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Steve Holloway, Associate Professor
in the Department of Geography, and co-director of the IBR’s Community,
Ethnicity and Identity in Context group is suspicious of clearly drawn boundaries.
He prefers borders that blur and definitions that shift in relation to the
context in which they occur. For several years, he has been asking questions
about how the boundaries of race are influenced by the characteristics of place.
“A lot of research treats race as an independent variable,” he
says. “Subjects are assigned a race by self or by the investigator. But,
what happens if you don’t consider race as fixed? What if racial categories
are not as tidy as we think they are?”
“Many scholars argue that race, at least in our national context, is
a social construct based on an elaborate power structure that disadvantages
those on the wrong side of the boundary,” he says. Some conclude that
we should stop asking the race question and stop collecting data on it.” Holloway
disagrees with that conclusion even though he agrees with the criticism. “I
would love to stop reifying old racial categories,” he insists. “But
I want to be able to observe and document injustice and to be able to speak
out regarding its policy implications.
In a recent project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, Holloway and his
colleagues - Mark Ellis (University of Washington) and Richard Wright (Dartmouth)
have been looking at the interplay between residential choices of interracial
families and parents’ descriptions of their children’s race on
census forms. The results of their analysis of the 1990 Census data in twelve
major metropolitan areas indicate that context affects parents’ choices
about how to describe their children’s racial identities.
“Residential geography plays an important role in identity formation
for these households,” Holloway explains. “Residential choices
influence how family members think about race, and these ideas may change as
the children grow older and families make different decisions about where to
live.” As he sees it, racial identity and choices about where to live
are both outcome and cause influencing and being influenced by how parents
socialize their children.
Of course, he acknowledges that knowing a parent’s choice of racial classification
for their child is not the same as knowing what the child’s experience
of racial identity is. Before 1960, Census enumerators selected the racial
classification for family members. For the next 50 years, Census respondents
were asked to choose one racial category for each member of their household. In
2000, respondents were able to make more than one choice in response to the
race question.
Holloway and his colleagues are now working on a $330,000 National Science
Foundation project to replicate their existing research using this new census
data, but he is thinking about what comes next. He would like to begin collecting
longitudinal data on a set of racially diverse families, looking at their lives
from an ethnographic point of view.
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Holloway has found that residential choices influence how family members think about
race, and these ideas may change as families make different decisions about
where to live.
