Acting White or Acting Black: Mixed-Race Adolescents' Identity and Behavior / Christopher Ruebeck, Susan Averett, Howard Bodenhorn.

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Ruebeck, Christopher

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w13793.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

J11 - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
J13 - Fertility • Family Planning • Child Care • Children • Youth
J15 - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants • Non-labor Discrimination
Z13 - Economic Sociology • Economic Anthropology • Language • Social and Economic Stratification

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Abstract: Although rates of interracial marriage are on the rise, we still know relatively little about the experiences of mixed-race adolescents. In this paper, we examine the identity and behavior of mixed-race (black and white) youth. We find that mixed-race youth adopt both types of behaviors -- those that can be empirically characterized as "black" and those that can be characterized as "white". When we combine both types of behavior, average mixed-race behavior is a combination that is neither white nor black, and the variance in mixed-race behavior is generally greater than the variance in behavior of monoracial adolescents, especially as compared to the black racial group. Adolescence is the time during which there is most pressure to establish an identity, and our results indicate that mixed-race youth are finding their own distinct identities, not necessarily "joining" either monoracial group, but in another sense joining both of them.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w13793 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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February 2008.

Although rates of interracial marriage are on the rise, we still know relatively little about the experiences of mixed-race adolescents. In this paper, we examine the identity and behavior of mixed-race (black and white) youth. We find that mixed-race youth adopt both types of behaviors -- those that can be empirically characterized as "black" and those that can be characterized as "white". When we combine both types of behavior, average mixed-race behavior is a combination that is neither white nor black, and the variance in mixed-race behavior is generally greater than the variance in behavior of monoracial adolescents, especially as compared to the black racial group. Adolescence is the time during which there is most pressure to establish an identity, and our results indicate that mixed-race youth are finding their own distinct identities, not necessarily "joining" either monoracial group, but in another sense joining both of them.