Between Black and White: European Immigration and African American “Mulatto” Classification, 1910-1920

• In Event: Race/Ethnicity/Immigration and Stratification

Abstract

This study examines how European immigration shaped the racial classification of African Americans in the early twentieth-century United States. Previous scholarship describes fluid racial classifications in which increases in an individual's wealth contribute to their "whitening". Past scholarship on racial reclassification in the U.S. examines boundary dynamics between two groups, such as native-born whites and African Americans. This study investigates how the arrival of a third social group - European immigrants - influenced the racial classification of African Americans into the intermediate category of "mulatto". Individual-fixed effects and instrumental variable regression models conducted on full count census records of African American men living outside the U.S. South between 1910 and 1920 reveal that African American men were significantly more likely to be reclassified from black to mulatto when the foreign-born white share of their county's population increased. On the individual-level, becoming a homeowner also increases the likelihood of reclassification to mulatto. These findings illuminate how European immigration during a period of anti-immigrant backlash paradoxically expanded social recognition of an intermediate racial category among African Americans. This contributes to our understanding of the processes of racial classification in multi-group societies.

Author

• Nicholas Aaron Pang, London School of Economics