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Title: Choosing Race: Multiracial Ancestry and Identification
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2010
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Abstract: Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choicesof multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal governments new check all thatapply method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowlydefined the population of multiracial individuals as the biracial children of single-race parents.In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples ofthe U.S. Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in itsunderstanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity inthe patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestryindividuals respectively, while we find that multiple race identification is the modal category forthose of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classificationregime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work onmultiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracialancestry groups.
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Authors: Gullickson, Aaron; Morning, Ann
Publisher: University of Oregon
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Race and Ethnicity
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