Collaborative Research: The Mixed-Race Household in Residential Space: Neighborhood Context, Segregation, and Multiracial Identities, 1990-2000

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Marriage across racial lines, excluding unions between Latinos and non-Latinos of the same race, nationally accounted for 2.2 percent of marriages in 1992, up from 0.4 percent in 1960. Rates more than doubled in the remaining years of the 1990s to 5.2 percent in 2000. Against this backdrop, this project investigates the neighborhood geographies of mixed-race couples. The extensive literature on US urban residential segregation that investigates issues of neighborhood choice and constraint for members of racial and ethnic groups has yet to examine, theoretically or empirically, the residential choices of mixed-race partners. This project seeks to answer a number of basic theoretical and empirical questions. Do the processes that generate and sustain segregation, as we currently understand them, apply to mixed-race households? Do mixed-race families live in segregated or diverse neighborhoods? Do they live in neighborhoods dominated by a particular race/ethnic group? Does this depend on the race of the male partner or the female partner? Do the social class positions of the partners affect the couple's residential choices? These initial steps in the investigation of the residential geography of mixed-race households set the stage for us to address two derivative questions. How does the increase in mixed-race partnering affect levels of residential segregation in neighborhoods? It may be that the rise in mixed-race partnerships due to interracial contact outside neighborhoods (such as at college or work) drives down levels of residential segregation within neighborhoods. Do the residential choices of mixed-race couples have implications for the way they racially/ethnically identify their multiracial children? Residence in a neighborhood dominated by a single racial/ethnic group may encourage mixed-race couples to identify their children as members of that group. This project will investigate the racial/ethnic identification choices that mixed-race couples make for their multiracial children across an array of racially identified places.This project will provide the first glimpse of the neighborhood geographies of mixed-race households in both 1990 and 2000. The ability to investigate these geographies has been limited to date because publicly available census data provide no information on household structure at neighborhood scales. Recently released restricted access data from the long forms of the 1990 and 2000 Censuses provide such data, allowing us to advance significantly our understanding of racial segregation, urban social geographies, and the construction of racial identity in mixed-race families.