Race in the United States

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The United States is a racially diverse country. Modern issues of "race", as well as its impact in the political and economic development of the nation, have been examined by numerous historians and researchers across a variety of academic disciplines.

There are issues and controversies about the self-identification and classification of "race" within the country, and several trends have emerged in the demographic movements of ethnic groups as discovered by self-reports and genetic testing.

History

The immigrants to the New World came largely from widely separated regions of the Old World. In the Americas, the immigrant populations began to mix among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African American have some European ancestors—in one analysis of genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ~23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans (Parra et al. 1998).

Similarly, many people who identify as European American have some African or Native American ancestors, either through openly interracial marriages or through the gradual inclusion of people with mixed ancestry into the majority population. In a survey of college students who self-identified as white in a northeastern U.S. university, ~30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry.

In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans were classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person’s appearance, his fraction of known non-European ancestry, and his social circle. The criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During and after Reconstruction, after the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War, in the effort to restore white supremacy in the South, conservative whites began to classify anyone with "one drop" of "black blood", or known African ancestry, to be black. Such a legal definition was not put into law until the 20th century in most southern states, but many established racial segregation of facilities during the Jim Crow era, after white Democrats regained control of state legislatures in the South.

In the early 20th century, this notion of "invisible" blackness was made statutory in southern states and many beyond the former Confederacy. Amerindians continued to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called blood quantum) due in large part to efforts at land allotments under the Dawes Act in the late 19th century. Given the financial implications, standards had to be developed to define a person's membership in a tribe or qualification as Native American. For the past century or so, to be white, one had to have "pure" European ancestry.

U.S. real median household income by race and ethnicity from 1967 to 2008, with the intra-group differences illustrated through history

In the 20th century, efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into discrete categories generated many difficulties (Spickard 1992). By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of mixed-race children born in the United States have been classified as of a different race than one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories (such as "mulatto" and "octoroon") and "blood quantum" distinctions, which became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. In addition, a person's racial identity can change over time, and self-ascribed race can differ from assigned race (Kressin et al. 2003).

Until the 2000 census, Latinos were required to identify with a single race, despite the long history of mixing in Latin America. Partly as a result of the confusion generated by the distinction, 32.9% (U.S. census records) of Latino respondents in the 2000 census ignored the specified racial categories and checked "some other race". (Mays et al. 2003 claim a figure of 42%)

Racial demographics

Main article: Racial demographics of the United States

The United States is a diverse country racially. In 2006, the United States became the third nation in world history to reach 300 million people, behind China and India, each of which has over a billion people.

The growth of the Hispanic population through immigration and high birth rates is noted as a partial factor for the US’ population gains in the last quarter-century. The 2000 census also found Native Americans at their highest population, 4.5 million, since the U.S was founded in 1776.

Multiracial Americans and admixture

Further information: Multiracial American

Admixture in European-American population (Schriver et al. 2003, sample size n=187)

% European Admixture	Frequency
90-100	68%
80-89.9	22%
70-79.9	8%
60-69.9	< 1%
50-59.9	< 1%
40-49.9	< 1%
0-39.9	0

In a survey of college students who self-identified as 'white' in a northeastern U.S. university, around 30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry. Through DNA analysis, the study found an average of 0.7% African genetic admixture with a standard error of 0.9% and 3.2% Native American admixture with a standard error of 1.6%, in a sample of white Americans in State College, Pennsylvania. Most of the non-white admixture was concentrated in 30% of the sample, with African admixture ranging from 2-20% with an average of 2.3%.

In 1958 Robert Stuckert produced a statistical analysis using historical census data and immigration statistics. He concluded that the growth in the White population could not be attributed to births in the White population and immigration from Europe alone, but also from a significant contribution from the American Black population as well. He concluded that at the time, 21 percent of white Americans had some recent African (or African-American) ancestors. He also concluded that the majority of Americans of African descent were partly white and not entirely black.

More recently, many different DNA studies have shown that many African Americans have European admixture in their ancestry. Proportions of European admixture in African-American DNA have been found in studies to be 17% and between 10.6% and 22.5%. Another recent study found the average to be 21.2%, with a standard error of 1.2%.

The Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute notes that "although genetic analyses of large numbers of loci can produce estimates of the percentage of a person’s ancestors coming from various continental populations, these estimates may assume a false distinctiveness of the parental populations, since human groups have exchanged mates from local to continental scales throughout history."

Social definitions of race

See also: African American#Who is African American? and Definitions of whiteness in the United States

In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were considered to belong to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person’s appearance, his social circle (how he lived) and his fraction of known non-White ancestry.

The differences between how Native American and Black identities are defined today (blood quantum versus one-drop) have been based on different historical circumstances. According to the anthropologist Gerald Sider, such racial designations were a means to concentrate power, wealth, privilege and land in the hands of Whites in a society of White hegemony and privilege (Sider 1996; see also Fields 1990). The differences had little to do with biology and more to do with the history of racism and specific forms of White supremacy (the social, geopolitical and economic agendas of dominant Whites vis-à-vis subordinate Blacks and Native Americans). They related especially to the different social places which Blacks and Amerindians occupied in White-dominated 19th-century America. Sider suggests that the blood quantum definition of Native American identity enabled mixed-race Whites to acquire Amerindian lands during the allotment process, while the one-drop rule of Black identity enabled Whites to preserve their agricultural labor force in the South. The contrast emerged because, as peoples transported far from their land and kinship ties on another continent, Black labor was relatively easy to control, and they became reduced to valuable commodities as agricultural laborers. In contrast, Amerindian labor was more difficult to control; moreover, Amerindians occupied large territories that became valuable as agricultural lands, especially with the invention of new technologies such as railroads; thus, the blood quantum definition enhanced White acquisition of Amerindian lands in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny that subjected them to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.

The political economy of race had different consequences for the descendants of aboriginal Americans and African slaves. The 19th-century blood quantum rule meant that it was relatively easier for a person of mixed Euro-Amerindian ancestry to be accepted as White. The offspring of only a few generations of intermarriage between Amerindians and Whites likely would not have been considered Amerindian at all (at least not in a legal sense). Amerindians could have treaty rights to land, but because an individual with only one Amerindian great-grandparent no longer was classified as Amerindian, they lost any legal claim to Amerindian land. According to Sider's theory, Whites were more easily able to acquire Amerindian lands. Socially, the same individual who could be denied legal standing in a tribe because he was "too White" to claim property rights, might still have enough visually identifiable Amerindian ancestry to be considered as a "half-breed" or breed, and stigmatized.

On the other hand, the 20th-century one-drop rule made it relatively difficult for anyone of known Black ancestry to be accepted as White. The child of an African-American sharecropper and a White person was considered Black by the local community. Significantly in terms of the economics of sharecropping, such a person also would likely become a sharecropper as well, thus adding to the landholder or employer's labor force.

In short, this theory suggests that in a 20th-century economy that benefited from sharecropping, it was useful to have as many Blacks as possible. Conversely, in a 19th-century nation bent on westward expansion, it was advantageous to diminish the numbers of those who could claim title to Amerindian lands by defining them out of existence.

Although some scholars of the Jim Crow period agree that the 20th-century notion of invisible Blackness shifted the color line in the direction of paleness, and "expanded" the labor force in response to Southern Blacks' Great Migration to the North, others (such as the historians Joel Williamson, C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, and Stetson Kennedy) considered the one-drop rule a consequence of the need to define Whiteness as being pure, and justifying White-on-Black oppression. Over the centuries when Whites wielded power over both Blacks and Amerindians and believed in their inherent superiority over people of color, they created a social order of hypodescent, in which mixed-race children were assigned to the lower status groups. This also related to the 18th and 19th-century conditions of slavery. Generally, it was much more common for white men to take sexual advantage of black women slaves, rather than for white women to have relationships with ethnic African men, slave or free.

In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories (Gossett 1997). An example is the "one-drop rule" implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known African-American ancestor as black (Davis 2001). The decennial censuses conducted since 1790, after slavery was well established in the United States, created an incentive to define racial categories and fit people into those categories (Nobles 2000). In other countries in the Americas where mixing among groups was overtly more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance (Mörner 1967).

The term "Hispanic" as an ethnonym emerged in the 20th century with the rise of migration of laborers from Spanish-speaking countries of the western hemisphere to the United States; it includes people who may have been considered racially distinct (Black, White, Amerindian or other mixed groups) in their home countries. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". Even if such categories were earlier understood as racial categories, currently they have begun to represent ethno-linguistic categories (regardless of perceived race). Similarly, "Anglo" is now used to refer to non-Hispanic White Americans or non-Hispanic European Americans, most of whom speak the English language but are not necessarily of English descent.

Official race definitions in the United States

Main articles: Race and ethnicity in the United States Census and Race (EEO)

The United States government has provided definitions regarding race (see the main articles). Racial classification in the U.S. 2000 census and in employment reports for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was based solely on self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify and did not pre-suppose disjointedness. The category "Hispanic" is considered an ethnicity, rather than a race, by the U.S. Census. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. They change from one census to another, and the racial categories include both racial and national-origin groups.

In 2007 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the US Department of Labor finalized its update of the EEO-1 report format and guidelines to come into an effect on September 30, 2007. In particular, this update concerns the definitions of racial/ethnic categories, see Race (EEO).

Racism

Main article: Racism in the United States

Racism in the United States developed from the circumstances of its colonial past and the widespread use of slave labor, especially in the South. The country was dominated politically and economically by a colonial society of religiously and ethnically diverse Europeans who defined themselves against the Amerindians, who used land in a different way, and Africans, whom they imported as laborers and enslaved.

See also

• Race and crime in the United States
• Race and ethnicity in the United States Census
• Race and genetics: Admixture in the United States
• Refusal of interracial marriage in Louisiana

Backgrounds:

• African American
• Asian American
• European American
• Hispanic and Latino Americans
• Native American
• White American