Racial Identity is Fluid

David Byler at WP:

Many Americans assume race is a constant: something people are born into and that — like their birth date or country of origin — simply doesn’t change.

But for a surprising number of us, race is a fluid concept. Polling data show that roughly 8 percent of adults jumped from one racial category to another in recent years. And that has important political implications for the Republican Party.

The best data on race-switching comes from panel surveys conducted by academics. These studies — such as the General Social Survey, the American National Election Studies and the Cooperative Election Study — ask a representative sample of Americans about their views and identities and then contact them again four to eight years later to track how they have changed.

...

In recent elections, some voters changed their race and their vote at the same time.

For example, 59 percent of multiracial Trump converts — that is, mixed-race voters who passed on Mitt Romney in 2012 but voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — also switched their race to White. Among multiracial voters who didn’t support Trump or Romney, only 4 percent moved into the White category.

Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo at Slate:

Ricky and Lucy were considered one of the first interracial couples on television, even though Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky on I Love Lucy, came from a white Cuban family. Despite being white, television executives opposed his casting, saying the public wouldn’t go for a “Latin” as the husband of an “All-American girl.” It was only after Lucille Ball insisted that they reluctantly agreed.

His whiteness wasn’t enough for him to go unnoticed, but it did allow him to get as far as he did in show business in 1950s America. A CBS creative consultant on the I Love Lucy 50th Anniversary Special, Alex Abella, who is Cuban-born himself, said to Hispanic magazine in 2001, “If Desi were black or had black blood, he wouldn’t have had any success or been allowed on the air. Americans could accept him because—like it or not—he was white.”

Ethnicity and Married Birth Parents

 Data Tools 6. The Geography of Traditional Families in America Charles Murray American Enterprise Institute April 2023

The ethnic differences in the prevalence of traditional marriage are huge. Among the nearly five million children in the ACS from 2014 to 2021, these were the percentages of children living with married birth parents broken down by the child’s ethnicity: 

Child’s Ethnicity Married Birth Parents 

Asian ............................82% 

White ............................62%

 Other or Mixed ,,,,,,,,,,,,50% 

Latino ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,43%

 Black ............................23% 

Asian children and black children effectively live in different familial worlds. The difference in living situations between white and black children is less dramatic but still extremely large.

Catholicism Declining Among Hispanics

 

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  Recent studies suggest that religious affiliation is on the decline in the United States.

From Pew:

Seeing Immigration as a Threat

PRRI:

A majority of Americans (55%) say the growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens American society, while four in ten (40%) say the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values. Republicans (69%) are about twice as likely as independents (37%) and about four more times as likely as Democrats (17%) to say newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values. Though there is now a 52-percentage-point difference between Republicans and Democrats on this question, a little over a decade ago, in 2011, the difference was much lower, at 22 percentage points (Republicans 55% vs. Democrats 33%).

Among religious groups surveyed, white Christians are the most likely to think that newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values. This includes about two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (65%), a slim majority of white mainline Protestants (53%) and half of white Catholics (50%). By contrast, four in ten other Christians (40%) and about three in ten Hispanic Catholics (31%), Black Protestants (29%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (27%), and members of non-Christian religions (27%) also say immigrants are a threat to American society.[5]

White Americans (46%) are notably more likely than Hispanic Americans (31%), Americans of another race (31%), and Black Americans (28%) to think that newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values.[6] Furthermore, white Americans without a four-year college degree are notably more likely than those with a four-year college degree to hold this view (53% vs. 34%).

People’s views on this topic are significantly affected by whether they know people who are immigrants or are immigrants themselves. Documented immigrants and those who know someone who is a documented immigrant are less likely than those who do not know any documented immigrants to say newcomers threaten traditional American customs and values (36% vs. 49%). The same is true for those who do and don’t know any undocumented immigrants (33% vs. 43%).

Americans’ proximity to people of different races and ethnicities also has an impact on whether they think immigrants threaten American customs and values. About four in ten Americans who are close friends with or know someone of a different race (39%) say that immigrants threaten traditional American customs and values, compared with a slim majority of those who don’t know anyone of a different race or ethnicity (51%).

Answers to the threat question also correlate with media consumption. Those who most trust conservative television media (76%) or Fox News (74%) are significantly more likely than those whose most trusted news source is a non-television source (42%) or a mainstream television source (28%) to say that newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values.

Diverse Congress

Katherine Schaeffer at Pew:

A quarter of voting members of the U.S. Congress identify their race or ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic White, making the 118th Congress the most racially and ethnically diverse to date. This continues a long-running trend toward more racial and ethnic diversity on Capitol Hill: This is the seventh Congress to break the record set by the one before it.

Overall, 133 senators and representatives today identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian or Alaska Native, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Congressional Research Service. This number has nearly doubled in the two decades since the 108th Congress of 2003-05, which had 67 minority members.

Our analysis of the 118th Congress reflects the 534 voting members of Congress as of Jan. 3, 2023. Portuguese American members are not included in the Hispanic count.

The vast majority (80%) of racial and ethnic minority members in the new Congress are Democrats, while 20% are Republicans. This split is similar to the previous Congress, when 83% of non-White lawmakers were Democrats and 17% were Republicans.

Language Use in the US

 Sandy Dietrich and Erik Hernandez at the US Census Bureau:

The number of people in the United States who spoke a language other than English at home nearly tripled from 23.1 million (about 1 in 10) in 1980 to 67.8 million (almost 1 in 5) in 2019, according to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report.

At the same time, the number of people who spoke only English also increased, growing by approximately one-fourth from 187.2 million in 1980 to 241 million in 2019 (Figure 1).

The report, Language Use in the United States: 2019, uses American Community Survey (ACS) data to highlight trends and characteristics of the different languages spoken in the United States over the past four decades.

The Hispanic population is the largest minority group in the United States. So it is not surprising Spanish was the most common non-English language spoken in U.S. homes (62%) in 2019 – 12 times greater than the next four most common languages.

Black Mayors

Brakkton Booker at Politico:

When Karen Bass is sworn in as Los Angeles mayor next month, she’ll be making history in more ways than one.

Not only will she be the first woman to lead LA, Bass will complete a rare tetrafecta of sorts: Black mayors will be running the nation’s four largest cities, with the congresswoman joining Eric Adams of New York, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.

“Anytime we get a new mayor, it’s exciting,” Frank Scott, the Democratic mayor of Little Rock, Ark., said in a phone interview. “But to have another mayor, a Black woman, who’s going to lead one of our nation’s major cities? That’s a big deal.”

This marks the first time these major metropolises will simultaneously be led by African Americans — and it may be for just a brief period. The leadership acumen of big city mayors is being tested now in how they address issues ranging from upticks in crime, to a sagging economy and high inflation, to housing affordability and homelessness.

And this is all taking place as the cities undergo seismic demographic shifts. All four are “majority minority” cities and these Black mayors are governing municipalities where Latinos, not Black residents, make up the largest non-white ethnic group.

Hispanics accounted for more than half of the growth in the U.S. population, according to the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities have seen their Black populations shrink in recent years in something of a reversal of what happened in the 1970s. These new migration patterns are altering political dynamics as Latinos consolidate power.

Racial and Ethnic Coalitions in Major Cities

Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:

Democrats in cities across America are having trouble holding their coalitions together.

In Los Angeles, the battle is over power in the form of representation on the City Council; in San Francisco and New York, it’s over affordable housing and access to public schools; across the nation, it’s over tough versus tolerant criminal prosecution and lenient versus punitive approaches to homelessness.

These tensions are, in turn, aggravated by white gentrification and have one thing in common: limited or declining resources, with shuttered businesses no longer paying taxes evident on downtown streets. An absence of growth prevents elected officials from expanding benefits for some without paring them for others.

Political tensions between African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white communities in Los Angeles are now on full display as a result of the publication of a secretly taped conversation that exposed the crude, racist scheming of three Hispanic City Council officials and a Hispanic labor leader — who were, in the main, angling to enhance their power at the expense of Black competitors.

These zero-sum conflicts epitomize the problem for liberals struggling to sustain a viable political alliance encompassing core minority constituencies.

Racial Tension in Los Angeles

Racist comments by progressive Hispanic members of the city council have roiled Los Angeles.

Efrén Pérez, Alisson Ramos, Crystal Robertson and Bianca V. Vicuña at WP:

Some observers may dismiss this episode as simply a few biased people. Others might attribute the incident to some Latinos’ exposure to anti-Black ideologies in their home countries.

But our research finds that Latinos’ anti-Black prejudice has strong roots in the United States, which has been steeped in anti-Black racism since its founding. When immigrants arrive here, they and their U.S.-born children learn that however low they might be on the social scale, another group is despised more. A series of such groups, including the Irish, Italians and Poles, earned their identity as Americans by expressing anti-Black prejudice. These efforts have ranged from hurling racial epithets at African Americans to violently keeping Black families out of neighborhoods and schools.

Many Latinos — along with other communities of color — are repeating this same pattern, asserting their position in the American fabric by denigrating Black people. For example, the 2012 installment of the American National Election Study — widely considered a benchmark survey of U.S. politics — examined a large oversample of about 1,000 Latino adults. In that survey, more than half of Latino respondents agreed with statements used to measure anti-Black racism, including: “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as Whites.”

Race and Ethnicity in Los Angeles

Racist comments by progressive Hispanic members of the city council have roiled Los Angeles. Miriam Jordan at NYT:

“They just made public that their colonial minds have not changed,” said Odilia Romero, director and co-founder of Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo, or Indigenous Communities in Leadership.

People from native, pre-colonial communities in Latin America have frequently faced harassment in Los Angeles, a city that prides itself for being tolerant and diverse — and not just from white people.

“The assumption that if you are Latino and progressive, you don’t hold racist views, ignores the reality that racism is very deeply ingrained in Mexican and Latin American cultures,” said Gabriela Domenzain, a Mexican American who worked as a Hispanic community expert in both the Obama 2012 and O’Malley 2016 presidential campaigns.

Latin America is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse regions, and throughout its history, racial and ethnic groups have converged there — Indigenous people, white colonizers and Black people brought as slaves. Their mixing gave rise to a “browning” of Latin America, with people of different shades of skin depending on their heritage.

Many people are now of mixed ethnicity, but people with lighter skin have remained at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, while those with darker skin, whether Indigenous or Black, often tend to be poorer and to be shut out of elite social and political circles.

That unofficial caste system was exported to the United States, which has its own history of racial stratification and tensions. Among Latinos, who are all considered people of color, studies have found that those who are lighter-skinned are more likely to make economic strides than their darker-skinned brethren, like Black Cubans, Indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans.

“What you get is this convergence of colonial racism from Latin America recreated in communities in the U.S.,” said Lynn Stephen, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon.

Indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans typically are shorter and have darker skin than other Latinos, and their first language is often not Spanish. Prejudice against them is commonplace at workplaces in farm fields, in restaurants and even on construction sites, where subcontractors sometimes separate Indigenous crews from other Latinos on the same job to avoid conflict.

“We are regarded as dark, short people, brown people who are ugly and ignorant,” said Arcenio López, a former farmworker who is executive director of Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, an organization that advocates for Indigenous field workers in California.

“On top of being exploited by employers, Indigenous farmworkers suffer discrimination from co-workers,” he said.

Very Few Hispanics Use "Latinx"

 

In our NEW survey of US Latinos, we asked which term is preferred to describe the nation's Latino population -- Hispanic, Latino or Latinx? Or do they have no preference. Here is what we found. @pewidentity @pewresearch https://t.co/vQ2cOqn0tR pic.twitter.com/OHlLPEVatL

— Mark Hugo Lopez (@mhugolopez) September 29, 2022

Protestant Shift Among Hispanics

 Marina E. Franco at Axios:

The percentage of Latinos who identify as Protestant — evangelical and other Christian faiths — is expected to grow from about 25% today to 50% by 2030.

Why it matters: More Latinos are leaving Catholicism for Protestant churches, which is influencing the political landscape in the U.S.

By the numbers: Half of U.S. Hispanics identified as Roman Catholic and 15% as evangelical in 2020, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute.Two decades ago, those numbers were 53% and 8%, respectively.
An Axios-Ipsos Latino Poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo also found younger generations of Latinos are less likely to identify as Catholic.

The big picture: People who left the Roman Catholic Church are driving most of the Protestant growth among Latinos, studies show.The boom is also attributed to immigration to the U.S. from countries where evangelicalism is already strong, like Guatemala, according to Jonathan Calvillo, assistant professor at Emory University's School of Theology.

Sociologist Aida I. Ramos, dean of the College of Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences at John Brown University, interviewed Latinos who converted for an upcoming study. She says the most common reasons given for the switch are:They feel disconnected from the Catholic Church that they grew up with and the Protestant “style of worship can feel less confined” to them.

Protestant traditions offered them more community support.

What they’re saying: White non-Hispanic Protestants have often worked to convert Hispanics, Ramos says. But, increasingly, “Latinos are converting other Latinos.”“It's actually Latino congregations and congregants who are inviting their family members, inviting their friends, and are introducing the faith to other Latinos,” Ramos said.

Between the lines: Growing evangelicalism among U.S. Hispanic communities is one of the factors moving Latinos to the right on political issues.

Of note: Most Latino Protestants live in Texas, New Mexico and California counties near the border, with growing numbers in south Florida and in Washington state, data from the Public Religion Research Institute shows.

Polarization and Diversity

From a new CBS News survey:\

Americans overall are more likely to see the Republican Party as fighting for White people than for Black people — by more than two to one. In fact, more say the Republican Party fights against the interests of Black Americans than is neutral toward them. It's similarly true for views of the Republican Party's approach to Hispanic people, with more feeling it works against them, rather than for them, and by more than two to one, against LGBTQ people than for them. Americans do think the GOP fights more for people of faith than do Democrats.

Conversely, they see the Democratic Party as fighting for Black and Hispanic Americans more so than for White Americans.

Americans are more likely to believe the GOP fights more against the interests of women than for women, and women overall describe things this way.

Men, meanwhile, are much more likely to think the Democrats fight more for women than for men, but a majority of men think the Republican Party fights for them (and more so than for women).

Echoing some of these perceptions are big differences in how partisans within the parties approach the country's racial diversity — and each group's partisans tend to think they're not being treated fairly.

Big majorities of Democrats think immigrants make America better in the long run; a majority of Republicans say they make America worse.

Republicans are more likely to say White Americans suffer "a lot" of discrimination than they are to say Black Americans do.

Democrats see quite the opposite. And Democrats are more likely to say it's very important for political leaders to condemn White nationalism.

Republicans tend to see America's changing diversity as neither good nor bad, but those who take a position tend to say bad. Democrats (whose ranks are made up of more people of color) say it's a good thing.

 

Religion and Abortion Opinion

Survey Center on American Life:

.The Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old ruling that legalized the right to abortion in the U.S. But Americans consistently show support for legal abortion in at least some circumstances. A majority (56 percent) of the public says abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Approximately four in 10 (41 percent) say it should be illegal. Notably only one in 10 (11 percent) Americans say abortion should be illegal without any exception.

Views differ significantly across religious traditions, but few religious groups oppose the legal right to an abortion. White evangelical Protestants register the strongest opposition to legal abortion. Seventy-eight percent of White evangelical Protestants say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Only 20 percent say abortion should be legal. A majority (55 percent) of Hispanic Catholics also believe abortion should be illegal. In contrast, a majority of White Catholics (56 percent), White mainline Protestants (59 percent), and Black Protestants (65 percent) say abortion should be legal. No group more strongly supports the legal right to abortion than religiously unaffiliated Americans—86 percent say it should be legal in at least most cases.

Hispanic Population" 62.1 Million

 From Pew:

The U.S. Hispanic population reached 62.1 million in 2020, an increase of 23% over the previous decade that outpaced the nation’s 7% overall population growth. At the county level, growth played out unevenly, which resulted in the continued geographic spread of Hispanics. Numerical growth of Hispanics was largest in counties that already had significant Hispanic populations, but the growth rate was largest in counties with smaller Hispanic populations, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of decennial census data from 1980 to 2020.

Hispanic Party Identification

Frank Newport at Gallup:

Hispanic party identification for the full year 2021 was 56% Democrats/Democratic leaners and 26% Republicans/Republican leaners. This represents a 30-point Democratic margin. The trend line since 2011 shows some fluctuation in this gap over time, but no indication of a major or sustained shift. The 30-point Democratic advantage in party identification among Hispanic adults in 2021 is, in fact, greater than the 26-point Democratic margin in 2011. If there has been any change worth noting, it has been the modest decrease in the percentage of Hispanic people who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party since 2011-2014.

Hispanic Views of USA

 Mark Hugo Lopez and (CMC alum) Mohamad Moslimani at Pew:

For many Latinos, the United States offers a chance at a better life than the place their Latino ancestors came from in several ways. A strong majority say the U.S. provides more opportunities to get ahead than their ancestors’ place of origin. Majorities also say the U.S. has better conditions for raising kids, access to health care and treatment of the poor, according to a Pew Research Center national survey of 3,375 Latino adults conducted in March 2021.

Hispanics hold these positive views of the U.S. whether they were born in Puerto Rico, in another country, or in the 50 states or the District of Columbia.

However, Latinos do not see the U.S. as better on all measures. About half of Latino adults (48%) see family ties as better in the origin place of their ancestors (Puerto Rico or another country) than in the United States. About another quarter (27%) say the strength of family ties is about the same in both places, while 22% say family ties are better in the U.S.

Hispanics are split on whether the U.S. or the origin place of their Hispanic ancestors treats immigrants better. About one-third (34%) say immigrants are treated better in the U.S., while 38% say there is no difference between the treatment of immigrants in the U.S. and their treatment in Puerto Rico or another country. Another quarter (25%) of Hispanics say immigrants are treated better in the place of their Hispanic ancestors.

Hispanic (Not Latinx) Voters

 Ruy Teixeira:

An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans.

They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. These findings on patriotism are confirmed by results from the 2020 More in Common Identity and Belonging study, where the views of Hispanics contrasted starkly with the negative views of progressive activists.

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.

Marc Caputo and Sabrina Rodriguez at Politico:

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.

More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.

 

Colorism and Hispanic Americans

 From Pew:

A majority (62%) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59%) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57% say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today, according to Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a bilingual, national survey of 3,375 Hispanic U.S. adults conducted in March 2021.

Colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin color, usually, though not always, favoring lighter skin color over darker skin color within a racial or ethnic group. While it can be tied to racism, it is not necessarily the same. (Racism is prejudice directed at members of a racial or ethnic group because of their origin.) For example, Hispanics in the U.S. may face discrimination because they are Hispanic (a form of racism), but the degree of discrimination may vary based on skin color, with those of darker shades experiencing more incidents (a form of colorism). And because of colorism’s deep roots in the histories of Latin America and the United States, discrimination based on skin color can occur among Hispanics just as much as it can be directed at Hispanics by non-Hispanics.

To measure this dimension of Latino identity in the United States, the survey asked respondents to identify the skin color that best resembled their own using a version of the Yadon-Ostfeld skin-color scale. Respondents were shown ten skin colors that ranged from fair to dark (see text box below for the images and scale used). Fully 80% of Latino adults selected a color between one and four, or lighter skin colors, while 15% selected a color between five and ten on the scale, or darker skin colors.

Public Opinion on Higher Education and Race

Chris Jackson, Mallory Newall and Neil Lloyd report on anAxios/Ipsos Hard Truth Higher Education poll: 

Difference by race and ethnicity erupt when race is even hinted at regarding higher education.

The impact of race, particularly with white Republicans, is particularly apparent when questions are about university admissions.

White Republicans are almost half as likely (40%) to support admissions policies that have a racial connotation than one that omits that (69%).

Among white Democrats, there is virtually no difference from the admissions policy with a racial cue (82%) than the one that omits it (77%). Black Americans also exhibit little difference in support for the two different admissions policy statements (67% to 66%).

Racial cueing: “Allowing universities to base admissions on a range of factors, including test scores, potential, and if the applicant comes from a disadvantaged community.”

Nonracial cueing: “Allowing universities to base admissions on a range of factors, including test scores and potential.”

Half of Black Americans believe their race gives them a disadvantage when it comes to access and opportunity for higher education.

More than half (57%) of white Democrats feel their race is an advantage compared to only 12% of white Republicans.

A large majority of white Democrats (79%) and Black Americans (81%) believe that higher education needs to continue making changes to give minority Americans equal opportunities with white Americans. A majority of white Republicans (76%) think higher education has changed enough.

The impact of culture wars also emerges when people are asked if ‘someone like them’ would be comfortable on college campuses. White Republicans are among the least likely to say they would be comfortable at a university.

White Americans, particularly white Republicans, are less likely to say people like them would be comfortable in four-year colleges or post-graduate universities.

White Democrats, Black, and Hispanic Americans all register about the same levels of comfort. Asian Americans generally are slightly more likely to say they would be comfortable in four-year colleges or universities.

TOPLINE AND METHODOLOGY