Primary Submission Category: Race/Ethnicity
Improving federal racial/ethnic categorization standards: reflections from critical Multiracial theory
Authors: Tracy Lam-Hine
Presenting Author: Tracy Lam-Hine*
Recent research shows how racism “gets under the skin” and produces health disparities, but largely focuses on pathways relevant to monoracial populations. Multiracial people suffer high prevalence of asthma, depression, and childhood adversity, and face unique social experiences (e.g. complex racial identity development, scrutiny of their identities from others) which may influence health. We need better tools to study how these patterns relate. The US Chief Statistician’s Office (CSO) recently proposed new race/ethnicity data categorization (RDC) standards, providing a rare chance to shape future racial equity research and policy. However, the new one-question format is still overly simplistic, and fails to accurately represent much of the diverse and growing Multiracial population. The one-drop rule historically determined RDC of Black Multiracial Americans; many, such as Barack Obama (BO), still identify primarily as Black. However, Mariah Carey (MC), who is similarly Biracial Black and White, identifies as Mixed and is often mistaken as White due to her light skin. Despite likely having very different racial experiences, they are coded the same by CSO standards, which most closely measure ancestry. Race, as a corporeal marker of relative systemic privilege, might be better captured in a second question asking respondents what “street race” strangers assume they are (Black for BO, White for MC). A third question could ask those selecting multiple ancestries if they identify primarily as Multiracial (no for BO, yes for MC), which could help us understand Multiracial identities’ role in shaping the effects of complex racial experiences. This separate question format would not prevent disaggregation by Multiracial ancestry, a concern with previous calls for a catchall Multiracial category in CSO standards. This session will explore why expanding RDC to include these questions can help the CSO meet its stated goal of better characterizing the Multiracial population.