Re: Where are the multiracial Americans?

From Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing:

Over at the New York Times, Peggy Orenstein wrote a light article about the social construction of race, ethnicity, and culture through the lens of multiracialism. This figure (in Hawaii, Hapa means "half") shows the states with the highest percentages of people claiming to be multiracial:


For background: 2000 was the first year that the Census allowed us to mark more than one race... talk about the social construction of racial categories!

My response to this posting (and to Orenstein's piece) is this:

I'm Hapa, but I think this has article has a few problems...

One might argue that there are many more "multi-racial" people throughout the country if the question were changed to ask if a person knew of having ancestors from more than one race.

I think that a whole lot of "African-Americans" are multi-racial, but identify themselves as "African-American", and not "multi-racial". Similarly, I think that many "Caucasian" peoples are likely to be "multi-racial" by descent, but identify themselves as only a single race.

Because of the relatively recent "allowability" of claiming multiple races on the Census, I think that this question only really affects people who have parents of different [single] "races" and aren't themselves subsumed into a single racial group. For example, Barak Obama is multi-racial. However, he is more likely to be seen as "African-American." He may try and distance himself from being "African-American", but I think that many people in a similar "racial descent" position may allow themselves to identify (at least publicly) themselves as the racial group which most of society sees them as.

On the other hand, some "races" have not allowed the children of mixed-race marriages to really enter into their society. (I'm thinking specifically of "white" and "Asian".) This provides for a strong environment for a person to cultivate an ethnic identity as something other than merely one or the other.

Similarly, in some places (such as some areas of California and many places in Hawaii), there are enough children of mixed "racial" heritage that identifying oneself publicly as mixed is acceptable (and one merely got aggravated with stupid government documents requiring that you note whether you were "Non-Hispanic Caucasian" or not).