Tukufu Zuberi

Deracializing Social Statistics: Problems in the Quantification of Race

Race is usually defined as an individual attribute fixed at birth and is employed by researchers as a variable with potential for causing change in some other aspect of that same individual. When an individuals race can change (as in Brazil), race is not an attribute but a dynamic characteristic dependent on other social circumstances. In the United States, an individuals race cannot change and thus is considered an individual attribute. As such, social statisticians may have measured racial classification correctly. The major error is in how race has been interpreted. The author suggests a new language to express things that our current language handles inadequately. This new language attempts to increase the efficiency of communication about the statistical analysis of race.

How Do Migrants Fare in a Post-Apartheid South African Labor Market?

South African policies have historically emphasized employment as the reason for immigration. In post-apartheid South Africa, stories about how “immigrants take away our jobs” abound in the mass media, yet few empirical studies have been undertaken to examine the validity of this claim. This study looks at the relationship between migration status, nativity and labor force outcomes in the post-apartheid labor market. Our results suggest that migrants are more likely to participate in the labor force and to be gainfully employed than the indigenous population. Foreign migrants enjoy the highest labor force participation rates and employment rates in South Africa. South African-born internal migrants also have significantly higher labor force outcomes than do nonmigrants.

Racial classification and the modern census in South Africa, 1911-1996

Abstract The South African government has previously used racial classification as a tool in its official state policies to control its population. In this essay, we examine the role racial classification and stratification has played in South Africa’s modern censuses. We define the modern period as between 1911 and 1996. We show how racial identity is part of the collective identity in South Africa. Racial identity is part of the government’s sense of what it means to be a South African, and, the population transfigured and imagined in this racialised context is what appears as race. The modern South African census illustrates how important race can be in a political context.

The demography of difference: shifting trends of racial diversity and interracial marriage 1960–1990

Abstract Does a greater degree of racial diversity lead to greater interracial contact over time for all racial groups? The two prevailing theoretical models of interracial contact, assimilation and racial stratification, purport two opposing relationships between diversity and interracial contact. Using an index of racial diversity and Schoen’s [Modeling Multigroup Populations, Plenum Press, New York, 1988] Z index of intermarriage, we explore national, regional, and state-specific levels of racial diversity and White–non-White interracial marriage in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 using Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) census data, for four racial groups, to describe overall levels of interracial contact vis-a-vis opportunities for interracial contact. We find that increasing contact does not always coincide with increasing marriage. Blacks, and to a far greater degree, American Indians show increases in intermarriage within a context of greater racial diversity. Asians and Hispanic trends are far more variable. In support of the racial stratification model that places the social construction of race as primarily determining the possibilities of contact, we interpret these trends in light of the ways that race structures interactions over time.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Sociology: The Philadelphia Negro and Social Science

The author addresses how, as a scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois transcended disciplinary boundaries and genre by providing answers to questions of racial colonialism and enslavement, the role of theory in social change, and the role of race in the dehumanization of the African, to name only a few. Here, the author offers a critical review of Du Bois’s application of sociology to the study of the African diaspora in America in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. The article gives an overview of Du Bois’s sociological research as historical, statistical, demographic, and cultural in nature—the type of research that, Du Bois demanded, must lead to social action.

One Step Back in Understanding Racial Differences in Birth Weight

In recognition of the biological and social connections in demographic processes, demographers have integrated biological factors into their models of population variation. This new effort has tended to focus on the analysis of fertility and mortality. Edwin J.C.G. van den Oord and David C. Rowe’s article, “Racial Differences in Birth Health Risk: A Quantitative Genetic Approach,” published in the August 2000 issue of Demography, is part of this effort. These authors use race as a proxy for genetic variation, which subverts even the most positive attempts to understand the impact of genetic variation on demographic processes. The authors’ statistical results restate their anachronistic theory of race using latent variables that are not open to empirical testing. Although new data increase the opportunities for the examination of the relationship between biology and demographic processes researchers must be vigilant not to commit the errors of the past by misusing race as a variable.

Race, Methodology, and Social Construction in the Genomic Era:

DNA segments can be used to distinguish among individuals and populations, but such differentiation of the population is not consistent with any known system of racial classification. In this article we elaborate on this core idea and discuss how it should influence genetic and genomic research on health and prisons in the United States. For studies involving racial classification and inequality, we provide methodological recommendations for addressing both the structure of race and gene expression of individuals and groups.

Orphans in Three Sahelian Countries: Exploratory Analyses from Census Data.

Important investments in Africa have reduced slightly the levels child mortality but life expectancy still very low. The number of children without surviving biological parents is increasing and orphans are becoming an important social problem. Because Sahelian societies are mostly patriarchal, becoming fatherless or motherless will have different effects on the well being of the child. This paper examines the levels and trends of the survival status of the parents and then, living arrangements of orphans. We describe characteristics of these children with a special focus on education and economic activities. The paper uses the censuses from Chad, Niger and Senegal made available by the African Census Analysis Project (ACAP) held at University of Pennsylvania. These countries collected information on survival status of each biological parent to estimate adult mortality but the potential of this information for research on child well-being is rarely exploited.

Demography of Race and Ethnicity in South Africa

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a demographic profile of South Africa. First, we focus on the Cape because we suggest that the Cape experience has general implications for other settlements in South Africa such as Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State, and helps in understanding the emerging national context of racial classification in the census. Secondly, we turn to the use of Race in the efforts to conduct censuses by the Colonial administrators. These enumerations are different from the census, in that they were not as systematic, nor did they have the same authoritative mandate as censuses. Next, we turn our attention to how the system of racial classification developed in the Cape Colony was expanded and extended to other regions of South Africa. The colonial history provides a foundation for a discussion of race and ethnicity in the segregation period. Finally, we move to an examination of apartheid and post apartheid periods and provide an outlook of the future in post apartheid South Africa. We conclude by mentioning how these enumerations were related to European colonial domination and racial classification more generally and are associated the racial stratification system.

The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach About Human Difference

grappling with such matters, I was somewhat alienated and disheartened to find not a single citation of those who have laid the groundwork for studying these issues, from the masterworks of Lemert and Garfinkel noted above, to the groundbreaking and seminal studies of Goffman, Emerson, and Messinger (especially ‘‘The Micropolitics of Trouble’’), and Scheff, Retzinger, and Katz on shame; or just as vitally, scholars such as Spector and Kitsuse and Loseke on the construction of social problems, and Holstein, Miller, and Gubrium on social problems work. Sociologists familiar with these might regard Molé’s effort as an invitation to consider what is missed by the omission of such references, and how the book might be enhanced by their inclusion. By building on thinkers such as Foucault, Kulick, and the Comaroffs, Molé, an anthropologist, has come to basically the same arguments as have generations of sociologists. There is no good reason why such disciplinary and epistemological gaps might not be bridged.