David R. Harris and Jeremiah Joseph Sim

An Empirical Look at the Social Construction of Race:The Case of Mixed-Race Adolescents

Report No. 00-452

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An Empirical Look at the Social Construction of Race:The Case of Mixed-Race Adolescents*

David R. Harris, Assistant Professor in Department of Sociologyand Assistant Research Scientist in Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Jeremiah Joseph Sim, Graduate Student in Sociology and Population Studies Center,University of Michigan

* Direct all correspondence to: David R. Harris, 2039 ISR, 426 Thompson Street, University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248, drharris@umich.edu. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2000annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C. We appreciate the helpfulcomments and assistance of Yu Xie, Pam Smock, Julia Adams, Howard Kimeldorf, Rick Lempert, SapnaSwaroop, Justin Thomas, and all those who have participated in seminars where our work has beenpresented.

An Empirical Look at the Social Construction of Race: The Case of Mixed-Race Adolescents

Abstract

We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine patterns of racialidentity in general, and mixed-race identity in particular. Because this study combines large sample sizewith myriad indicators of racial identity, we are able to make generalizable claims about the extent towhich racial identities are socially constructed, and the processes by which this construction occurs,thereby shedding empirical light on what has largely been a theoretical debate. Along the way we providea complex answer to what is usually considered to be a rather simple question—“Who is mixed-race?”We find that establishing mixed-race identity is a complex task precisely because race is sociallyconstructed. Our findings provide unique evidence about the sensitivity of adolescent racial identity tocontexts, survey methods, and definitions of race. They also challenge us to think deeper about what wemean by race and how we measure it.

Datasets Used: National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health): U.S., 1994-1995

In recent decades it has become increasingly common to describe race as a social construct.Numerous scholars have observed that racial groups and their boundaries are the result of social, notbiological, processes (e.g., Gould 1996; Spickard 1992). This claim does not ignore the fact thatappearance often forms the basis of racial identification. Instead, it observes that there is no objectivebasis for determining which combination of physical and cultural characteristics identify someone asbelonging to a particular racial group.

While acknowledgement of race as a socially constructed category has become widespread,insufficient attention has been given to the implications of this assertion for empirical analyses. In thispaper we explore meanings and measurement of race by considering the question, “Who is mixed race?”Though the answer to this question may at first seem straightforward, data reveal that establishing mixed-race identity is a complex task precisely because race is socially constructed. The findings that emergefrom this analysis provide unique evidence about the sensitivity of adolescent racial identity to contexts,survey methods, and definitions of race, and in the process challenge us to think deeper about what wemean by race and how we measure it.

Background

The United States is in the midst of what has been termed an “Interracial Baby Boom” (Kalish1992; Root 1992b). Sparked in large part by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well asthe 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning state antimiscegenation laws1, the past three decades haveseen a marked rise in both interracial unions and births of mixed-race children (Besharov and Sullivan1996; Farley 1999; Harris and Ono 2000; Spickard 1989). Between 1970 and 1992, the share of allmarriages that were between people of different races tripled, rising from .7 percent to 2.2 percent (UnitedStates Census Bureau 1998). Not surprisingly, the rate of interracial marriage is highest among youngpeople (Farley 1999; Suro 1999), both because they are selecting partners at a time of greater racialequality and also because they tend to have a more liberal perspective on race than do the cohorts thatprecede them (Farley 1996; Firebaugh and Davis 1988; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997).

Given the rise in interracial unions and the concentration of such unions among people in theirprime childbearing years, it should come as no surprise that the rise in interracial marriages has spawned aparallel rise in births of mixed-race children. Kalish (1992) reports that between 1970 and 1992, thepercentage of mixed-race births increased from 1.0 percent of births in which the race of both parents wasknown, to 3.4 percent of such births. If mixed-race children are less likely than other children to be bornto married parents, an assumption that is plausible given the stigma associated with interracial unions andthe greater exogamy observed for cohabiting unions (Harris and Ono 2000), then both the reported ratesof mixed-race births and the change in this rate over time may underestimate the scope of the ongoingInterracial Baby Boom.

In response to this interracial baby boom there has been growing popular and academic interest inthe size and conditions of the mixed-race population. The 1990s was a decade of intense interest in allthings multicultural, with mixed-race people as one of the key foci of this trend. It was a decade whenentertainers and superstar athletes openly discussed their multiracial identities (e.g., Mariah Carey, LennyKravitz, Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods), and advertising campaigns increasingly featured racially ambiguousmodels (e.g., Benetton). On the political front, the 1990s was the first decade to feature a prominentmixed-race political campaign. First at the state level, and then on the national stage, mixed-raceadvocates were able to attract the attention of politicians (Graham 1996; Wright 1994). The culminationof this campaign was the 1997 Office of Management and Budget announcement that by 2003, the federalstatistical system would for the first time allow people to identify with more than one race (Office ofManagement and Budget 1997). Academics and intellectuals have also been prominent in the wave ofrecent attention devoted to mixed-race people. Through empirical studies, essays, and novels, intellectualshave shed light not only on how mixed-race people negotiate their racial identities, but also on how being 1 As late as 1967, interracial marriage was still illegal in fourteen states (Farley 1999).

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mixed-race affects their lives (e.g., Funderburg 1994; Kao 1999; Root 1992a, 1996; Senna 1998; Twine1997; Williams 1995; Wright 1998; Xie and Goyette 1998).

While there is much interest in the mixed-race population, and growing work on this topic, lessattention has been paid to how we determine who is mixed-race. For example, Eschbach (1995), Twine(1997), and Harrison and Bennett (1995) each use reports of parents’ race to define the mixed-racepopulation. In so doing, each assumes that one is mixed race if, and only if, one has biological parentswho do not identify with the same monoracial group. This definition is flawed in that it assumes that theprevious generation consists only of people who are racially pure, and that these individuals fully reporttheir racial identity. Consider for example the case of a person who is equal parts black and white, butreports himself as black on the census. If his spouse is white, then their children will be consideredracially mixed. By contrast, if he marries a black woman then their children will not be considered mixedrace. The problem is that any, all, or none of the offspring of these two hypothetical couples could wellconsider themselves mixed race. Goldstein and Morning (2000) acknowledge this point in the discussionof their research question, but fail to integrate this perspective into their analysis. Instead, they rely onreports about individuals, rather than their parents, to define the mixed-race population, a strategy that isalso common (Funderburg 1994; Hirschman, Alba, and Farley 1999). Yet a third way of defining themixed-race population is evident in the work of Kao (1999). Rather than rely on parent or child reportsshe instead defines as mixed race anyone who reports a race for himself that is different from the racereported by his interviewed parent. As Kao acknowledges, the limitation of this method is that whetherthe child is identified as racially mixed depends on which parent is interviewed. This method no doubtresults in a questionable count of the mixed-race population, and may also produce biased estimates of thegroup’s characteristics if which parent is interviewed and the racial identities provided by parent and childvary in some systematic way.

The lack of attention given to how the mixed-race population should be defined suggests anassumption that this decision has little effect on the size of the population or its characteristics. Instead,there appears to be a general acceptance that how the mixed-race population is defined may haveimplications, but probably not large ones. If the consensus were otherwise, one would expect analysts tospend much more space than they currently do arguing that they have defined the mixed-race populationcorrectly. However, if one begins to consider theoretical arguments about race, and in particulararguments about the extent to which both racial categories and the assignment of individuals to categoriesis context specific, then it is not clear that how one defines the mixed-race population is a trivial issue.While we are not new in raising this critique, our work is novel in that it uses a nationally-representativesample to illustrate the sensitivity of the mixed-race population to various definitions of race.

In considering the implications of employing various definitions of race on our understanding ofthe mixed-race population, it will first be helpful to briefly consider what is meant by “race”. Race is aterm that means different things to different people. In understanding conceptions of race it is useful todistinguish between essentialist, social constructionist, and folk perspectives. The essentialist perspectiveon race regards race as biology. It has its roots in Carolus Linnaeus’s eighteenth century effort to classifyplants and animals. Linnaeus divided the species Homo sapiens into four subspecies, known in modernterms as Native Americans, whites, blacks, and Asians (Gould 1996). In the strictest sense thesesubspecies were conceived as isolated inbreeding populations with distinctive genetic heritages, though amore relaxed interpretation is that they are populations that differ in the relative frequency of some geneor genes. It was not until the nineteenth century that human subspecies came to be widely seen as distinctraces. This budding essentialist perspective was led by a group of scientific racists who argued that therewas a natural hierarchy to human subgroups, with whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and Asians andNative Americans in between. They further posited that these racial groups had inherently differentphysical, mental, and moral characteristics. The implication of this perspective is that social differencesbetween the races are the result of biological differences (Banton 1983; Gould 1996; Spickard 1992).

While the essentialist perspective on race was deemed scientifically valid during the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has largely been discredited by the more recent work of socialand physical scientists. Those who challenge the essentialist perspective argue that there never were pure

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races, that on almost all traits there is greater variation within racial groups than between them, and thatthe boundaries of racial groups vary both over time and across social contexts (e.g., Almaguer and Jung1998; Davis 1991; Gould 1996; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994; Park 1931; Spickard 1992).Advocates of the social constructionist perspective argue that there is no objective, biological basis fordefining racial groups. Rather, race is seen as a concept that is used to reinforce and perpetuate socialdifferences (Blauner 1972). As Spickard (1992) has noted, “The process of racial labeling starts withgeography, culture, and family ties and runs through economics and politics to biology, and not the otherway around" (16). This is not to deny that racial groups tend to differ in appearance, on average theycertainly do. Rather the principal difference between the social constructionist and essentialistperspectives is that the social constructionists believe average phenotypic differences reveal little aboutgenotypic differences, and have few implications for physical and mental abilities or moral tendencies.

In addition to arguing that the boundaries of racial groups are subjective, a second, though muchless accepted tenet of the social constructionists is that individuals’ racial identities are fluid (Davis 1991;Hahn and Mulinare 1992; Nagel 1995; Snipp 1997). They argue that people need not have a single racialidentity that they carry with them from birth to death. Rather, people may be born one race, live as asecond race, and have yet a third racial identity at death. To complicate matters further, this position alsoallows one’s racial identity to shift over short periods of time as the characteristics of contexts change. Anexcellent illustration of this aspect of the social constructionist perspective is the case of GregoryWilliams (Williams 1995). Williams grew up in the 1950s, the child of a white mother and a white father.In early adolescence Williams’s parents divorced, and he went to live with his paternal grandmother. Itwas only then that Williams learned that his father had been passing as white, but was actually black andwhite, which according to the one-drop society of the time meant that Williams and his father were black.Word of Williams’s “true” racial identity quickly spread, and he began living an odd double life. Tostrangers he was a white boy, but to those who knew his heritage, Williams was a black boy who justhappened to look white. There are many stories like Williams’s that have been told, but no one knows forsure how commonly such shifts in racial identity occur.

While academics representing the essentialist and social constructionist perspectives continue todebate the meaning of race (e.g., Gould 1996; Rushton 1995), there exists a third perspective on race thatlikely has a greater impact on society than these two. Banton (1983) terms this third perspective the folkperspective on race. It can be defined as the everyday understanding of race that exists in society. Thefolk perspective is a combination of the essentialist and social constructionist perspectives, though forhistorical reasons it tends to be more heavily influenced by the essentialists. It is evident in racialstereotypes about group differences in intelligence and self-sufficiency (Bobo and Zubrinsky 1996), aswell as in the belief that racial intermarriage is unnatural (Waters 1990), and in the ways that race affectsnorms and behaviors (Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Frankenberg 1993; Steele and Aronson 1998; Wong1980). What people believe about the validity and basis of racial groups also affects how they identifythemselves and others. Therefore, while the social constructionist and essentialist perspectives are eachuseful for understanding racial identities, it is the interpretation of these perspectives through the lens ofthe folk perspective that provides the greatest insight.

The three perspectives on race yield different lessons about how the mixed-race population isdefined. Consider the hypothetical family tree shown in Figure 1. The people at the head of this familytree are racially “pure”. Their union produces two children (1 and 2). From that point forward all directdescendants on the left side of the family tree (1, 3, 5, and 7) marry “pure” whites, while all directdescendants on the right side of the family tree (2, 4, 6, 8) marry “pure” blacks. Uncertainty about theracial identities of the hypothetical family members derives from the tension in the folk perspectivebetween the essentialist and social constructionist perspectives, as well as the many contingenciesinherent in social constructionist conceptions of racial identity. From an essentialist perspective, all of thenumbered entries in the family tree represent blacks. This is because of the one-drop rule, whichmaintains that anyone with any blood from an “inferior” racial group is a member of that group (Davis1991; Spickard 1992). From a social constructionist perspective, each of the direct descendants could be

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black, white, black/white, or any other single or mixed race. Which race is assigned to these individualsdepends on several factors.

[Figure 1 about here]

First, racial identity depends on whether the individual identifies himself, or has his racial identitydetermined by someone else. Who does the identifying is important because every individual has at leastthree racial identities—internal, external, and expressed. One’s internal identity is what he tells himselfhis racial identity is. Because of the constraints of settings and audiences, one’s internal race may contrastwith his expressed race, which is what he tells others his race is. It is also possible that both of theseidentities might differ from what others believe this person’s race to be. This third type of identity is whatwe call an external race. For example, person 1 in Figure 1 may consider himself black (internal race), tellothers that he is racially mixed (expressed race), and be perceived by strangers as white (external race).While the three identities may be inconsistent with one another, from a social constructionist perspectivethere is no reason to conclude that only one of the identities is correct. Instead, each provides meaningfulinformation and is the individual’s true identity from a particular perspective, in a particular context, at aparticular point in time (Telles and Lim 1998). Lastly, it is important to emphasize that internal,expressed, and external identities are not independent of one another. This point was long ago recognizedby Cooley (1902), and has been recently revived by Nagel (1994). One’s expressed ethnic identity “is theresult of a dialectical process involving internal and external opinions and processes” (Nagel 1994: 154).Similarly, one’s external race is influenced not just by physical appearance, but also by the cultural cuesthat an individual expresses (Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Griffin 1960).

In addition to who identifies the individual, racial identity also depends on ancestry. People whoare known to only have ancestors from one racial group are considered to be members of that group, andpeople with known mixed heritages might be considered racially mixed or, depending on the context,identified with only one of their ancestral groups (Goldstein and Morning 2000). Of course in practicethese rules are difficult to employ because most people do not have full information about their own racialheritage, and we almost never know the complete racial heritage of others. As a result, racial identitybecomes dependent on imagined, rather than real, ancestry. In the absence of ancestry information,physical and cultural markers, such as appearance, surname, language, and personality, are used to imputeancestry (Hahn and Mulinare 1992; Waters 1990), and debates about “real” racial identities andauthenticity abound (Banton 1983; Nagel 1994).

Third, racial identity varies by context. One’s external racial identity depends on others’ race,ideology, and familiarity with the individual, as well as the racial composition of the context (Eschbach1995; Harris 1995; Nagel 1994; Waters 1990; Xie and Goyette 1998). Under conditions of uncertaintyindividuals rely on past experiences to determine the racial identity of strangers. As a result, the sameperson may be perceived as a dark-skinned white in a predominantly white environment and a light-skinned black in a predominantly black environment (Davis 1991). Similarly, the offspring of black andwhite parents may be considered black by people who believe in the one-drop rule, but mixed-race orwhite in contexts where a different racial ideology is operational (Twine 1997). These forces alsoinfluence expressed identities, as individuals respond to external cues when they decide how they willpresent themselves.

Fourth, racial identities are affected by an individual’s personal history. While personal historyhas its greatest impact on expressed racial identity, over time it may also affect changes in internal andexternal identities. If an individual regularly experiences rejection of her expressed racial identity orrepeatedly has a given external racial identity thrust upon her, she may react by changing the way sheidentifies herself to others (Cooley 1902). Over time, what began as an effort to conform one’s expressedidentity to expectations may result in a shift in one’s internal racial identity, and a consequent shift inexternal racial identity in contexts where the original expressed identity was not challenged. Twine (1997)illustrates this process through interviews with University of California students. Despite the fact thateach of her respondents has a black parent, all initially identified as white. It was not until these women

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arrived at college that people began to seriously challenge their expressed white identities. Afterrepeatedly being told by other students that they were not white, all but one of Twine’s respondents beganto refer to themselves as black, or at least mixed race. In some this racial transformation was so completethat they no longer felt they could talk to their mothers, because a white person could not understand theirexperiences.

The foregoing discussion makes clear that answering this paper’s motivating question—“Who ismixed-race?”—is not a straightforward endeavor. To shed light on this broader question, we proceed byexploring four specific questions: (1) How large is the mixed-race population? (2) How fluid is mixed-race identity? (3) How do youth who identify as mixed-race respond when forced to choose a single race?and (4) How similar are the racial identities mixed-race youth select for themselves and the racialidentities selected for them by other people? In addressing these four questions we have two goals. First,we use a nationally-representative sample of youth to illustrate the ways in which race is sociallyconstructed. Second, we show that because the assignment of individuals to racial groups is a socialprocess, analyses of racial differences must devote greater attention to measurement issues thanpreviously thought.

New Data, New Opportunities

While the fluidity of white ethnic identities has been examined in previous empirical work(Lieberson and Waters 1993), the extent to which racial identities are socially constructed and context-specific is not well understood. Some argue that what distinguishes racial identities from white ethnicidentities is that the former have consequences and are not optional (Davis 1991; Waters 1990). Stillothers maintain that some people, especially those who are mixed race, are able to choose their racialidentity (Snipp 1997). Unfortunately, our understanding of the fluidity of racial identity is limited becauseexisting studies rely upon data that are either unrepresentative or contain limited measures of racialidentity. It is for this reason that the recent release of the National Longitudinal Study of AdolescentHealth (Add Health) is so exciting. Unlike prior data, Add Health contains multiple measures of race for alarge sample of youth, and thus provides a unique opportunity to assess processes of racial identification.

Add Health is a school-based, longitudinal study of health behaviors among youth in grades 7through 12. As part of Wave 1, 90,118 interviews were completed with students from 132 schoolsbetween September 1994 and April 1995. Next, 20,745 in-home interviews were completed with a subsetof the school-based sample between April 1995 and December 1995.2 In-home interviews were alsoconducted with primary caregivers. For over 70 percent of youth the interviewed primary caregiver wastheir biological mother.

For the purposes of the present study the key features of Add Health are its large sample andmultiple measures of racial identity. At school, adolescents complete a self-administered survey. Onequestion asks, “What is your race? If you are of more than one race, you may choose more than one.”Options are white, black or African American, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or NativeAmerican, and other. At home, adolescents are again asked the same race question they completed duringthe in-school survey, but this time the question is administered in a face-to-face interview. In addition tomode of administration, a second difference between the school and home race questions is that at homestudents who select more than one race are again presented with the list of five racial groups and asked,“Which one category best describes your racial background?” A further difference between the schooland home measures of adolescent racial identity is that the home survey records the interviewer’sperception of the adolescent’s race. The interviewer is instructed to, “Please code the race of therespondent from your own observation alone.” Again five racial categories are offered and the intervieweris instructed to select only one racial group for each adolescent.

2 This home sample included numerous oversamples, such as blacks from well-educated families andChinese, Cuban, and Puerto Rican adolescents.

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In addition to the four measures of adolescent racial identity—school race, home race, best race,and interviewer perception of race, Add Health also collects racial identity data for parents who residewith the adolescent respondent. Primary caregivers are given the same home race questions as adolescents(i.e., select all races that apply and then choose a best race), and the interviewer is asked to use herobservations to code the primary caregiver into one racial category. After describing their own racialbackground, primary caregivers are then asked, “What is the race of your current (spouse/partner)? Youmay give more than one answer.” In another section of the survey we learn whether this currentpartner/spouse is the adolescent’s biological parent. By combining responses to these questions it ispossible to obtain yet another measure of adolescent racial identity, one that is based entirely on the racialidentity of biological parents.

While multiple measures of racial identity and a large sample size make Add Health an idealsource for studying mixed-race adolescents, this dataset is not without its limitations. First, in identifyingmixed-race adolescents and assessing their outcomes, it is necessary to restrict the data to the 80 percentof adolescents who do not identify as Hispanic at home or in school. While it would clearly be preferableto keep Hispanics in the sample, in part because Hispanics comprise the largest nonwhite group amongadolescents, doing so makes results nearly impossible to interpret. The problem is that despite itsinnovations, Add Health uses the traditional approach of treating Hispanics as an ethnic group rather thana race, and thus asks separate race and Hispanic origin questions. The assumption is then that everyonewho identifies as Hispanic also has a race [see Hirschman et al. (1999), and Office of Management andBudget (1997) for additional details]. This creates a problem in our analysis because it is not at all clearthat someone who responds affirmatively to the Hispanic origin question and selects white as her race ismixed, at least not mixed in the same way that someone who selects white and Asian is mixed. Forexample, a person who identifies as Hispanic and white may believe that she and her parents are ofMexican heritage, and that none of her ancestors mixed with the indigenous population of Mexico (i.e.,she is white). Alternatively, another person who provides these same answers to the Hispanic origin andrace questions may have a mestizo mother from Mexico and a white father from Ireland. These two casesrepresent very different situations. The latter would probably be considered mixed-race by most peoplewhile the former almost certainly would not.

A second limitation of Add Health is that 24 percent of nonhispanic adolescents were onlyinterviewed at home because some schools agreed to let their students be selected into the in-homesample, but refused to allow in-school interviews. This missing data is problematic because it means thatfor a substantial minority of students we cannot compare answers to the home and school race questions.

Third, the racial identity of biological parents is only ascertained if adolescents live with theirbiological parents at the time of the home interview. Due to high rates of out-of-wedlock births andmarital dissolution (Farley 1996; Smith, Morgan, and Koropeckyj-Cox 1996), a large share of adolescentsdo not live with both biological parents. The result is that further restricting analyses to adolescents wholive with both biological parents reduces the sample by an additional 57 percent. This reduction in samplesize is distressing because it limits the number of mixed-race people for analysis, but more importantlybecause it results in a biased sample of adolescents and thus eliminates one of the key reasons for usingAdd Health for this study. Given the limitations inherent in restricting the sample to adolescents who livewith both biological parents, parent race will seldom be used in the following analyses, and when it is, itshould be understood that our findings may be biased.

A fourth limitation of Add Health is that the interviewer is asked his/her perception of arespondent’s race immediately after the respondent answers the home race and best race questions. As aresult of this unfortunate ordering of questions it is highly likely that the interviewer’s perception of therespondent’s race is biased by the respondent’s expressed racial identity. This bias is of no consequencefor the vast majority of people whose expressed and perceived racial identities are identical, but for themixed-race population bias in the interviewer perception of race limits the usefulness of this measure.

One final limitation of Add Health is that despite its large sample size, once Hispanic adolescentsand those who did not complete school surveys are excluded, there are only enough cases to support ananalysis of three mixed-race groups—white/black, white/American Indian, and white/Asian adolescents.

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Despite these limitations, Add Health nevertheless represents a unique opportunity to explore patterns anddeterminants of racial identity among a nationally-representative sample of adolescents.

Patterns and Determinants of Racial Identity

The first question we ask is, “How large is the mixed-race population?” Figure 2 provides aninitial response to this question. Clearly, who is mixed race depends on how one defines race. When weuse the responses youth give at school we find that 6.6 percent of youth are mixed race. By contrast, usingthe responses provided by these same youth at home reveals that only 3.6 percent are mixed race. Yet athird estimate emerges when we limit the sample to youth who live with both biological parents, anddefine mixed-race adolescents as those whose parents do not identify with the same monoracial group.This common definition suggests that 4.8 percent of youth are mixed race.

[Figure 2 about here]That such large discrepancies are observed in the size of the home and school mixed-race

populations suggests that, for many adolescents, these contexts stimulate distinct racial identities. Whilethis explanation is certainly plausible, and it is in fact supported by some of our results, it is also possiblethat observed differences in the size of home and school racial populations reveal little about contextualeffects. In addition to being asked in different contexts, the school and home race questions also rely ondifferent methodologies. It may be that adolescents are more likely to identify as mixed race in schoolbecause of the greater anonymity afforded to them by a self-administered questionnaire, as opposed to theface-to-face home interview, which is often observed by family members. While Add Health data do notallow us to distinguish between these two explanations, they nevertheless make the point that for anontrivial share of the adolescent population racial identities are fluid.3

Figure 2 further shows that mixed-race subgroups differ in their sensitivity to definitions of race.At one extreme are white/black youth. Both at home and at school, .6 percent of youth identify with thisgroup. The share of youth classified as white and black is one-third less when we rely on parents’ race toclassify youth. At the other extreme of sensitivity to definitions of race are white/American Indian youth.While 2.3 percent of youth identify as white and American Indian at school, only 1.6 percent claim awhite/American Indian identity at home, and just .2 percent live with biological parents who expresswhite and American Indian racial identities. Between these two extremes are white/Asians. This group is.6 percent of youth at school, .4 percent at home, and nearly 1 percent of youth who live with bothbiological parents. Variability across mixed-race groups in their sensitivity to how race is defined showsthe importance of examining mixed-race groups separately. The distinct histories and perceptions ofsingle and mixed-race groups means that there is unlikely to be a single multiracial experience.

Having shown that racial identity is fluid, we next consider the magnitude and character of thisfluidity. The first column of results in Table 1 reports patterns of school and home expressed race for alladolescents. These data show significant deviation from the “pure race” assumption implicit in muchsurvey design and empirical research (Lee 1993). Only 86 percent of adolescents select the same singlerace at home and in school. Table 1 further extends the findings from Figure 2 by considering the overlapbetween the home and school mixed-race populations. Figure 2 reported that the share of adolescents whoidentify as mixed race at school is 1.8 times larger than the share identifying as mixed at home. Table 2reveals that the home mixed-race population is not simply a subset of those who are mixed at school.While 8.3 percent of youth report being mixed race at home or in school, only 1.6 percent identify asmixed race in both contexts, and only 1.1 percent of youth give the same mixed-race identity at home andin school. This means that 54 percent of the home mixed-race population is not mixed at school, and 75percent of the school mixed-race population is not mixed at home. The two mixed-race populations are

3 We find no support for the hypothesis that temporal gaps between school and home interviews explaininconsistencies in expressed race. Unreported analyses show no relationship between the probability ofshifting expressed racial identity and the amount of time between interviews.

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clearly overlapping, yet most youth who report being mixed race in one context identify as monoracial inthe other.

[Table 1 about here]

The first column of Table 1 further reveals the myriad ways that adolescents indicate mixedheritage. Summing the percentage of adolescents who provide the same single race to both race questionsand the percentage of adolescents who report being mixed race in either context accounts for about 95percent of the sample. Slightly more than 2 percent of adolescents report being other race in at least onecontext, another 2 percent refuse to answer the home or school race question, and 1 percent of adolescentsswitch monoracial identities between school and home. All of these response patterns—“other”,“refused”, and switching between single-race identities—are further ways that adolescents indicate thatthey do not fit into the traditional racial classification scheme. Some of these adolescents are expressing arejection of the system, but for others, these responses are ways of expressing a mixed-race identity.

The remainder of Table 1 summarizes patterns of school and home race by parent race. Theseresults show that having parents who claim to be from different racial groups is neither a necessary norsufficient condition for expressing a mixed-race identity. Column 2 summarizes responses for adolescentswhose parents report being from the same monoracial group. If we rely on ancestry to determine racialidentity, we would expect all of these adolescents to appear in the first row of the table. While 91 percentof these youth do give the same single race response to both race questions, 5 percent report being mixedat least once, and another 4 percent either switch between single race groups, select “other”, or refuse toanswer the race questions. Thus, between 5 and 9 percent of adolescents with parents from the samesingle-race group report being mixed race. This apparent refutation of the ancestry rule for racialidentification shows that being the product of an interracial union is not a necessary condition for beingmixed race.

Column 3 of Table 2 summarizes racial identities for adolescents who are either the product of aninterracial union, or have at least one biological parent who reports being mixed race. Ancestry predictsthat all of these respondents should be mixed, but the data show something different. Fifty-two percent ofthese adolescents do report being mixed at least once, though only 12 percent report the same mixed-raceidentity in both contexts. An additional 14 percent of this group selects other race, switches betweensingle-race groups, or refuses to answer the race question, which means that no more than two-thirds ofyouth with known multiracial ancestry express a mixed-race identity. This finding reveals that havingparents of different races is not a sufficient condition for expressing a mixed identity.

The fourth column in Table 1 again summarizes the pattern of school and home racial identities,but this time for cases where the race of both biological parents is not known. This is the group that ismissing in studies that rely upon parents’ races to identify mixed-race populations (Eschbach 1995;Harrison and Bennett 1995; Xie and Goyette 1998). While it has long been suspected that excluding suchindividuals from analyses of racially-mixed children might be problematic (Root 1992c), the results inTable 1 provide an empirical basis for this concern. Adolescents who do not live with both biologicalparents, which means that parent race is missing in Table 1, are less likely to give the same single-raceidentity in both contexts (84 percent vs. 88 percent), more likely to switch between monoracial groups(1.3 percent vs. .8 percent), more likely to select other race (2.6 percent vs. 1.3 percent), more likely toever report being mixed race (9.3 percent vs. 7.9 percent), and more likely to refuse to answer the racequestion (2.5 percent vs. 1.7 percent) than are adolescents who live with both biological parents. Each ofthese differences is statistically significant. Together they suggest that adolescents who do not live withboth biological parents are more likely than other adolescents to express a mixed-race identity. Thisdifference could mean that interracial parents are more likely than same race parents to never marry or, ifthey do marry, to divorce. Alternatively, it might indicate that adolescents who do not live with bothbiological parents are more inclined to express a “created” racial identity (i.e., one that deviates from theirbiological parents’ racial identities). Unfortunately the data do not allow us to distinguish between theseexplanations, but regardless of which is true, the conclusion is the same—adolescents who live with bothbiological parents are a biased subset of the mixed-race adolescent population.

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While the summary statistics in Table 1 provide an overall picture of the patterns of agreementbetween school and home expressed racial identities, they do not show specific transitions. This furtherinformation is revealed in Table 2. It shows home expressed race for adolescents who identify with anysingle-race group, or one of the three mixed-race groups, at school. One finding that emerges from thistable is that members of the three mixed-race groups differ substantially in the fluidity of their expressedracial identities. This point was made earlier in reference to Figure 2, but in Table 2 it is possible to seethe specific transitions into and out of mixed-race identities. Just under two-thirds of youth who arewhite/black at school also report being white/black at home. Those who switch racial identities are aboutequally split between black and other race, with few identifying as white at home. About one-third of thewhite/Asian school population is also white/Asian at home. Unlike white/black youth, this group shows ahigh probability of identifying as white at home. The final mixed-race group, white/American Indians,shows a pattern of racial identification that differs markedly from those exhibited by the other mixedgroups. Only 16 percent of youth who are white/American Indian at school also report this identity athome. Nearly 80 percent of this group shifts from white/American Indian to white as they move fromschool to home. Only 3.5 percent identify as American Indian. When combined with the observation thatyouth who identify as American Indian at school are more likely to report being white at home thanAmerican Indian, findings about white/American Indians provide strong support for the assertion thatmany people regard American Indian as a costless, optional racial identity that can be adopted or put asideat will (Eschbach, Supple, and Snipp 1998; Harris 1994; Nagel 1995; Snipp 1989, 1997).

[Table 2 about here]

Table 2 also provides support for the assertion that some use “other” as an alternative way ofexpressing a mixed-race identity. This strategy seems particularly popular among white/blackadolescents. Fifteen percent of those who identify as white/black at school report being other race athome. The implication of this finding is that those who wish to identify mixed-race people cannot simplylook at either those who come from interracial unions or even those who self-identify as mixed, as somefraction of the mixed population also appears as other race.

Finally, Table 2 suggests that inconsistencies in reporting race are not the result of adolescentspurposefully creating fictional identities for the survey. If that were the case it is likely that not onlywould home and school race differ; they would differ unsystematically. However, Table 2 shows thatwhen school and home race differ, they almost always do so in a way that makes sense. For example, inTable 2 everyone who is white/black at school is white/black, white, black, other, or some combination ofthese groups at home. A similar pattern emerges for white/American Indian and white/Asian adolescents.Only in rare cases do people shift from a mixed-race identity to a specific single-race identity that is not acomponent of their mixed-race identity. It is also rare for people to shift between mixed-race groups bydropping racial groups. Instead, transitions between mixed-race groups usually involve adding a thirdracial group to one’s original two (e.g., white/black to white/black/American Indian rather thanwhite/black to white/Asian). These patterns argue for the validity of Add Health race data. They suggestthat estimates of the size of the mixed-race population and observed shifts in expressed racial identity arenot due to adolescents randomly answering race questions.4Constrained Expressed Race

Thus far we have examined expressed racial identity in the context of “select all that apply” racequestions. While this is consistent with the way race is now measured in many states, and the way it willsoon be measured at the federal level, historically American society has not been tolerant of expressionsof mixed-race identity. Instead, the popular and administrative discourse on race has assumed that racialgroups are mutually exclusive (Lee 1993). People who identify with more than one racial group have had 4 The claim that youth take the Add Health surveys seriously is further supported by the observation thatfewer than 1 percent of respondents change their country of birth between the school and homeinterviews.

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a single race selected for them by state and federal statistical systems and the courts (Davis 1991; Hahnand Mulinare 1992; Hirschman et al. 1999), and been queried about their “real” race by acquaintances(Williams 1996). As the folk perspective on race is historical, it is likely that changing the way wemeasure race on official documents will not immediately alter the pure race assumption that is central tohow we identify ourselves and others.

In an effort to understand how racial identity is expressed under the constraint of selecting onlyone racial group, we examine responses to the Add Health best race item for youth who express a mixed-race identity at home. In the Add Health home interview this group is asked, “Which one category bestdescribes your racial background?” Table 3 shows best race separately for the three mixed-race groups ofinterest. White/American Indian adolescents give the most predictable responses when forced to select asingle-race identity. Nearly 86 percent of this group selects white over American Indian as their best race.This result is consistent with the argument that because of generations of intimate contact with whites,American Indian is now a symbolic identity for many Americans (Snipp 1997).

[Table 3 about here]

The next most predictable group is white/black adolescents, where 75 percent choose a blackidentity. Unlike white/American Indians, this result should not be interpreted to mean that the white/blackgroup is largely composed of blacks who find it convenient or fashionable to claim a mixed identity. Thata majority of white/black adolescents select a black identity when forced to choose is likely due to theenduring power of the one-drop rule in American society (Davis 1991). For much of U.S. history peoplewith any suspected black ancestry were legally and socially black. While the one-drop rule is no longerofficially enforced, it continues to permeate Americans’ thinking about racial identity. Thus, white/blackadolescents are often socialized to understand that even if they identify as mixed, they are “really” black.So when someone who has just told an interviewer that she is white/black is asked what race bestdescribes her, it is likely that she knows what the “right” answer to this question is and responds byexpressing a monoracial identity that is consistent with expectations. Given these circumstances, it issurprising that 17 percent of white/black adolescents select white as the race that best describes them.Further evidence of rebellion against the one-drop rule is evident in the 8.5 percent of white/blackadolescents who respond to the best race question by either saying that they do not know which race bestdescribes them, or by simply refusing to give one. This suggests a commitment to being mixed race onthe part of white/black youth that is not evident in the responses of white/American Indian youth.

Unlike the other two groups of mixed-race adolescents, white/Asian youth seemingly selectsingle-race identities at random, being equally likely to identify as white or Asian. This finding isconsistent with the results Xie and Goyette (1998) obtain from the 1990 Census. When considered withthe other results in Table 3, these patterns suggest that the saliency and social status of racial groups havea significant effect on the single-race identities selected by mixed-race adolescents. White/AmericanIndian adolescents almost always select white because the greater saliency of white identity leadsAmerican Indian to be seen as a choice with low internal and external validity. For white/blackadolescents the historical privilege of whiteness makes this a difficult identity to select (Frankenberg1993). However, because of the extreme social distance between blacks and whites, a white/black identityhas meaning, appearing more salient than either of the other two mixed-race identities we examine. Thegreat degree of choice evident in the single-race identities of white/Asian adolescents can also beunderstood in the context of saliency and social status. While there is certainly variation in socioeconomicstatus and ethnic identity among Asian Americans (Espiritu 1992), recent work suggests that of the majornonwhite racial groups, Asian Americans are by far the closest to whites in terms of social and economicstatus (Bobo and Zubrinsky 1996; Farley 1996). As a result, white/Asian youth display a pattern of racialidentification that closely resembles the ethnic options of whites (Waters 1990).

To further explore the racial identities of mixed-race youth who are asked to select a monoracialidentity, we present a series of logistic regression models in Table 4. The models show how individual,family, and neighborhood characteristics are related to the probability that when asked to select a single

11

race, these youth choose to identify as white. The model is first run for all white/black, white/AmericanIndian, and white/Asian youth who agree to select a best race, and is then estimated for each groupseparately. Results confirm aforementioned differences between mixed-race groups in the likelihood ofselecting white as the race that best describes them. The odds that a white/American Indian youthidentifies as white are 33 times greater than the odds that an otherwise comparable white/black adolescentidentifies as white. Differences between white/Asian and white/black youth are not as dramatic, yetwhite/Asian youth remain almost seven times as likely to choose a white identity.

[Table 4 about here]

The remaining columns in Table 4 reveal that mixed-race groups also differ in the factors thatlead them to express a white identity. As white/black youth age, they become less likely to select white asthe single race that best describes them. Instead, they increasingly conform to the one-drop rule,maintaining that although they are white and black, they are more black than white. Like white/blackyouth, white/Asian adolescents are also more likely to select Asian as their best race as they age, while forwhite/American Indian youth age has the opposite effect. However, the age effect is only statisticallysignificant for white/black youth. This set of findings is consistent with the expectations of Cooley’s(1902) looking-glass self hypothesis and its reformulation by Nagel (1994). Both predict that oldermixed-race children will be more likely to adapt their identities to meet societal expectations, as years ofbeing “corrected” about their racial identities take their toll. That the age effect is only statisticallysignificant for white/black youth reflects greater societal concern about the racial identity of this group ofmixed-race youth. As Davis (1991) has observed, the one-drop rule has always been applied moststrongly to those who are both white and black.

A second group of effects in Table 4 suggest the importance of social context in defining one’sexpressed racial identity. When white/black youth live in neighborhoods that are either located innonrural areas or primarily inhabited by whites, they are more likely to select white as their best single-race identity. Both effects are consistent with Twine’s (1997) work on the racial identity of women whohave one black parent. In a small sample of college students, Twine finds that as these women movedfrom white, prosperous suburbs to a more diverse college campus, they stopped thinking of themselves aswhite, instead adopting a mixed-race or black identity. While tract racial composition effects are notsignificant for white/American Indian youth, contextual effects are apparent at the regional level, withwhite/American Indian youth in the West being significantly more likely to select American Indian astheir best race. Eschbach (1995) finds similar regional differences in 1990 Census data. With the benefitof a much larger sample he is able to show that these regional differences reflect state-level differences inracial composition. Similar to the observed effect of tract racial composition on white/black identity,region effects for white/American Indian youth suggest that mixed-race adolescents are more likely toselect white as their best race when they live in an environment with more whites. Curiously, no supportfor contextual effects appears for white/Asian youth. This finding is inconsistent with the work of Xie andGoyette (1998), which finds that children with one Asian parent are more likely to be identified as Asianby their parents when they have more Asian neighbors. While we control for percent white, rather thanpercent Asian, unreported analyses suggest that this difference does not explain our differences with Xieand Goyette. Rather, the discrepancy between our findings likely reflects differences in who is included inthe sample and who identifies the child’s race. Xie and Goyette include all children who live in ahousehold with only one Asian parent, and rely on racial identities provided by parents. In contrast, ouranalysis includes all adolescents who self-identify as white and Asian at home, regardless of the race oftheir coresidential parents.

Table 4 also suggests that parents have an effect on how youth identify. When a family member ispresent at the home interview, youth who initially identify as white/black are more likely to select blackas their best race, while white/American Indian youth are more likely to choose white. These relationshipsare consistent with the probable expectations of parents about which race best describes their mixed-racechildren. White/black children continue to be thought of in terms of the one-drop rule (Davis 1991), while

12

white/American Indian youth and their parents tend to have little cultural connection with their NativeAmerican past (Nagel 1994; Thornton 1990).Expressed and External Race

To this point we have examined patterns of expressed identity, and assessed how expressedidentity changes when youth are confronted with the constraint that they only identify with one racialgroup. While expressed identity is certainly important for what it reveals about how we see ourselves, aswell as for the implications of conceptions of self on how others treat us, this type of racial identity isnevertheless limited. For many outcomes, what matters is one’s external, rather than expressed, identity.The way we choose to identify ourselves affects how others treat us, but in the end people react to usbased on what they believe our race to be. As one observer has remarked, “It’s not that we don’t respectTiger Woods’s right to call himself a Cablinasian [a blend of Caucasian, black, American Indian, andAsian]. We just don’t think it will help him get a cab in D.C.” (Parker 1999).

In an effort to further our understanding of the relationship between expressed and external racialidentity we present Table 5, which compares home race, best race, and interviewer perception of race(i.e., expressed race by constrained expressed race by external race). While it is rare to find all three ofthese measures of racial identity in a large-scale survey, assessing the relationships between them isproblematic. As has already been noted, the external race measure in Add Health is heavily biasedbecause interviewers are not asked their perception of the respondent’s race until after she has answeredthe home and best race questions. Given this ordering, it would not be surprising to find that external raceperfectly tracks expressed race in the Add Health data. While a perfect correlation between thesemeasures might be expected, Table 5 reveals numerous discrepancies between expressed and externalrace.

[Table 5 about here]

When youth express a single-race identity at home, interviewers usually agree with them, thoughthe strength of this relationship varies across racial groups. Adolescents who say that they are black orwhite are almost always perceived as black or white by interviewers. By contrast, in 4.3 percent of casesinterviewers disagree with youth who express an Asian identity. There is even greater dissensus betweenyouth and interviewers in the case of American Indians. In almost 15 percent of cases in which youth saythat they are American Indian, interviewers instead identify them as some other race, usually white. Thesegaps between expressed and external race reveal the traditional American obsession with white and black,and lack of experience with other racial groups. When faced with someone who does not look like astereotypical Asian or American Indian, some interviewers decide that this person is not really a memberof the group they claim to represent.

Table 5 also reveals that it is not uncommon for interviewers to contradict mixed-race youth’sexpressions of racial identity. Only 67 percent of white/black adolescents who say that white is the single-race group that best describes them are in fact identified as white by interviewers. This contrasts withwhite/black youth who select black as their best race. Ninety-five percent of this group is identified asblack by interviewers. Again the data show vestiges of the one-drop rule. Not only are youth who identifyas white and black more likely to say that black is their best single race, but even when confronted with awhite/black person who says he is white, there is a one in five chance that the interviewer will say he isreally black.

The results for white/American Indian youth show quite a different relationship betweenexpressed and external race. Like youth who identify as white, those who identify as white and AmericanIndian, but then choose white as their best race are almost always identified as white by interviewers. Bycontrast, only 29 percent of white/American Indian youth who select American Indian as their best raceare also identified as American Indian by interviewers. In 70 percent of cases interviewers “correct”white/American Indian youth who identify as American Indian, and choose to identify them as white. Asin all of the mismatches in Table 5, the magnitude of this discrepancy between expressed and externalrace is biased downward. If interviewers had not just been told by respondents that they are

13

white/American Indian, but consider American Indian to be the single-race group that best describesthem, it is likely that far more than 70 percent of these youth would be identified as white by interviewers.

Lastly, Table 5 shows that the choice and uncertainty that surrounds white/Asian expressedidentity also extends to external identity. Regardless of whether white/Asian adolescents select white orAsian as their best race, a significant minority are assigned a different identity by interviewers. Eighteenpercent of those identifying as white are perceived to be Asian by interviewers, while 30 percent of thosewho say Asian is their best race are instead identified as white by interviewers. These results show greatuncertainty in how white/Asian youth should be identified, and contrast sharply with how white/black andwhite/American Indian youth are viewed. Nearly all white/American Indian youth are accepted as whites,partially because so few conform to romanticized stereotypes of American Indians. The perspective onwhite/black youth is quite different. In keeping with the one-drop rule this group is least likely to havetheir claims of whiteness validated by interviewers, and least likely to have their expressed minorityheritage challenged. Both because the Asian population has increased sharply in a relatively short periodof time and also because social distance between whites and Asians tends to be relatively small, societyappears unsure about how to identify white/Asian youth, and not too inclined to challenge their claims ofwhiteness.

Discussion, Conclusions, and Next Steps

In this paper we examine patterns of racial identity and show how they vary across racial groups.Along the way we provide a complex answer to what is usually considered to be a rather simplequestion—“Who is mixed-race?” The centerpiece of our analysis is the National Longitudinal Study ofAdolescent Health. As a result of its unusual combination of large sample size with myriad indicators ofracial identity, we are able to make generalizable claims about the extent to which racial identities aresocially constructed, and the processes by which this construction occurs, thereby shedding empiricallight on what has largely been a theoretical debate. Our analysis supports several conclusions about racialidentity in general, and mixed-race identity in particular. One set of conclusions provides strong supportfor the claim that race is socially constructed. We find that adolescent racial identities are fluid, with morethan 10 percent of youth expressing different racial identities between the school and home interviews.We further show that there are inconsistencies not only across multiple indicators of expressed racialidentity, but also between indicators of expressed and external racial identity. Youth who identify withAmerican Indians, Asians, or one of the three mixed-race groups are significantly less likely to have theirexpressed identities confirmed by interviewers than are those who identify as white or black.

In addition to establishing that racial identity is not a fixed characteristic of individuals, ouranalysis supports a second set of conclusions about how race is socially constructed. We provide clearevidence of contextual effects on racial identity. When forced to choose a single-race identity, theresponses of white/black and white/American Indian youth are sensitive to the racial compositions of theirneighborhood, state, and region. We further find a relationship between perceived ancestry and racialidentity. When asked to provide racial identities for respondents, interviewers’ selections are affected byhow the respondents identify themselves. Additionally, our work provides support for the hypothesis thatrace is socially constructed in a dialectical process (Cooley 1902; Nagel 1994). As youth age they areincreasingly confronted with the pure race and one-drop ideologies that are central to the folk perspectiveon race. In response, older youth are less likely to identify as mixed race, and among youth who identifyas white and black, those who are older are more likely to express a constrained racial identity that agreeswith societal expectations.

Third, our work supports conclusions about the role of parents in the social construction of theirchild’s race. First, we observe that being either the product of an interracial union, or having at least onebiological parent who reports being mixed race, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition forexpressing a mixed-race identity. While we know that having parents from different racial groups is not asufficient condition for expressing a mixed-race identity (Davis 1991), both academic work and the folkperspective operate under the assumption that being the product of an interracial union is a necessary

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condition for being mixed race (Eschbach 1995; Harrison and Bennett 1995; Twine 1997; Xie andGoyette 1998). However, in Add Health about 6 percent of youth who are known to have biologicalparents from the same single-race group report being mixed-race. Second, we show that youth are morelikely to express a mixed-race identity when they do not live with both biological parents. Again, thissuggests that defining mixed-race youth on the basis of the racial identities of their coresidential parentsleads to an underestimate of the size of this population, and may produce biased estimates of itscharacteristics. Third, we show that how youth identify themselves depends on whether their parents arepresent. When interviewed with family members present, white/black youth are more likely to say thattheir “best” race is black, while white/American Indian youth are more likely to express a stronger bondwith their white ancestry.

While it may be tempting to dismiss youth’s claims of mixed-race identity when they conflictwith parents’ expressed identities or are only uttered in anonymous settings, we maintain that doing soinvolves an implicit, dubious assumption that parents provide full reporting of their own racial identity. Itis likely that some parents who express a monoracial identity either know or suspect that they haveancestors from multiple racial groups. They may pass this information along to their children; yet believethat they are not sufficiently mixed to justify expressing a mixed-race identity. However, if childrenreclaim ties to these forgotten ancestors, they might well claim a mixed-race identity for themselves. Infact, we suspect that this chain of events has been occurring with increasing frequency in recent decades.The past thirty years have seen a fundamental shift in racial regimes in the United States (Daniel 1996;Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994). Whereas the parents in Add Health came of age at a time when theone-drop rule still dominated thinking about race, their children are being raised in a society that espousesthe virtues of diversity, and has made real efforts to support mixed-race identity (Graham 1996; Office ofManagement and Budget 1997). Using parents’ race to define the mixed-race adolescent populationignores the fact that both parents’ and children’s racial identities are socially constructed. There is nobasis for arguing that the parent is “right” and the child is “wrong”.

Our final conclusions pertain to the distinctiveness of mixed-race populations. We show thatprocesses of racial identification differ dramatically between white/black, white/American Indian, andwhite/Asian youth. White/black youth continue to have their racial identities constrained by the one-droprule, although there is clear evidence that conformity to this rule is not as widespread as previouslythought (Davis 1991). Only 75 percent of youth who identify at home as white and black say that black isthe single race that best describes them, and 17 percent of white/black youth are identified as white byinterviewers. However, it remains clear that this is the group that is viewed as posing the greatest threat tothe racial hierarchy. They are less likely than other mixed-race youth to be seen as white, and the leastlikely to have their claims of nonwhite identity challenged.

In contrast to white/black youth, white/American Indian youth emerge as the largest, but leastcommitted mixed-race population. Both of these characteristics of the white/American Indian populationare likely due to the peculiar place of American Indians in the folk perspective on race. Despite the factthat large numbers of American Indians live on reservations plagued by extreme levels of poverty,joblessness, and substance abuse (Snipp 1989), American Indian identity continues to be viewedpositively (Deloria 1998; Nagel 1995). For whites, reclaiming or inventing an American Indian identity isa way to participate in the wave of multiculturalism that is sweeping the United States. However, becauseso many whites who adopt an American Indian identity have little, if any, connection with AmericanIndian culture, they often treat this identity as if it were just another ethnic identity; that is, symbolic andcostless (Nagel 1995; Waters 1990). As a result, youth who claim a white/American Indian identity in onecontext are highly likely to express a white identity in another context, few white/American Indianadolescents choose American Indian as the race that best describes them, and the vast majority ofwhite/American Indian youth are identified as white by interviewers.

Yet a third pattern emerges for youth who identify as white and Asian. Our findings confirm andextend Xie and Goyette’s (1998) conclusion that “the racial identification of biracial children with anAsian parent is, to a large extent, optional” (564). Not only is the identity of this group optional whenthey are identified by their parents, it is also optional when they identify themselves or are identified by a

15

stranger. When asked to choose a single-race identity, white/Asian adolescents are as likely to selectAsian as white. They are also unique among mixed-race groups in that agreement between their externalidentity and constrained expressed identity is independent of what they select as their “best” race. Thechoice afforded this group is likely due to the traditional American preoccupation with white and black;the relatively recent emergence of a prominent Asian American identity; and the contemporary perceptionthat Asians are educationally advanced, economically prosperous, and culturally refined (Bobo andZubrinsky 1996; Espiritu 1992; Wong 1980). Because white and Asian are each seen as viable identities,unlike American Indian, and because there is relatively little social distance between whites and Asians,unlike whites and blacks, white/Asian youth enjoy more choice in their racial identities than dowhite/black or white/American Indian adolescents.

Taken together, our conclusions make the critical point that not only are racial categories sociallyconstructed, but also the process of assigning people to racial categories is social. This means that there isnot a single mixed-race population. Instead, there are overlapping mixed-race populations whosemembership depends on what identity is measured—expressed or external—and the social context inwhich identity is assessed. This perspective argues against the standard assumption that race is sociallyconstructed but fixed. Rather, it calls for careful consideration of how race is measured in surveys, as wellas the relationship between the measurement of race and our understanding of racial differences.

Of course, our findings about the subjective nature of racial identity do not imply that race is nolonger an important determinant of life chances. As was noted long ago, if people define situations as realthen they can be real in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Thus, our next step will be toassess the consequences of race, and particularly mixed-race identity, under various definitions of race.Exploring how outcomes vary across racial populations, as well as how mixed-race groups compare totheir constituent monoracial populations will tell us a lot about the consequences of race, and whetherthese consequences are affected by how race is defined. It will also test claims about mixed-race peoplethat have dominated social science and popular discourse for generations, but largely escaped rigorousempirical scrutiny (Park 1928; Stonequist 1937). With the boom in the mixed-race population showing nosigns of slowing down, now is the time for social scientists to commit themselves to understanding thiselusive and misunderstood group.

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Figure 1. Interracial Family Tree

1st Generation White Black

2nd Generation White 1 2 Black

3rd Generation White 3 4 Black

4th Generation White 5 6 Black

5th Generation 7 8

Figure 2. Percentage of Youth Mixed Race under Various Definitions of Race.

6.6%

0.6%

2.3%

0.6%

3.6%

0.6%

1.6%

0.4%

4.8%

0.4% 0.2%

0.9%

0%

1%

2%

3%

4%

5%

6%

7%

8%

9%

10%

All Mixed Race White/Black White/American Indian White/Asian

School Race Home Race Parents Race

Table 1. Distribution of Adolescents by Racial Identities Given at Home and School.

All Not Mixed Mixed MissingSame single race in both contexts 86.2% 91.1% 34.2% 84.3%Different single races in each context 1.0% 0.6% 3.2% 1.3%Other at home only 0.6% 0.2% 4.8% 0.8%Other at school only 1.4% 1.2% 2.0% 1.5%Other in both contexts 0.3% 0.2% 2.3% 0.3%Multiracial at home, monoracial at school 1.9% 1.1% 19.2% 1.9%Monoracial at home, multiracial at school 4.8% 3.6% 13.8% 5.5%Same multiracial identity in both contexts 1.1% 0.2% 11.9% 1.5%Different multiracial identity in each context 0.5% 0.1% 7.2% 0.5%"Refused" in either context 2.2% 1.7% 1.5% 2.5%Total adolescents 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%

Unweighted N 11,531 4,695 269 6,567 Weighted percentage of all adolescents 100.0% 44.7% 2.2% 53.0%Note: Weighted data for nonhispanics with valid home and school race data.

By Parent Race

Table 2. Percentage Distribution of Selected School Races by Home Race.

Race at Home W B I A O WB WI WA

White 98.3 1.0 41.6 2.1 65.8 1.7 79.9 41.5 Black 0.0 95.5 8.1 0.3 7.6 17.6 - 0.4 Indian 0.0 0.1 24.5 0.0 - - 3.5 - Asian 0.0 0.2 - 88.0 6.0 - - 14.1 Other 0.1 0.4 1.0 6.5 16.7 15.4 - 2.6 White/Black 0.0 0.8 - - 1.7 62.8 0.3 - White/Indian 1.0 0.0 23.0 0.3 0.7 - 16.1 - White/Asian 0.1 - - 2.2 0.6 - - 35.1 White/Other 0.3 - - 0.0 - - - 5.6 Black/Indian - 1.3 0.6 - 0.4 - - - Black/Asian - 0.0 - 0.0 - - - - Black/Other - 0.3 - - - 0.2 - - Indian/Asian - - 1.4 - - - - - Indian/Other 0.1 - - - - - 0.1 - Asian/Other - - - 0.5 - - - 0.8 Multiracial 0.0 0.3 - 0.2 0.5 2.4 0.2 - Refuse 0.0 0.0 - - - - - - Weighted % of cases 68.6 15.6 1.4 4.1 1.7 0.6 2.3 0.6Unweighted N 6,523 2,657 135 961 171 103 211 91Note: Cells are weighted column percentages. Column labels are abbreviations for the racial groups shown in the row labels. So, "W" is "White", and "WA" is "White/Asian".

Race at School

Table 3. Percentage Distribution of Selected Home Races by Best Race: Add Health.

Best Race White/Black White/Indian White/Asian

White 17.1 85.9 47.4 Black 74.5 - - Indian - 14.1 - Asian - - 52.0 Other - - - Refused 1.8 - 0.1 Don't Know 6.7 - 0.4

Unweighted N 108 159 82Note: Cells are weighted column percentages. Best race is only asked if home race is multiracial.

Race at Home

Table 4. Logistic Regression of Best Race on Individual, Family, and Neighborhood Traits: Add Health.

Coeff Std Err Odds Coeff Std Err Odds Coeff Std Err Odds Coeff Std Err OddsRace: White/Indian 3.49 *** 0.49 32.78 White/Asian 1.91 *** 0.58 6.76Female 0.67 * 0.38 1.96 -0.87 0.80 0.42 1.17 * 0.65 3.22 0.50 0.75 1.65Age 16 or older 0.16 0.40 1.18 -1.55 ** 0.75 0.21 0.82 0.69 2.27 -0.90 0.85 0.41Region: Midwest 1.22 ** 0.59 3.38 0.72 0.87 2.06 1.87 * 0.96 6.50 0.65 1.18 1.92 South 0.78 0.58 2.19 -1.92 1.38 0.15 1.64 ** 0.83 5.15 -0.88 1.60 0.41 Northeast 0.72 0.67 2.06 -0.89 1.18 0.41 0.69 0.94 2.00 0.76 1.25 2.14Rural -0.60 0.53 0.55 -2.65 * 1.38 0.07 -0.65 0.67 0.52 -0.99 1.64 0.37Residential Parents' Education: Some College 0.51 0.55 1.66 1.46 * 0.88 4.31 -0.07 0.70 0.93 0.96 1.39 2.62 College Degree or More 0.21 0.50 1.23 -0.70 0.95 0.50 0.72 0.76 2.05 -0.50 1.26 0.60Family at Home Interview 0.68 0.43 1.97 -2.56 ** 1.05 0.08 1.46 * 0.87 4.33 1.36 1.04 3.91Tract Percent White 1.34 0.86 3.82 2.81 ** 1.43 16.64 0.36 1.58 1.43 1.52 1.75 4.56Constant -3.51 0.98 -4.28 *** 1.65 0.79 1.69 -0.09 1.46

Log Likelihood -142.71 -34.16 -52.09 -44.43Model X2 70.41 16.30 11.59 13.06Pseudo R2 0.33 0.27 0.17 0.19df 12 10 10 10N 326 96 151 79Note: Dependent variable equals "0" if best race is not "white", "1" if best race is "white". Weighted data for nonhispanics who identify as white/black, white/Indian, or white/Asian at home.*p<.10**p<.05***p<.01

White/Black White/Indian White/AsianAll Three Mixed-Race Groups

Table 5. Distribution of Selected Home Races by Best Race by Interviewer Perception of Race: Add Health.

Race at Home Best Race White Black Indian Asian Other Refuse Don't Know Total Unweighted N

White 99.9 0.1 - - - - - 100.0 7,059Black 0.1 99.8 0.1 - - - - 100.0 2,794Indian 14.7 0.7 84.3 0.3 - - - 100.0 71Asian 0.2 0.4 0.8 95.7 2.9 - - 100.0 968Other 26.6 6.2 - 14.4 52.7 - - 100.0 113

White/Black: 17.1 76.0 - - 5.1 0.9 0.9 100.0 108White 66.9 19.0 - - 14.1 - - 100.0 25Black 2.0 95.3 - - 2.5 0.1 - 100.0 73Refuse 54.0 - - - 1.8 44.2 - 100.0 3Don't Know 49.0 26.0 - - 11.8 - 13.3 100.0 7

White/Indian: 95.8 - 4.2 - - - - 100.0 159White 99.9 - 0.1 - - - - 100.0 136Indian 70.7 29.3 100.0 23

White/Asian: 54.5 - 0.1 45.2 0.1 - - 100.0 82White 81.8 - 0.3 17.8 0.2 - - 100.0 38Asian 30.0 - - 69.9 0.1 - - 100.0 42Refuse 100.0 - - - - - - 100.0 1Don't Know - - - 100.0 - - - 100.0 1

Weighted % of cases 1.7 0.5 0.2 0.2 0.0 97.4 0.0 100.0Unweighted N 7,298 2,885 73 1,000 95 2 1 11,354Note: Cells are weighted row percentages. Best race is only asked if home race is multiracial. Hispanics are excluded. Cells showing agreement between youth and interviewer assessments of racial identity are in boldface.

Interviewer Perception of Race