Terminal Identities: The Racial Classification of Immigrants in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Death Records

Abstract

Death certificates are a means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is based neither on a set of formal racial identification criteria nor self-identification. Instead, local informants typically report the race of decedents. According to a sample of 1,884 records filed between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were progressively less likely to be identified by racial terms (e.g., white or yellow) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (e.g., Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified with a racial term—typically white. Most of the records analyzed are from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records, primarily from Illinois and Ohio, are compared to the southern records. In some cases, white identity can serve as a mark of racial confusion, acting as a default or neutral identity rather than a mark of privilege. Conversely, it can represent a status that is actively striven for to provide freedom from discriminatory treatment. It serves primarily as the former for those born in China and the latter for those born in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Contraction as a Response to Group Threat: Demographic Decline and Whites’ Classification of People Who Are Ambiguously White

“…Racially ambiguous targets tend to be classified in ways that are consistent with racial stereotypes. Freeman and colleagues (2011), for example, find that morphed White–Black male faces are more likely to be classified as Black when wearing janitor (i.e., low-status) attire, and Noymer, Penner, and Saperstein (2011) find that medical examiners are more likely to classify victims of homicide as Black on their death certificates, controlling for the racial classification provided by the deceased person’s next-of-kin (see also McDermott 2018; Miller, Maner, and Becker 2010). 7 Studies also show that people follow different rules when classifying ambiguously White–Black people 8 versus ambiguously White–Asian people.…”

United States Public Perceptions of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) as a Racial Category

“…Within social psychology, there is a paucity of studies on racial categorization (as opposed to self‐identification). Studies of racial categorization like this one have attempted to illustrate latent bias in U.S. public perceptions of race (McDermott, ).…”