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~ Chapter 7 ~ Who Is Multiracial? The Cultural Reproduction of the One-Drop Rule As noted earlier, the 2000 census allowed Americans to mark “one or more” races to indicate their racial identification. This landmark change in the way the census has measured race was significant not only because it represented official recognition of racial mixing in the United States but also because it validated the view that racial categories are no longer strictly bounded and mutually exclusive (DaCosta 2000; Farley 2002; Hirschman, Alba, and Farley 2000; Hollinger 2003; Morning 2000; Waters 2000; Williams 2006). This was a momentous step, for the United States has historically denied the reality of racial mixture and instead adhered to the view expressed by Madison Grant (1916, 16), a well-known eugenicist and “scientific racist,” who proclaimed in the early twentieth century, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” In 2000, 7.3 million Americans—one in every forty, or 2.6 percent of the population—identified multiracially (Ruggles et al. 2009). In 2007 the figures were 6.5 million, or 2.2 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). As we noted in chapter 3, multiracial reporting varies widely by group, with blacks exhibiting the lowest rate among all nonwhite groups. In fact, their rate of multiracial reporting is much lower than those among Asians and Latinos, even after controlling for differences in age, education, nativity, gender, and region of the United States (Tafoya, Johnson, and Hill 2005). It is particularly puzzling, given that the Census Bureau estimates that at least three quarters (and very likely 90 percent) of the black population in the United States is ancestrally multiracial, that just 5.8 percent chose to identify as multiracial in 2008 (Ruggles et al. 2009). Clearly, most African Americans do not identify themselves strictly on the basis of their genealogy. Instead, most rely on the social construction of racial status and, in particular, the legacy of the one-drop rule of hypodescent , whereby anyone with as little as one thirty-second black ancestry or any traceable amount of black blood is categorized as racially black (Davis 2004; Haney-Lopez 1996; Nobles 2000). The relatively higher rates of multiracial reporting among Asians and Latinos suggests that the absence of the one-drop rule of hypodescent for these groups leaves them with more options to choose from among various ethnoracial identities (Farley 2004; Harris and Sim 2002; Stephan and Stephan 1989; Xie and Goyette 1997). In this chapter we use the data we collected from the forty-six in-depth interviews we conducted with multiracial adults to examine some of the mechanisms and processes that lead to different rates of multiracial reporting by different ethnoracial groups. Two broad research questions guide the analyses that follow. First, how do we explain the different rates of multiracial reporting among Asians, Latinos, and blacks? Second, in the absence of the legal implementation of the one-drop rule of hypodescent, what cultural and institutional mechanisms may now be in place to effectively keep the rate of black multiracial reporting relatively low and, conversely, the rate of black monoracial reporting unexpectedly high? The Cultural Reproduction of the One-Drop Rule We found that in the absence of the legal invocation of the one-drop rule of hypodescent, ethnoracial identification is still highly contextualized and governed by cultural parameters (Moran 2001). Culturally and institutionally embedded practices such as external attributions of identity and interactions within institutional contexts, such as schools and the criminal-justice system, continue to operate effectively to constrain the multiracial identities of blacks in the United States and keep the likelihood of their multiracial identification relatively low, especially compared to that of Asians and Latinos. In fact, cultural and institutional factors operate in the opposite direction for multiracial Asians and Latinos. Ethnic organizations and networks often exclude multiracials from their circles, consequently pulling Asians and Latinos with multiracial backgrounds away from choosing monoracial Asian and Latino identities and pushing them instead in the direction of adopting multiracial, white, or American identities. External Ascription From our interviews we found that multiracial Asians and Latinos have much more flexibility in their choice of racial and ethnic identities than multiracial blacks, in large part because of the sheer...

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