Multiracial identities, single race history: Contemporary consequences of historical race and marriage laws for racial classification.

This work interrogates the role of the law as an "actor" in the spatial patterning of racial classification. Laws governing racial intermarriage represent key ways that rigid distinctions between groups were codified. Critically, there is a great deal of state variation in these laws. We draw on a unique data set that combines samples from the 1990 and 2000 Census (5 percent IPUMS) and the 2009-2011 estimates from the American Community Survey with information on state-specific legal bans against intermarriage. Results from multilevel logistic and multinomial analyses indicate that a past of legal regulation is associated with a lower likelihood of a "mixed" classification for the offspring of black-white interracial unions, particularly in the 2009-11 period. Our results provide evidence that place-specific institutional legacies are imprinted on the classification choices made even in the midst of expanding options.

Single mother families and employment, race, and poverty in changing economic times.

Using American Community Survey data from 2001, 2005, and 2010, this paper assesses the relationships between employment, race, and poverty for households headed by single women across different economic periods. While poverty rates rose dramatically among single-mother families between 2001 and 2010, surprisingly many racial disparities in poverty narrowed by the end of the decade. This was due to a greater increase in poverty among whites, although gaps between whites and Blacks, whites and Hispanics, and whites and American Indians remained quite large in 2010. All employment statuses were at higher risk of poverty in 2010 than 2001 and the risk increased most sharply for those employed part-time, the unemployed, and those not in the labor force. Given the concurrent increase in part-time employment and unemployment between 2000 and 2010, findings paint a bleak picture of the toll the last decade has had on the well being of single-mother families.

Is discrimination an equal opportunity risk?: racial experiences, socioeconomic status, and health status among black and white adults.

Using the 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we explore the relationship between racial awareness, perceived discrimination, and self-rated health among black (n = 5,902) and white (n = 28,451) adults. We find that adjusting for group differences in racial awareness and discrimination, in addition to socioeconomic status, explains the black-white gap in self-rated health. However, logistic regression models also find evidence for differential vulnerability among black and whites adults, based on socioeconomic status. While both groups are equally harmed by emotional and/or physical reactions to race-based treatment, the negative consequences of discriminatory experiences for black adults are exacerbated by their poorer socioeconomic standing. In contrast, the association between racial awareness and self-rated health is more sensitive to socioeconomic standing among whites. Poorer health is more likely to occur among whites when they reflect at least daily on their own racial status-but only when it happens in tandem with mid-range educational achievement, or among homemakers.

Does multiracial matter? A study of racial disparities in self-rated health.

How do self-identified multiracial adults fit into documented patterns of racial health disparities? We assess whether the health status of adults who view themselves as multiracial is distinctive from that of adults who maintain a single-race identity, by using a seven-year (2001-2007) pooled sample of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). We explore racial differences in self-rated health between whites and several single and multiracial adults with binary logistic regression analyses and investigate whether placing these groups into a self-reported "best race" category alters patterns of health disparities. We propose four hypotheses that predict how the self-rated health status of specific multiracial groups compares with their respective component single-race counterparts, and we find substantial complexity in that no one explanatory model applies to all multiracial combinations. We also find that placing multiracial groups into a single "best race" category likely obscures the pattern of health disparities for selected groups because some multiracial adults (e.g., American Indians) tend to identify with single-race groups whose health experience they do not share.