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Transcending Race? The Social Relations of Individuals with Black and White Parentage
One of the most severe and longstanding cleavages in American society has been the social divide between
blacks and whites. Starting under slavery and continuing under Jim Crow, the gulf between these two groups was so
great that not even individuals with both black and white parentage (hereafter referred to as black-whites) could
bridge the gap and find acceptance in both racial communities. Instead, black-whites during this time period were
socially, and sometimes even legally, incorporated into the black populace under the pretext of the one-drop rule.
Yet America’s racial structure, composition, and attitudes have changed dramatically in the past five
decades. First, the Civil Rights movement started to dismantle some of the mechanisms that had long been forcing
whites into one society and blacks (and black-whites) into another. Second
,
revisions in U.S. immigration law
caused America to transform from a society composed primarily of blacks and whites to one comprised of blacks,
whites, Asians, and Hispanics. While census records indicate that from 1900 to 1960 about 99 percent of Americans
were either white or black, by 2000 only 81 percent of Americans chose only white or only black to describe
themselves racially and ethnically (Grieco and Cassidy, 2001; Hobbs and Stoops, 2002).
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Third, changes in U.S.
census forms suggest that Americans are more willing to recognize individuals’ multiple racial backgrounds and that
the pressure on multiracials to assume membership in a single race group is waning.
Despite these dramatic changes surprisingly little is known about black-whites’ current social relations.
This article uses descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis of National Study of College Experience
(NSCE) data to rectify this absence in the literature and answer three important questions. First, what are black-
whites’ relations to those groups with whom they share racial roots, specifically blacks and whites? Second, what
are black-whites’ interactions with those groups with whom they have no racial or ethnic ties, expressly Asians and
Hispanics? And third, do the associations of black-whites differ from those of individuals who have only one racial
or ethnic heritage (namely monoheritage blacks, monoheritage whites, monoheritage Asians, and monoheritage
Hispanics), and if so, how?
Throughout this chapter I use the term “monoheritage” to refer to individuals who belong to the same
single racial or ethnic category as both of their parents. This term has several advantages over the term
“monoracial” (see Stephan, 1992). Most importantly, the term “monoheritage” acknowledges that race is socially
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This figure of 81 percent includes only non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks who selected only one racial
category.
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Convention