What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white?
In a recent paper I co-authored with Roland Fryer, Lisa Kahn, and Jorg Spenkuch, we look at data to try to answer that question. Here is what we find:
1) Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to those in which black children grow up: similar incomes, the father is much less likely to be around than in white households, etc.
2) In terms of academic performance, mixed-race kids fall in between blacks and whites.
3) Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average.
The really interesting result, though, is the next one.
4) There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.
We try to use economic theory to explain this set of facts. I can’t say we are entirely successful. If we had to pick an explanation that best fits the facts, it would be the old sociology model of mixed-race individuals as the “marginal man”: not part of either racial group and therefore torn by inner conflict. One reason this model is largely consistent with our facts is because it makes so few strong predictions that it is hard to falsify, which isn’t really fair to the competing models.
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“What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white?”. As a mixed race person myself I can tell you that it is absolutely nothing like the information written by Steven D. Levitt and his three co-authors. Growing up bi-racial is just like growing up white or growing up black – It varies from home to home and environment to environment.
I just want to know where they get their samples from? I’m mixed – I know a lot of mixed people – and we’re all college educated and grew up in nice loving households that were completely typical of suburbia….
I think the biggest plight for mixed-race children is the vastly inconsistent standards applied to them. Some places adhere to the “one drop rule”, while others subscribe to the more flexible “brown paper bag” test. If discrimination can’t be consistent, what does that say about the system! The government needs to get NIST involved to settle the issue and create a uniform standard as can all live separately with.
Technically, aren’t we all just the same race (human)? There’s no link between genotype and phenotype (as far as the conception of ‘race’ is concerned).
What standards are you using to define what ‘race’ someone is? Is it the arcane definition given by the supreme court (the one-drop rule)? Or is it some sort of tracing technique (family lineage, mother’s mitochondriatic DNA, or something else)? Whatever it is, there’s not clear-cut argument for who is of one ‘race’ and not of another.
Kudos goes to you when you acknowledge that the model that you have is too broad in scope to do any meaningful work (the ‘marginal man’ model). I think that revelation points to the heart of the problem with trying to do this type of analysis – it’s much easier to do with class because it delineates subjects in a binary fashion (either you have money/monetary assets or you don’t).
Also, asking the question “what’s it like” seems to lend itself to the methodological tool of ethnography (if that’s a firm enough tool, which is debatable). I don’t think that there’s ever going to be an answer about the question that you posed that will have a strong enough model/theory that explains it.
As the father of a biracial child, this is definately an interesting topic for me. I will read your article more in depth tonight. I did notice from a key word search that you didn’t appear to address grandparents at all in the paper. Grandparents are often an economic resource for parents, either directly through money, (or even just babysitting!) or indirectly though advice and/or social connections.
It isn’t a big leap to hypothesize that in many interracial relationships, one or both sets of grandparents were missing or refuse to provide the same level of direct and indirect assistance as would be provided to a same race couple. Is this something that could be quantified and studied in a future paper?
By “black”, do you mean the historically African-American community, or do you include parents from all of the various African and Caribbean immigrant communities?
By “white”, similarly, do you control for ethnicity, or are Mayflower descendants, Russian immigrants in Kew Gardens, and second-generation Armenian-Americans all lumped together?
Exactly #3, as a mixed raced person as well, i can’t say any of “the facts” represented my experience growing up in a mixed household either.
5) They own the future.