages. The status or power of parents is often unequal, and this is played out in how children are identified. Parents from some minority populations seemingly have fewer claims on the race of their children. The racial and ethnic identities of children of interracial marriages, at a minimum, are highly subjective and complex.

 

 II: Change across the Generations after Immigration

 

Finding the Lost Generation: Identifying Second-Generation Immigrants in Federal Statistics (Douglas S. Massey)

ABSTRACT

1. This article underscores the importance of adding a question on parental birthplace to the American Community Survey (ACS). This question was removed from the long form of the U.S. Census after 1970 and replaced by a question on ancestry. While the former provides accurate information about a demographic fact that is critical to the identification of the children of immigrants, the latter refers to a subjective social construction that has limited utility for purposes of program administration, apportionment, or governance. At the time that the parental birthplace question was eliminated, the percentage of ACS respondents who were foreign-born had reached an all-time low, and the second generation was aging and shrinking, so the loss to the nation's statistical system was not immediately apparent. With the revival of immigration in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the inability to identify and study the second generation has become glaringly apparent. Immigrants and their children now constitute a quarter of the U.S. population: their non-white racial origins and a widespread lack of legal documents among them render their prospects for integration uncertain. Our current inability to accurately measure progress between first- and second-generation immigrants now constitutes a major weakness in the U.S. statistical system.

2. Keywords: immigrants; integration; second generation; assimilation

NOTES

3. How the Second Generation Got “Lost”. . Civil rights legislation covers more than just AFRICAN Americans, of course, and Hispanics also mobilized during the 1960s to advance their interests. A key element in their mobilization was the demand for the inclusion of a pan-ethnic Hispanic identifier on the decennial census, . . .

4. The addition of a Hispanic identifier triggered demands from other national-origin groups for their own identifier, notably the DESCENDANTS OF SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS who had experienced exclusion and discrimination earlier in the twentieth century (Higham 2002). In reaction to the political mobilization of BLACKs and Latinos, many of them were in the process of mobilizing as self-identified “white ethnics” who were defiantly “unmeltable” .

5. Among the children of immigrants in the United States today, 58 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are Asian or Middle Eastern, and 8 percent are AFRICAN, with only 12 percent coming from Europe, Canada, or Australia. .

 

Social Mobility Across Immigrant Generations: Recent Evidence and Future Data Requirements (Van C. Tran)

ABSTRACT

1. This article assesses second-generation socioeconomic mobility using the most recent data available for eighteen ethnic groups from the Current Population Survey. In contrast to prior predictions of second-generation declines in mobility, this analysis finds significant progress in the second generation, both when that generation is compared to first-generation proxy parents and when compared to native peers of the same age cohort descended from what I identify as “proximal host groups.” The analysis also underscores the significant data limitations that continue to plague assessments of intergenerational mobility in immigrant-origin populations, pointing to the urgent need to collect new and better data against which researchers can benchmark socioeconomic attainment for the post-1965 third generation, which will enter young adulthood in the next decade.

2. Keywords: immigration; assimilation; social mobility; second generation; third generation

NOTES

3. This analysis focuses on eighteen second-generation and four third-plus-generation groups. The eighteen second-generation ethnic groups are identified because each group has a sample size of at least 100 in the pooled CPS dataset. The primary focus will be on second-generation individuals between the ages of 25 and 50. This cohort of individuals most resembles the post-1965 second generation. For CPS 2008, the oldest individuals in this cohort were born between 1968 and 1983. For CPS 2016, the oldest individuals in this cohort were born between 1976 and 1991. Following the lagged-birth-cohort method (Farley and Alba 2002), I compare this cohort of second-generation individuals with their proxy parents: first-generation individuals above the age of 50. I also compare outcomes among the second generation to their third-plus-generation peers in the “proximal host” groups: non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic BLACK, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic/Latino (Mittelberg and Waters 1992).

4. The combined CPS sample size includes 1,002,647 respondents from a mix of ethnoracial origins and immigrant generations. Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics on this sample by immigrant generation and age cohort. The first panel shows that only 1.9 percent of whites and 1.1 percent of BLACKs belong to the second generation, whereas these proportions are 11.2 percent of Hispanics and 10.5 percent of Asians. Of whites and BLACKs, 92.9 percent and 87.2 percent are in the third-plus generation, compared to only 28.3 percent of Hispanics and 12.4 percent of Asians. The next three panels in Table 1 provide the race and age distributions across generations. In the first generation, the age profile skews older among whites. For the other three ethnoracial groups, about half are between the ages of 25 and 50. In the second generation, the major difference is between whites and nonwhites. Whereas 47.7 percent of second-generation whites are above the age of 50, the proportions are small among BLACKs, Asians, and Hispanics (2.5 percent, 6.3 percent, and 5.8 percent, respectively). In contrast, almost three-quarters of the nonwhite second generation are below the age of 25. As the second generation comes of age in the next decade, this cohort of children and adolescents will emerge into young adulthood in sizable numbers. In the third-plus generation, the population is more evenly distributed across the age cohorts. In general, whites are more likely to be concentrated in the oldest cohort, whereas Hispanics and Asians are more likely to be concentrated in the youngest one.

5. Table 2 presents descriptive results for four measures of socioeconomic attainment for the eighteen ethnic groups, separately for the first-generation individuals above age 50 and for second-generation individuals aged 25 to 50. The results from Table 2 show clear evidence of mobility between the first and second generation for every ethnic group. Among the four white ethnic groups, Italians report the lowest starting point, with 34.9 percent of the first generation having no high school degree--similar to levels among first-generation Haitians and Vietnamese. And yet, by the second generation, the high school dropout rates among these three groups hover around 2 to 3 percent, a marked improvement. By the second generation, whites, BLACKs, and Asians report high school dropout rates of less than 3 percent (with the exception of second-generation Canadians at 7.4 percent). Among Hispanics, many ethnic groups also report very low starting points in terms of education. In the first generation, 66.9 percent of Mexicans have no high school education, compared to 58.6 percent of Salvadorans and 50.4 percent of Guatemalans. In the second generation, these rates are dramatically reduced: 16.9 percent of Mexicans, 11.9 percent of Salvadorans, and 17.8 percent of Guatemalans. To be sure, the high school dropout rates are still highest among Hispanics, but the progress is remarkable, considering the lower starting points among the first-generation parents.

6. On college completion, second-generation Asians report the most exceptional outcomes, with about 56 to 80 percent of the sample having a college degree. In the third-plus generation, this rate is 38.3 percent of whites, 21.4 percent of BLACKs, and 57 percent of Asians. Second-generation whites and BLACKs report high levels of college completion, surpassing their respective proximal host groups. Among BLACKs, there is a clear dichotomy, with second-generation Haitians reporting significantly better college completion rates than Jamaicans. Among Hispanics, Colombians and Cubans report the highest rates of college graduates, whereas the results among the other Hispanic groups are more mixed. To be sure, many Hispanics have yet to close the gaps with whites, but they have fared significantly better than the first generation from the same ethnic background.

7. Although there is a clear improvement from first to second generation, inter-generational differences are more modest for service occupations. The results for professional occupations, however, are revealing. With the exception of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Vietnamese, every second-generation ethnic group has not only fared better than its first-generation proxy parents, but also better than its proximal host group. Among second-generation whites, these rates are between 40 and 49 percent, compared to only 36.9 percent for third-plus-generation whites. Among second-generation BLACKs, these rates are 45.6 percent for Haitians and 30.5 percent for Jamaicans, compared to 22.7 percent for third-plus-generation BLACKs. Second-generation Asians report some of the highest rates, with 62.3 percent among Chinese, 63.2 percent among Indians and 51.4 percent among Koreans holding a managerial and professional occupation. In contrast, these rates are lowest among Hispanics--especially Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--with only 20 percent reporting a professional occupation.

8. The multivariate analyses in Table 3 focus attention on second-generation attainment in comparison with third-plus-generation individuals, controlling for age, gender, region, and survey year. In comparison to native whites (i.e., the reference group), models 1 and 2 show that most second-generation whites and Asians are significantly less likely to have no high school degree and significantly more likely to have a college education. The largest differences are found among Chinese and Indians, who are six times more likely than whites to have a college degree. What is more remarkable is that there are no differences between second-generation BLACKs (i.e., Haitians and Jamaicans) and native whites, suggesting that the former have achieved parity with the latter. Among Hispanics, Colombians and Cubans fare better than native whites, whereas the other ethnic groups fare worse. On occupational attainment, models 3 and 4 show that the second generation has achieved parity with native whites, with few exceptions. For service occupations, Koreans and Puerto Ricans are significantly more likely than third-plus-generation whites to report working in the service sector. For professional occupations, Poles, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans report a disadvantage compared to native whites, whereas Chinese and Indians report a clear advantage. Overall, these results show broad convergences between the second generation from diverse ethnic origins and third-plus-generation whites.

 

Tracking a Changing America Across the Generations after Immigration (Tomás R. Jiménez)

ABSTRACT

1. The post-1960s immigration boom and contemporary demographics have elevated generation-since-immigration as a category that is central to analysts and, more generally, to Americans as they make sense of their place in the world around them. This makes the collection of data on immigrant generations imperative if surveys are to keep up with how the nation's people think about themselves and each other. A clear portrait of contemporary assimilation, and indeed American progress, depends on possessing the right tools to paint such a portrait. That means that surveys must enable researchers to identify respondents' generation, particularly the third generation of the post-1965 immigration wave.

2. Keywords: immigration; assimilation; generation; identity; data

NOTES

3. The large post-1965 wave of immigration highlights the continued relevance of generation for tracking assimilation. Intergenerational comparisons are central to research on post-1965 immigration, and especially diverging assessments of second-generation assimilation. There is disagreement about whether the assimilation of the Latino and BLACK post-1965 second generation is characterized by racialization and permanent exclusion, or by steady, if bumpy, progress.

4. The sample also includes third-plus-generation comparison groups (whites, Puerto Ricans, and AFRICAN AMERICANS).

 

Identifying the Later-generation Descendants of U.S. Immigrants: Issues Arising from Selective Ethnic Attrition, (Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo)

ABSTRACT

1. Evaluating the long-term socioeconomic integration of immigrants in the United States requires analyses of differences between foreign-born and U.S.-born residents, as well as analyses across generations of the U.S.-born. Regrettably, though, standard data sources used to study these populations provide very limited information pertaining to generation. As a result, research on the U.S.-born descendants of immigrants often relies on the use of subjective measures of racial/ethnic identification. Because ethnic attachments tend to fade across generations, these subjective measures might miss a significant portion of the later-generation descendants of immigrants. Moreover, if such “ethnic attrition” is selective on socioeconomic attainment, it can distort assessments of integration and generational progress. We discuss evidence that suggests that ethnic attrition is sizable and selective for the second- and third-generation populations of key Hispanic and Asian national-origin groups, and that correcting for the resulting biases is likely to raise the socioeconomic standing of the U.S.-born descendants of most Hispanic immigrants relative to their Asian counterparts.

2. Keywords: racial/ethnic identification; generational mobility; immigrant integration

NOTES

3. No discussion of Blacks, AFRICAN AMERICANS or descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS)

 

 III: Diversities within Major Populations

 

Measuring Hispanic Origin: Reflections on Hispanic Race Reporting Sonya R. Porter, and C. Matthew Snipp

ABSTRACT

1. There are more than 50 million Hispanics in the United States, composing 16 percent of the population. Hispanics are also one of the fastest-growing race and ethnic groups. The American public often views and treats Hispanics as a racial group; yet 47 years after a Hispanic origin measure was added to the 1970 U.S. decennial census, and after numerous tests aimed at ameliorating racial measurement issues related to Hispanics, we continue to struggle with defining and measuring this population. In this article, we review literature about conceptual and measurement issues regarding Hispanic race reporting, evaluate public tabulations from one of the largest Census Bureau studies conducted in the 2010 Census to test strategies to improve race reporting for Hispanics, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of changing the race question on the decennial census to incorporate Hispanics.

2. Keywords: Hispanic origin; race; measurement

NOTES

3. The Directive 15 in 1977 defined four races: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, BLACK, and white; and two ethnicities: Hispanic and non-Hispanic.

4. Despite the ideology of racial mixture common to many Latin American countries, racial categories are enacted in different ways found that Puerto Ricans use more than nineteen different categories to describe a person's skin tone and physical characteristics; while in the Dominican Republic, skin color and nationality are used to define people racially. Labels in between white and BLACK such as indio-claro (“light Indian”) are reserved for Dominicans, while Haitians are racialized as BLACK.

5. Within the United States, the characteristics of Hispanics who report white, BLACK, or SOR, or do not report a race, differ considerably. White Hispanics have higher incomes and live in more affluent areas compared to BLACK Hispanics and Hispanics who report SOR. The socioeconomic experiences of Hispanics who report SOR fall in between white Hispanics and BLACK Hispanics, while BLACK Hispanics and non-Hispanic BLACKs have similar economic characteristics (Logan 2003). SOR Hispanics are poorer, less educated, and less likely to be citizens than white Hispanics. Skin tone also appears to play an important role in Hispanic race reporting: Hispanics who report white tend to have lighter skin tones than those who report BLACK or other (Golash-Boza and Darity 2008).

6. The SOR category was intended to be a small residual category; instead, it makes up 6 percent of the U.S. population and is the third largest category after white and BLACK. Moreover, 97 percent of those who report only SOR are of Hispanic origin.

7. The combined questions and separate questions have very similar proportions for the BLACK, Asian, and American Indian and Pacific Islander alone populations.

8. While Hispanics who report white, BLACK, or SOR have very different experiences and characteristics, this reporting may also be due to skin tone or other phenotypical differences. This type of heterogeneity can be observed within most racial groups.. . . Experiences of AFRICAN AMERICANS who are DESCENDANTs of slaves differ from those of West Indians and AFRICANs who have immigrated to the United States.

 

 Latinos, Race, and the U.S. Census (Edward Telles)

ABSTRACT

1. We identify two dimensions of race for the Latino/Hispanic population in the United States--Latinos as one category among the various categories of the U.S. “ethno-racial pentagon” and racial or color differences among Latinos. In a major change from the previous (two-question) format, the Census Bureau recommends a one-question format for capturing ethno-racial distinctions in the 2020 census, which efficiently captures the Latino population on the first dimension and is consistent with racial classification and identification in the real world. At the same time, it nearly eliminates the problem that the two-question format fostered of classifying many Hispanics as “some other race” while maintaining a similar number of Americans classified as Hispanic or Latino. Whether the Census Bureau adopts the one- or two-question format is yet to be decided as of this writing. However, neither format is sufficient for capturing racial distinctions among the fast-growing Latino population, thus precluding effective monitoring of racial disparities in the United States.

2. Keywords: Hispanics; color; colorism; Afro-Latinos; ethno-racial; ethnic

NOTES

3. In 1977, the U.S. Congress passed the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Directive 15, which regulates the classification of Latinos or Hispanics 1 in the census and other official surveys. OMB Directive 15 deems that Hispanics/Latinos are an ethnic but not a racial group in the U.S. Census. In census publications and in social practice, however, Hispanics or Latinos are often treated as a separate category, whether it is called racial or ethnic, apart from BLACK, Asian, white, and native Americans.

4. A two-question format in the census since 1980 has sought to implement the notion that Hispanics are an ethnicity and not a race. . . The “race” question never included the category Hispanic/Latino, and the large majority of Hispanics, faced with the available choices, chose either white or “other” (i.e., “some other race”). Less than 5 percent chose BLACK, and far fewer chose any of the other terms.

5. So-called ethnic groups, such as Jewish Americans, have been characterized as having distinct physical features and discriminated against accordingly or discriminated against by their religion or culture, and so-called racial groups, such as AFRICAN AMERICANS, have been described as having a shared culture and way of life.

6. Analysts have used the two questions together in their attempts to understand “racial” differences among Hispanics (Denton and Massey 1989; Logan 2010). Denton and Massey (1989), for example, examined segregation among Hispanics in Northeast metropolitan areas and assumed that those who self-identified as BLACK are phenotypically BLACK, those who identified as white are actually white, and those who identified as other or some other race are mixed. Logan made the same division and called these groups BLACK Hispanics, white Hispanics, and Hispanic Hispanics. Notably the racial designations were based on self-classification, but analysis of surveys has shown that self-identified race among Hispanics does not reflect phenotypic or color differences (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Roth 2012; E. Vargas et al. 2016). Although dark and phenotypically AFRICAN Hispanic respondents experience discrimination on the basis of phenotype, their racial self-identification may be a poor proxy for their racial ascription.

7. Note the example of Dominicans, who largely appear BLACK. In the 2000 U.S. Census, only 13 percent of Dominicans also identified as BLACK, and in 2010 that number increased to only 18 percent. Most Dominicans are probably considered BLACK in the American understanding of the term (Roth 2012; Candelario 2007), but they have been routinely classified as Indio in Dominican identity cards (Howard 2001). 2 Since the early twentieth century, the BLACK racial category, AFRICAN culture, and BLACKness became associated with Haitians, which were seen as antithetical to Dominican-ness (Moya Pons 1986; Howard 2001; Candelario 2007). Only recently, have some (non-Haitian) Dominicans begun to embrace BLACKness and identify with BLACK and especially mulatto categories (Howard 2001; Simmons 2009; Telles and Paschel 2014).

8. The Hispanic Response: Cognitive Understandings of Race and Ethnicity The two-question format used by the census does not capture the way that Hispanics tend to think about race; the census's separate notions of race and ethnicity simply do not coincide with the lived experience/worldview of many Hispanics (Hitlin, Brown, and Elder 2007). Social science research has found that cognitively Hispanics consider Hispanic/Latino as both race and ethnicity and, racially, that Hispanic is a group separate and in addition to BLACK, white, Asian, and American Indian (Hitlin, Brown, and Elder 2007).

9. Based on extensive testing of questions in very large census survey trials, including the Alternative Questionnaire Experiment in 2010 and the National Contents Test in 2015, the Census Bureau has proposed the biggest change in the race and ethnicity question(s) since at least 1980: a one-question format that eliminates the Hispanic ethnic question and adds a Hispanic/Latino category in the race question (Perlman and Nevada 2015). In other words, Hispanic would be treated as a race (and possibly MENA [Middle Eastern and North AFRICAN] would also become a new racial category) in addition to the traditional categories. Census Bureau analysts have found that the overall count of Hispanics is the same with either format and that the new format leads to a dramatic reduction in the selection of “other” or “some other race.” Moreover, identification as BLACK under either format remains the same, which means that there are similar undercounts of the Afro-Latino population under either format.

10. More recently, police and other institutions continue to classify suspects and others in a scheme where Hispanic is a major racial category. In institutions such as California prisons, inmates are “segregated by race” to diminish violence, reflecting the sharp racial boundaries of street gangs (Goodman 2008). In that highly racialized environment, Hispanics, AFRICAN AMERICANS, and whites are kept apart from each other, regardless of the insistence that Hispanics are not a race or the Census Bureau's notions and their neat preordained categories.

11. Race is a social construction and if members of a society deem certain individuals as belonging to a distinct race, then that view reflects the racialization of that society, whereby its members are classified in particular categories and then treated accordingly. In other words, society often distinguishes Latinos as a race apart but there is another dimension. Society, including Latinos themselves, also often racializes Latinos who appear AFRICAN and those with dark skin.

12. Dimension 2: Racialization by color or as BLACK, white, mestizo, and so on Social science data show that U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans are socially ranked along a racial hierarchy of skin colors and phenotypes (Telles and Murguia 1990; Rodriguez 2000; Telles and the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America [PERLA] 2014) in much the same way as there is a racial hierarchy in the United States. But that hierarchy within the Hispanic population is not adequately captured in the census. When asked about one's race and ethnicity, Hispanics/Latinos are likely to “racially” self-identify as Hispanic/Latino or under a nationality group like Mexican or Dominican. At the same time, their lived experience also reflects their treatment in American society, where phenotype, especially a BLACK phenotype, affects their life chances. Yet they often do not identify as BLACK even though they may be perceived as such (Candelario 2007; Roth 2012). The second dimension, which we refer to as a second-order category of race, is fluid, while the first-order identification as Hispanic is not. For example, Hannon and DeFina (2015) find in a longitudinal study that only 2 percent of respondents switched classification as Hispanic from one year to another, but fully 44 percent of Hispanics switched their second-order racial classification.

13. The U.S. Census is inadequately equipped to capture the phenotypic and color gradients that characterize racialization within the Hispanic population. As we previously noted, the white and BLACK categories that have been used to make such distinctions among Latinos (Logan 2010; Denton and Massey 1989) are poorly captured by the U.S. Census. For many persons considered BLACK Latino, Afro-Latino or Latino of AFRICAN descent, BLACK self-identification in the U.S. Census is a second-order identity. For example, Landale and Oropesa (2002) find that when asked to identify themselves by race, 47.5 percent of Puerto Ricans identified as Puerto Rican, 40.6 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and less than 1 percent identified as BLACK. 5. . .. In the two-question option, many such persons probably choose “some other race.” Moreover, the census does not capture phenotype or skin color among Latinos (or anyone else) beyond the BLACK category. Latinos rarely identify as indigenous except in the relatively small number of cases in which they identify with an indigenous culture or speak an indigenous language.

14. Latinos in the United States are immigrants or descend from Latin Americans coming from twenty countries with their own, often complex, racial histories. (Latinos also include U.S.- and island-born Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, and a few who are actually DESCENDANTs of Mexicans living in areas conquered by the United States [not immigrants].) Latinos/Latin Americans span a wide range of phenotypes comprising varying degrees of European, indigenous, and AFRICAN ancestries, and many, perhaps most, are racially mixed.

15. While some Latin American countries tend toward the European phenotype or origins (e.g., Argentina), others toward BLACK (Brazil and Panama), and others toward indigenous (Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico), most have incorporated ideas of mixture based on the idea that racial distinctions are generally difficult to make because of a history of mixing. In Mexico, for example, most are considered mestizo (mixed race) yet they vary widely by skin color, which is a primary axis of stratification in Mexican society (Martínez Casas et al. 2014; Villarreal 2010). Thus, the so-called racial categories fail to capture such racialized differences.

16. ote that there are also racialized differences based on color or phenotype and referred to as colorism among AFRICAN AMERICANS, but AFRICAN AMERICANS are captured in a single category in the census. Skin color and other phenotypical differences result in differential treatment in schools, the labor market, the dating and marriage market, the criminal justice system, and other dimensions of society (Dixon and Telles 2017). The census thus does only an approximate job of monitoring discrimination by capturing the first order of identification, but it fails to capture the racialized dimension of phenotype variation within the BLACK population, as it does among Hispanics.

17. The Caribbean countries are largely of AFRICAN origin yet they and the U.S.-bound emigrants they spawned have quite distinct racial histories and politics (Sawyer 2006; Duany 2005; Candelario 2007).

18. As mentioned earlier, at the other end of the white-Black continuum, only 5 percent of Hispanics and about 15 percent of Dominicans select the BLACK category, even though some argue that most Dominicans in the United States would probably be considered BLACK (Candelario 2007; Roth 2012). As in the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and other parts of Latin America (Candelario 2007; Telles 2004; Duany 2005), many Latinos avoid the BLACK category because BLACK is the most stigmatized category, instead self-classifying in U.S. Census categories such as other and white. On the whole, those who do identify as BLACK may be the more assimilated than those who are treated as BLACK. Golash-Boza and Darity (2008) find that greater experience with color discrimination is associated with greater identification as BLACK. However, they and others (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Hannon and DeFina 2015) find that skin color is only loosely associated with identification as BLACK. The U.S. Census thus does not reliably capture race differences within the Hispanic population.

19. The U.S. Census laudably attempts to designate Afro Latinos. However, it has not been able to fully identify that population, in either the old or the new format. In the old format, Latinos--identified in the Hispanic question-- could also identify as BLACK in the race question, and in the new format, respondents can check both the Latino/Hispanic and BLACK categories. Indeed, the Census Bureau has found that the change from the old to the new format does not really change the number of persons that are classified as Afro-Latino. The problem has not so much to do with the census question format as with self-identifications. Latinos, even when they are seen as BLACK, often do not identify that way. In the U.S. context, where single identities are most common, they may be seen as primarily Latino and see themselves that way; perhaps more worrisome, many see BLACKness as an identity to be avoided.

20. So how do we overcome this problem? Perhaps a long-term strategy, which has been tried by the Afro-Latino Forum in New York City, is to raise awareness and consciousness through TV spots about race in the Latino community for Hispanic media markets. By exposing Hispanics to the importance of checking off both BLACK and Latino and by reducing the stigma of BLACKness, self-identification as Afro-Latino might be enhanced. The use of supplemental surveys that measure skin color and hair type also provide direct measures of observed racial status, which can be used to assess an Afro-Latino population as well as distinguish the very heterogeneous Hispanic population by phenotype. Surveys might also consider a question on reflective race like “What race do others think you are?” or “Do others ever consider you BLACK or of AFRICAN origin?” Finally, the Census Bureau should consider publishing data specifically on Afro-Latinos, while seeking to specifically improve its ability to capture that population.

 

 Estimating the Characteristics of Unauthorized Immigrants Using U.s. Census Data: Combined Sample Multiple Imputation (Randy Capps, James D. Bachmeier, Jennifer Van Hook)

ABSTRACT

1. Contemporary U.S. immigration policy debates would be better informed by more accurate data about how many unauthorized immigrants reside in the country, where they reside, and the conditions in which they live. Researchers use demographic methods to generate aggregated information about the number and demographic composition of the unauthorized immigrant population. But understanding their social and economic characteristics (e.g., educational attainment, occupations) often requires identifying likely unauthorized immigrants at the individual level. We describe a new method that pools data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which identifies unauthorized immigrants, with data from the American Community Survey (ACS), which does not. This method treats unauthorized status as missing data to be imputed by multiple imputation techniques. Likely unauthorized immigrants in the ACS are identified based on similarities to self-reported unauthorized immigrants in the SIPP. This process allows state and local disaggregation of unauthorized immigrant populations and analysis of subpopulations such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) applicants.

2. Keywords: unauthorized immigrants; undocumented immigrants; immigrant populations; demographic estimation methodologies

NOTES

No Use of the word Black or African

 

Counting America's First Peoples (Carolyn A. Liebler)

ABSTRACT

1. The DESCENDANTS OF THE FIRST PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS (labeled “American Indians and Alaska Natives” in the federal definition) are a particularly challenging group to count in censuses. In this article, I describe some enumeration issues and then outline what we have learned about American Indians and Alaska Natives from efforts that rely on individuals' answers to census questions on race, ancestry, ethnicity, and tribe. Those who do not report a tribe and those who change their race response from one census to another complicate these efforts. Tribal self-enumeration and indigenous data sovereignty may improve data about some portions of the population. Census and survey enumeration efforts should continue to separate the concepts of race, ancestry, and tribe lest the various subpopulations become indistinguishable in the data, making the data much less useful and possibly misleading.

2. Keywords: American Indians and Alaska Natives; U.S. Census; self-identification; tribe; indigenous

NOTES

 No mention of African or Black

 

 Accurately Counting Asian Americans Is a Civil Rights Issue (Jennifer Lee, Karthick Ramakrishnan and Janelle Wong)

ABSTRACT

1. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group in the United States, increasing from 0.7 percent in 1970 to nearly 6 percent in 2016. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2065, Asian Americans will constitute 14 percent of the U.S. population. Immigration is fueling this growth: China and India have passed Mexico as the top countries sending immigrants to the United States since 2013. Today, two of three Asian Americans are foreign born--a figure that increases to nearly four of five among Asian American adults. The rise in numbers is accompanied by a rise in diversity: Asian Americans are the most diverse U.S. racial group, comprising twenty-four detailed origins with vastly different migration histories and socioeconomic profiles. In this article, we explain how the unique characteristics of Asian Americans affect their patterns of ethnic and racial self-identification, which, in turn, present challenges for accurately counting this population. We conclude by discussing policy ramifications of our findings, and explain why data disaggregation is a civil rights issue.

2. Keywords: Asian Americans; immigration; race; ethnicity; identity; civil rights

NOTES

3. Comprising twenty-four detailed origins with vastly different migration histories, Asian Americans evince socioeconomic and political outcomes at both extremes of the spectrum, including educational attainment, median household income, health status, poverty levels, civic participation, and naturalization (Foner 2010; Kao and Tienda 1998; Kasinitz et al. 2008; Kibria 2003; Louie 2004; Min 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Ramakrishnan et al. 2012; Ramakrishnan and Shah 2017; Wong 2018; Wong et al. 2011; Zhou and Bankston 1998). For example, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans attain higher levels of education than all other U.S. groups, including native-born whites (Lee and Zhou 2015). By contrast, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong are less likely to complete high school than AFRICAN AMERICANS and Latinos: 40 percent of Hmong Americans do not graduate from high school, and just 14 percent have a bachelor's degree--half the national average (Ramakrishnan and Ahmad 2014).

4. Second, Asian Americans are the most diverse racial group in the United States with respect to national origin, migration history, and socioeconomic and political status. While some arrive as poorly educated refugees from war-torn countries, others migrate through employer sponsored H-1B visas. The differences in migration histories manifest in socioeconomic outcomes at the extremes with respect to educational attainment, poverty levels, median household income, and political participation. For example, 72 percent of Asian Indians and 53 percent of Chinese hold a bachelor's degree or higher, yet less than 15 percent of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong can claim the same, as Figure 1 shows. In fact, the latter groups are much less likely than AFRICAN AMERICANS or Latinos to have high school degrees.

5. When the alternative question experiment was proposed, the presumption was that detailed-origin reporting among whites and BLACKs would increase because these groups had not been provided such an option before. It was not clear how much detailed-origin reporting among Asian Americans would be affected. Prior testing of a write-in strategy for Asian Americans found, however, declines in detailed-origin reporting related to factors such as LEP when only provided an open-ended write-in option to denote their national origin (Compton et al. 2013).

6. Other groups, including advocates for BLACK and Latino communities, have pressed the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed data on their groups as well, so that the needs of smaller ethnic groups become more visible. Whites, BLACKs, and Native Americans will have the option to write in their ethnicity in the upcoming 2020 census, enabling a more detailed count of these populations. Therefore, Asian Americans are not alone in their call for the collection of detailed data, but they have been leaders in this policy area.

 

 IV: Some Ramifications of Diversity

 

 Racial and Political Dynamics of an Approaching “Majority-Minority” United States (Maureen A. Craig, Julian M. Rucker, Jennifer A. Richeson)

ABSTRACT

1. Do demographic shifts in the racial composition of the United States promote positive changes in the nation's racial dynamics? Change in response to the nation's growing diversity is likely, but its direction and scope are less clear. This review integrates emerging social-scientific research that examines how Americans are responding to the projected changes in the racial/ethnic demographics of the United States. Specifically, we review recent empirical research that examines how exposure to information that the United States is becoming a “majority-minority” nation affects racial attitudes and several political outcomes (e.g., ideology, policy preferences), and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to those attitudes. We focus primarily on the reactions of members of the current dominant racial group (i.e., white Americans). We then consider important implications of these findings and propose essential questions for future research.

2. Keywords: majority-minority; demographic changes; racial/ethnic diversity; political ideology; racial attitudes

NOTES

3. We have replicated and extended this work, finding that white Americans exposed to the racial shift information (relative to a number of control conditions) express greater preference for racial homophily in their social settings and interpersonal interactions, and have more negative evaluations of racial minority groups on both self-report and reaction-time measures (Craig and Richeson 2014a; see also Schildkraut and Marotta, forthcoming; Skinner and Cheadle 2016). Building on this work, Zou and Cheryan (2018) found similar effects among whites who are informed that their neighborhood will become “majority-minority” in the near future. Specifically, compared with whites who expected their neighborhood to stay majority-white, those who thought that another racial group (i.e., BLACK, Latino, or Asian Americans) would become the majority reported being significantly more likely to move. Further, as alluded to previously, concerns about group status statistically mediated the effects of the future white minority (i.e., racial shift) information on whites' intergroup emotions, explicit racial attitudes, and desire to exit “majority-minority” neighborhoods (Craig and Richeson 2014a; Outten et al. 2012; Zou and Cheryan 2018).

4. In addition to these outcomes for intergroup emotions, attitudes, and perceptions, information about changing national racial demographics can elicit racial discrimination. Specifically, whites who read about the growth in the Hispanic population donated more money to an unknown white recipient, compared with an unknown BLACK recipient (Abascal 2015). If nonracial information were made salient (i.e., iPhone market share growth), however, white participants donated equal amounts of money to BLACK and white recipients. Taken together, this growing body of research suggests that communications about the changing racial demographics of the nation (or, even one's local community) readily trigger multiple concerns about the status, standing, and potential vulnerabilities of one's racial group among whites, which, in turn, promote increased favoritism toward the racial ingroup and derogation of relevant outgroups (i.e., racial minorities). In the next section, we explore the effects of these group status concerns on political outcomes.

5. Although most of the research conducted thus far has understandably focused on white Americans, the dominant majority racial group, recent work finds similar effects among racial minority participants. Specifically, Craig and Richeson (2017a) examined the effects of making salient the growth in the Hispanic population in the United States on the political ideology and policy preferences of non-Hispanic racial minorities (i.e., BLACK, Asian, Native Americans, multiracial). Similar to the findings for white Americans, members of these non-Hispanic racial minority groups, on average, also endorsed politically conservative policies more strongly and identified as more conservative (or, qualitatively, less liberal) after exposure to the Hispanic growth, rather than control, information. Although the mechanism underlying these findings is not yet known, they suggest that the impacts of salient shifting demographics are not unique to whites--that is, members of dominant societal groups. They also highlight the need to examine how racial minorities are responding to the omnipresent information regarding the changing demographics of the nation (see also Abascal 2015).

 

Racial Population Projections and Reactions to Alternative News Accounts of Growing Diversity, (Dowell Myers and Morris Levy)

ABSTRACT

1. Projections of changes in racial demographics depend on how race is classified. The U.S. Census Bureau makes several different projections of the nation's racial demographic future, but the most publicized version projects our racial future in a way that narrows the definition of race groups to exclude people who are of mixed race or Hispanic. This definition results in projections of many fewer “whites,” accelerating the impending decline of the country's white majority and perhaps heightening white audiences' anxiety about demographic change. We conducted an experiment that randomly assigned whites to read alternative news stories based on 2014 Census Bureau projections. One story emphasized growing diversity, a second emphasized the decline of the white population to minority status, and a third described an enduring white majority based on intermarriage and inclusive white identity. Much higher levels of anxiety or anger, especially among Republicans, were recorded after reading the white minority story than the alternative stories of diversity or an enduring white majority.

2. Keywords: race; projections; demographic change; public opinion; political psychology

NOTES

3. From its beginning, the United States has displayed interest in racially classifying its population in a census once every decade, with the original three categories of white, BLACK, and indigenous Native Americans or American Indians expanded over time to more categories that form a database available to shape subsequent social policy, an evolution well described and interpreted in Prewitt (2013). Since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, there has been legal and policy interest about current inequities that exist among racial groups.

4. In contrast, the second classification, termed here the “inclusive identity” arrangement, takes full account of the overlap across categories by tabulating people inclusively in the multiple categories they choose to select as their racial and ethnic identity. Because of “double counting,” this sums to a number that is some 20 percent greater than the total population. . . . At different moments the same person, such as an AFRICAN American who is also Hispanic, might wish to be categorized with all AFRICAN AMERICANS or, alternatively, with all Hispanics. For some purposes, it clearly is desirable to count all people of a race rather than just the non-Hispanic remainder.

5. The implications of choosing among the alternative definitions could not be greater. . . Meanwhile other groups will be growing rapidly and will surpass whites in growth. Between 2015 and 2045, Hispanics will increase in number by 73.8 percent, Asians by 82.0 percent and BLACKs or AFRICAN AMERICANS by 24.6 percent. Meanwhile the white population will have declined, and the nation will reach a crossing point in 2044 when the white total has fallen below 50 percent of the national population.

6. By happenstance, two major historic events coincided with the finding in 2008 of a sharp acceleration in white decline. The 2008 election of Barack Obama, a Democrat, to be the nation's first nonwhite president, was an energizing moment for many Americans, and especially for AFRICAN AMERICANS and other minority groups who felt long disenfranchised. Yet it also engendered anxieties about the nation's future among some whites because it put a human and political face on the nation's racial transition that had been projected .

7. Would the reductions in threatened feelings be accompanied by shifts in racial and political attitudes? Prior research has found that threat leads to the adoption of more hostile attitudes toward the minority group as well as efforts to limit the subordinate group's numbers and economic interests. Indeed, respondents exposed to the inclusive story were more likely than those who read the exclusive, minority story to say that Asians and Hispanics faced racism in America, while there were no effects on perceived racism against whites or BLACKs.

 

Growing U.S. Ethnoracial Diversity: a Positive or Negative Societal Dynamic? (Frank D. Bean)

ABSTRACT

1. Solving problems of race relations in the United States requires avoiding binary ethnoracial classifications and understanding the nature, extent, and consequences of today's diversity resulting from immigration. Recent demographic change has involved not only growth in the size of the nonwhite U.S. population but also increases in the number of new ethnoracial groups. Modest socioeconomic improvements have recently occurred among most nonwhite groups, and the rise in the number of different groups has led to some positive changes (i.e., boosting intermarriage and multiracial identification, blurring color lines among ethnoracial groups, and fostering creativity and economic growth) without diminishing social cohesion and solidarity. However, the benefits of multigroup diversity appear not to have reached many Americans who have less felt the social and economic benefits of free trade, globalization, and immigration. This underscores the need for universal policies that transcend identity- and grievance-based politics and provide security and benefits for all Americans.

2. Keywords: ethnoracial; diversity; immigration; integration

NOTES

3. The Difficulty and Consequences of Defining Race. . . ,\ we could define race as a “consciousness of status and identity based on ancestry and color.” This definition fits the BLACK population in the United States particularly well. But in the cases of the new Latino and Asian immigrant groups, race in this sense does not by itself provide a totally suitable label because it is not clear that color is an attribute that can be consistently applied to immigrants from Latin America or Asia, either by natives or by these newcomers themselves. For example, some Latinos view themselves and are seen by others as white, some as brown, and some as BLACK.

4. AFRICAN AMERICANS, however, fall into a different category. If immigration has symbolized the hopeful and uplifting side of the American experience, the practice of SLAVERY in many of the colonies and subsequent states for the first two to three centuries after European settlers arrived has dramatized the negative and exclusionary part of the historical picture. Whereas the weaving of many strands of immigration into the U.S. economic mainstream represents the success of the American experience, the lack of full integration in the case of the AFRICAN American population represents the country's most conspicuous failure and an indication of the residual power of racial discrimination throughout American society. Although social and economic progress among BLACKs has occurred, the questions of how much, when, how fast, and why are still the subjects of much debate (Hacker 1992/1995; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997; Frey 2014). AFRICAN AMERICANS, OF COURSE, WERE INVOLUNTARY IMMIGRANTS TO THE UNITED STATES.

5. During the eighteenth century, they were the single largest immigrant group arriving in the country. Despite this, their experience cannot be understood as analogous to that of other immigrant groups. Most BLACKs came to the United States under chattel slavery that bound not only them but also their children to their owners for life. The modes of entry and the reception in America of immigrants from Africa were thus especially harsh and debilitating compared with the experience of immigrants from other countries. This makes it impossible to address the experience of BLACKs in this country as just another chapter in the story of immigration. Nor is it any less an oversimplification to view the difficulties of recent immigrants as just another chapter in the history of racism in the United States.

6. This reasoning lays bare the potential perils of conflating racial and ethnic status into the single term race, as well as the pitfalls of relying on binary distinctions in general to define and operationalize ethnoracial categories. Whatever set of categories are used, unintended consequences result. This is partly because relying on any particular classification scheme privileges the observation of certain differences over others, a tendency that is less problematic when such distinctions capture large real-world differences. For example, the use of a binary BLACK/nonBlack delineation, because of the pernicious and long-lasting negative legacies of slavery, indicates substantial BLACK disadvantage relatively undiluted by the inclusion of other ethnoracial groups in the “Black” category. A binary white/nonwhite scheme, however, which is increasingly used by many observers, is distorted by the inclusion of BLACKs in the nonwhite category, making nonBlack disadvantaged groups appear to suffer more than is actually the case. The very usage of the category nonwhite in the absence of disaggregating nonwhites betrays an a priori assumption that today's white/nonwhite differences are as large as yesterday's BLACK/nonBlack ones.

7. Such usage also tends to encourage new forms of identity politics pitting whites against nonwhites, thus redirecting efforts away from addressing pressing real-world disadvantages, such as those between BLACKs and whites, and those between the rich and poor members of any ethnoracial group. Taking note of these problems is not to suggest that certain ways of gauging ethnoracial differences be ignored or overlooked. . .

8. Other current practices make it difficult to detect the latter kind of diversity effects. In using classifications of U.S. racial groups, analysts frequently adopt schemes that yield six exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories (and ignore the existence of multiple-race persons, by assuming that any mention of a nonwhite identity justifies classifying such multiracial individuals as nonwhite. This is based on respondents' self-reports to questions asking (1) whether they are Hispanic and (2) whether they are white, BLACK, Asian, Native-American, or some other race.. . .

9. Lumping all ethnoracial groups together also implicitly encourages the idea that all nonwhite groups in America (so-called people of “color”) are just as disadvantaged as AFRICAN AMERICANS, even though social science research shows that this is not the case.

10. Contemporary Ethnoracial Demographics and Social Welfare Arrayed against such statistics, however, are others showing that nonwhite ethnoracial groups are faring notably better today on various socioeconomic integration measures than they did in 1970 . . This suggests notable upward mobility on the part of such groups, even AFRICAN AMERICANS, but especially among recent nonwhite immigrant groups . . .

11. Research showing a link between this kind of ethnoracial diversity and improvements in majority attitudes toward minorities would suggest an improving climate in the country for nonwhites.. . . The degree to which people from such backgrounds see themselves in multiracial terms, of course, is a matter of self-perception and, thus, one that may vary substantially by ethnoracial category. For example, people in the South with one BLACK and one white parent appear considerably less likely to define themselves as multiracial than is the case for people with other paired differences in racial background, suggesting that the social and temporal dynamics of BLACK life in the United States remain more constraining than those for other groups. Despite this, since 1970 evidence for BLACKs implies some improvement in material well-being, supporting the conclusion that notable numbers of BLACKs are also better off now than they were some 40 years ago (Frey 2014), even though the group as a whole continues to lag other groups, and even though a sizable number of AFRICAN AMERICANS are worse off than previously (Bean and Bell-Rose 1999).

12. The other two major minority populations are Latinos and Asians. . . . thus diluting Latino progress and encouraging the conclusion that their experiences and disadvantages are similar to those of BLACKs. But, as just noted, many BLACKs continue to fare much less well socioeconomically than whites, and they are viewed by whites more negatively than are Asians or native Latinos (although an exception consists of Latino unauthorized immigrants who are seen just as negatively. . .

13. The Broader Effects of Immigration and America's Growing Diversity. . .Also, extensive research shows how the diversity arising from immigration affects both social cohesion and the strength of ethnoracial boundaries.. . . . Since then researchers have conducted dozens of additional inquiries on the topic in the United States and Europe, concluding overwhelmingly that immigration-induced ethnoracial diversity does not on balance negatively influence interethnic social cohesion, except sometimes in the United States. . . But this tendency went away when studies took into account the impact of prejudicial attitudes toward BLACKs on social cohesion. Because white Americans perceive a greater threat from and exhibit more prejudice toward BLACKs than toward other ethnoracial groups, whites living in areas with both large and immigrant and large BLACK populations often report less social cohesion, thereby diminishing the boost in social cohesion that accompanies the diversity resulting from immigration.

14. A different way of looking at the issue of cohesion comes from examining the extent to which ethnoracial diversity breaks down boundaries between different ethnoracial groups and, thus, indirectly reflects the potential for improvements in U.S. ethnoracial relations? For instance, has diversity diminished the strength of ethnoracial color lines in the United States, including the BLACK-white color line? Have ethnoracial heterogeneity and intermarriage contributed to boundary change? Several reasons exist for thinking that ethnoracial diversity may help to increase tolerance both for and among the members of new immigrant groups and AFRICAN AMERICANS. .. .

15. Recent research on ethnoracial intermarriage and multiracial identification is consistent with these ideas. . . For instance, 5.3 percent of all children aged 0 to 17 were identified as multiracial in 2010, compared to only 1.1 percent of persons aged 55 or older (Bean, Lee, and Bachmeier 2013). For whites, this figure was 6.4 percent, for BLACKs 14.6 percent, and for Asians 27.9 percent (comparable figures for Latinos are impossible to derive because census data do not recognize mixed Latino/non-Latino origins).

16. Most significant of all, research also shows that intermarriage and multiraciality are highest in those parts of the country that are the most diverse, and that this depends in part on diversity per se, rather than simply the presence of a large minority population. In sum, the huge post-1965 immigration that has brought millions to the country whose ethnoracial status is neither BLACK nor white has thus elevated ethnoracial diversity. More important, diversity appears to be creating multiple color lines, detracting from the stark emphases on BLACK-white and white-nonwhite divides. Recent rises in intermarriage and multiracial identification--which are more pronounced among Asians and Latinos than among BLACKs--suggest a broad loosening of the boundaries between groups, thus setting the stage for possible increases in intergroup tolerance and social cohesion (whose implications for BLACKs, however, are uncertain).

17. Overall, U.S. minority groups are thus faring better now than they did some 40 years ago. . . One of these is the popular inclination among young people to emphasize a binary racial classification of white and nonwhite. This, as in the case of the old BLACK-white binary, risks the negative reification of whiteness in the former instance and BLACKness in the latter.. .

18. Moreover, as native baby boomers continue to age and retire, workforce voids are providing prospects for both immigrant and BLACK upward mobility, even as aggregate earnings stagnation reigns in the bottom two-thirds of the distribution.. . . Paying attention to a binary ethnoracial classification that looks only at whites and nonwhites reinforces the tendency to view all nonwhites as similar to BLACKs, failing to give justice to the larger difficulties of AFRICAN AMERICANS and to the income stagnation of non-college-educated whites.

19. That the income and wealth situations of many BLACKs in the United States continue to lag those of third-generation ethnoracial immigrant groups suggests that the country needs a new narrative to guide the formulation of its policies regarding race. We also need policies that recognize and are directed at the disadvantages of non-Black Americans that often result at least as much from their low socioeconomic status as from their ethnoracial status. In short, new ameliorative programs, like revised affirmative action programs, could target both BLACKs and non-college-educated persons of all ethnoracial statuses for assistance..

20. Issues of race and ethnicity, along with those of social class, remain important in the United States. Although slavery caused the Civil War, a conflict that narrowly averted the breakup of the Union, its cessation ushered in Jim Crow laws almost as destructive as slavery itself. Today, the legacies of slavery and the Jim Crow era endure in the form of institutional and cultural practices that allow the disproportionate incarceration of BLACK males and a tacit white condoning of BLACK-targeted police violence (Alexander 2012). The recent killings by police of BLACKs in several U.S. cities highlight the continuation of virulent racism toward BLACKs. While we do not want to repeat earlier underestimations of BLACK racism (Faust 2015), neither should we today exaggerate the extent to which harsh treatment and prejudice characterize the contemporary experiences of nonwhite U.S. immigrant groups, most of whose members show considerable integration into the country's larger socioeconomic fabric (National Academies of Sciences 2015).

21. Overstating the extent of permanent harm to and disadvantage among today's immigrants may seem to follow from clear-cut instances of the earlier mistreatment of certain groups such as the Chinese and Japanese. However, evidence suggests that the effects of injuries from such historical injustices have now considerably waned, especially when viewed in comparison to the continuing contemporary difficulties of BLACKs. Imposing a new dichotomy, namely, a white/nonwhite one, on the country undermines recognition of the reality that growing diversity in the form of more heterogeneity is making for a better America.

22. Relying on rigid ethnoracial dichotomies fosters identity politics by stigmatizing one class of Americans at the expense of another, in effect implying that the members of that class alone are responsible for disadvantage. The old BLACK-white color line helped to foster the idea that all BLACKs were inferior and undeserving of societal membership. The new white-nonwhite designation tends to affirm the idea that all whites are privileged and responsible for any difficulties faced by nonwhites.