Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

From Appearance to Identity: How Census Data Collection Changed Race in America

race-in-america

Publicizing the release of the 1940 U.S. census data, LIFE magazine released photographs of census enumerators collecting data from household members. Yep, census enumerators. For almost 200 years the U.S. counted people and recorded information about them in person by sending out a representative of the U.S. government to evaluate them directly. By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race. Before the shift, census enumerators categorized people into racial groups based on their ... Read More

The Great White Hoax

Chael-Sonnen

Chael Sonnen spent most of his fighting career as a marginally above average fighter with a bombastic personality and tragicomic penchant for losing big fights in the most embarrassing fashion possible. However, thanks to a depleted pool of contenders in the UFC’s middleweight division and some well-timed wins, he earned a shot at reigning champion and pound-for-pound kingpin Anderson Silva that was scheduled for August of 2010. What followed was straight out of a certain political strategist’s playbook. In the lead up to the fight, Sonnen claimed that Portuguese, Silva’s native ... Read More

It Gets Better, Y’all

paisley-1

A man in a cowboy hat stands in a field, next to a tractor, guitar in hand. The hat is white and the man is white and the tractor is red. This is the music video for one of the most popular songs in America right now, a song that name-checks Billy Graham, sweet tea, NASCAR, and biscuits with gravy. For good measure, the hit single also quotes generously from "Dixie," the unofficial Confederate anthem once performed by blackface minstrels, in which a freed slave sings longingly about the plantation of his birth. For pop-country listeners, this song has been on heavy rotation during a ... Read More

The Benefits of Interracial Roommates

Is success in college influenced by your roommate’s race? Recently published research suggests it is, at least for some minority students. A study of 159 freshmen enrolled at a predominantly white, urban university in the Southern U.S. found minority students who were randomly assigned a white roommate “reported a greater sense of belonging, and received a higher GPA than minority students randomly assigned to a minority roommate.” There was no similar effect for white students. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Natalie Shook of West Virginia ... Read More

Are Evaluators Afraid To Criticize Minority Students?

White evaluators may go easier on minority students for fear of appearing racist, according to a new study. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia gave a group of white undergraduate students essays that were identified as being written by white or minority high school students. Though the essays were all of similar quality, the undergraduate evaluators gave fewer negative critiques and higher grades to minority students than to white students. To determine the cause of the differing critiques the evaluators were given a questionnaire where they were asked to rank the ... Read More

Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World

Defining racial identity in the United States has always been a fraught enterprise, involving shifting intersections of law, custom, class, ancestry and choice. Physical appearance and money have mattered, but so have family history and community attitudes — and not always in the ways we might suspect. Two intriguing new books — Daniel J. Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White and Julie Winch’s The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America — underline the fluidity of racial categories over nearly three ... Read More

Could More Interracial Marriages Cure Inequality?

True to its name, GOOD magazine happily reports that Americans of differing races are intermarrying more than ever and "that it's a clear indication that attitudes and behaviors are shifting with the times." In the middle of a colorful infographic on GOOD's website is an illustration of a black groom and white bride. Before we pat ourselves on the back for our open-mindedness about race, comparatively few blacks and whites rush hand in hand to the altar. Instead, it remains the least common type of interracial union. Asians, it turns out, are most open to marrying whites. Sociologist ... Read More

Why Whites Avoid Movies With Black Actors

In terms of box-office grosses, this is an extraordinary week for Hollywood: The No. 1 movie in America features a mixed-race cast. Granted, that movie is Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious action series. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris called these films “loud, ludicrous and visually incoherent,” but added that they are “the most progressive force in Hollywood today.” As Morris noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while ... Read More

Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?

It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of the segregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today. Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or ... Read More

Study Finds Racial Pay Disparities Among Nurses

When Sandra McGinnis and Jean Moore at the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the State University of New York at Albany looked at the results of a 2007 survey of close to 3,000 New York City hospital nurses, they didn’t expect to see such wide differences in pay. Conventional wisdom suggests in a world of inequality, nursing is less unequal, McGinnis said. “It’s pretty well known there are salary disparities by race and ethnicity in the wider work force, but because nursing has been a field that has these cyclical shortages, a lot of people have regarded it as some place where ... Read More