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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ruebeck, Christopher S.

Contributor:

Averett, Susan.

Bodenhorn, Howard.

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13793.

NBER working paper series no. w13793

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Acting White or Acting Black

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

February 2008.

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