Why compare multiracial groups?

This chapter describes the income and education profiles of the 10 largest multiracial groups in the US. Our goal is to better understand how these groups are positioned within the racial inequality system in the US. Racial inequality and discrimination is long-established in the US, with White people experiencing significantly more privileged positions along many different axes (e.g., educational, occupational, income, health, etc) than Black people and Native Americans. Some have argued, however, that as we become an increasingly multiracial society, some of the ways in which racial inequality is organized might change (e.g., Yancey, 2003; Bonilla-Silva, 2004; O’Brien, 2008; Lee and Bean, 2010), and the rapidly growing multiracial groups (along with Latino/as and Asians, rapidly growing immigrant groups) might be at the forefront of these changes because their position in the system of racial inequality may be shifting (as discussed by Quinones-Rosado in Chapter Three and Strmic-Pawl and Brunsma in Chapter Eleven).

What kinds of outcomes might we predict for groups of individuals who identify with more than one race? One prediction might be that because multiracial individuals have family or ancestral connections to more than one racial group, and these racial groups have different average socio-economic characteristics, multiracial groups will fall (on average) in between the characteristics of those two specific racial groups. These many group-specific differences may result in multiracial groups experiencing different kinds of oppression and/or privilege, and therefore result in their occupying different positions in the US “racial hierarchy.” This assumes, however, that there are no other forces affecting their outcomes. If, in fact, multiracial groups face more or less discrimination than single-race groups, their outcomes may not be a simple averaging of the single-race group outcomes. One goal here, then, is to gain some leverage on the question of whether the outcomes of multiracial groups appear to be shaped by the specific histories and outcomes of their single-race origin groups, or whether multiracial groups also share some commonalities (because of their shared ties to multiple racial groups) that distinguish them from groups who only claim a single racial background. Also, all of these groups are spread unevenly across the US, and the experiences of these groups might depend heavily on the region in which they live and the particular history of that area.