Abstract
Fans of Peter Blau’s macrostructural theory of intergroup relations will find Rachel Butts’s Structural Influence on Biracial Identification a fascinating read. Observing that past research has used interracial marriage as an indicator of racial distance, Butts uses 2010 U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS) data from the 363 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the continental United States to test whether the same structural factors that have been found to influence interracial marriage (segregation, equality in educational attainment, relative group size, percent foreign-born, and geographic region) also influence biracial identification. She examines Black/White, Asian/White, and Black/Asian populations and finds that macrostructural variables are strongly correlated with city-level incidence of biracial identification. Bivariate analyses and multiple regression show that the variables explain significant amounts of the variation in identification for all three populations but are especially robust for the Black/White population.
Examining differences between biracial populations reveals that the direction of macrostructural influence can vary. Regarding biracial Asians, for instance, the percent of Asians that are foreign-born in an MSA is negatively related to Asian/White identification but positively related to Asian/Black. The book concludes by enumerating its contributions as the author sees them, which taken as a whole are that, one, the book extends Blau’s theory beyond marriage and beyond Black and White; and two, it shows the value of using biracial identification versus interracial marriage to study racial distance. While the analyses do innovatively extend Blau’s theory and have strong explanatory power statistically, the methodological choice to retain data from minors as well as other shortcomings undermine the substantive value claim.
Structural Influence proposes that self-identification (p. 10) is a “sharper, and more salient indicator of integration” than interracial marriage (p. 15); and yet despite the well-known demographic fact that about half the biracial population are minors, and thus do not fill out their Census form for themselves, Butts included minors in her data. She claims “that the way [biracial] minors are identified by guardians is closely related to the way those minors identify themselves at the time of enumeration and how they will identify themselves as adults” (p. 46); however, this justification is problematic in two ways. First, Butts interprets “closely related” identifications as wholly different. For example, one could argue that Black and Black/White identifications are “closely related”; yet in Butts’s analyses, the former is considered evidence of continued distance between the two races while the latter is evidence of racial integration. Given Butts’s interpretations, exact self-identification data is vital.
Second, Butts cites three sociological studies that were published about two decades ago to support her choice to retain minors’ data. Recent research, however, especially qualitative work, has cast doubt on the idea that guardians’ racialized view of their child matches the child’s self-identification and on the idea that this identification is constant from childhood to adulthood. Thus, the book more specifically shows that the same macrostructural factors that influence interracial marriage also influence adult biracial identification AND influence monoracial people to identify their children as biracial. This second finding is not unimportant, but the value added of measuring racial distance with biracial identification instead of interracial marriage is not clear if the former is operationalized in part as the choices of the same people involved in the latter.
The lack of engagement with qualitative research that is evidenced by the uncritical inclusion of minors’ data is striking given that Butts mentions “decades of qualitative research” (p. 90) that “add tremendous value to the discipline” (p. 96). She also acknowledges “a multitude of rich, smaller sample size studies” (p. 99) while claiming she will “fold in qualitative findings from racial identity scholars” (p. 115). Yet the book lacks substantive engagement with the few qualitative works that are cited. Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s typology of Black/White biracial identification, as put forth in her 2008 book with David Brunsma, is briefly summarized and then never discussed again. Regarding Black/Asians, one qualitative book and one news report are quoted passingly but not engaged with in any deeper way. Hephzibah v. strmic-pawl’s 2016 book Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials (Lexington Books) is not acknowledged at all.
Tenuous assumptions and lack of engagement with the literature are not the only elements of Structural Influence that make it a frustrating read for non-Blauians. The writing style is also less than ideal, especially for a book aspiring to contribute to “race bodies of scholarship” (p. 12). First, the specter of biological essentialism is haunting when Butts writes that a biracial person “may or may not be composed of 50 percent DNA of one group and 50 percent of the other” (p. 17). Second, hypodescent framing pervades the writing as the first two analyses are described as examining Blacks and Asians who “report identification with” Whites (p. 36). This leaves unchallenged the view that biracials with White heritage are, foremost, members of their racial minority population. Third, the book reads with a subtext of anti-blackness in characterizing Black/White biracials’ singular Black identification as resulting from social “constraints” that limit biracials’ “mobility” and “continue to prohibit Blacks from transcending Black categorization” (p. 62). The possibility that biracials may mark or be marked as singular Black for reasons other than inability to access whiteness is foreclosed. Last, the text itself is incredibly repetitive. Within any given chapter, exact sentences often appear multiple times. Regarding the analytic chapters, one can hold all three of them open from their beginning and flip page-by-page observing that, but for their biracial population of focus, they have practically verbatim sentences, paragraphs, and sub-sections.
As a whole, Structural Influence extends Blau’s theory and presents “a new way to quantify the broader concept of structural social distance between racial groups” (p. 3). Butts’s analyses show that the data and variables traditionally used to empirically test racial distance when it is operationalized as interracial marriage also work for other operationalizations as well as work with two minority groups. Her models have high explanatory power statistically, but substantively they miss the mark. In addition to problematically conflating parents’ ascription with biracial minors’ self-identification, she also never explains how her “analytic design will help inform policy protecting any racial group experiencing discrimination, hate crimes, and everything in between” (pp. 15, 125). She mentions the legacy of slavery and contemporary police brutality against Black Americans (pp. 4, 44, 91, 119) and the legacy of World War II plus COVID-19 era hate crimes against Asian Americans (pp. 75, 91, 95, 120) but gives no indication of how measuring racial distance with biracial identification will lead to new protective policies.
For this reason, the main contribution of the book is methodological. Research Methods instructors can use a chapter to demonstrate how to innovatively operationalize the tenets of a theory and test them. Critical Research Methods instructors can also use her methodological decision to retain minors’ data to spark classroom discussions about how researchers’ choices influence outcomes. Finally, the Methodological Appendix as well as Chapters One and Two contain detailed explanations of basic statistics (e.g., when to use Chi-square, the standard regression model equation, the history of OLS, etc.) plus information about the methodology behind the U.S. Census and ACS, all of which would be useful in Methods and Statistics classes.