Posted on 08/28/2008 8:02:10 AM PDT by reaganaut1
What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white?
In a recent paper I co-authored with Roland Fryer, Lisa Kahn, and Jorg Spenkuch, we look at data to try to answer that question. Here is what we find:
1) Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to those in which black children grow up: similar incomes, the father is much less likely to be around than in white households, etc.
2) In terms of academic performance, mixed-race kids fall in between blacks and whites.
3) Mixed-race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: the mixed-race kids are much more attractive on average.
The really interesting result, though, is the next one. 4) There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.
(Excerpt) Read more at freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Of course, Obama is only responsible for his own actions and words, not of all people who fit a certain profile. Those deed are enough to show his unfitness for the Presidency.
The paper is at http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/MR%20KIDS%207.1.08.pdf .
From the scientific to the purely subjective.
Agreed, sometimes it is true, Halle Barry anyone?, but not always by a long shot.
I have a mixed granddaughter from my present wife’s son, she is 14 and gorgeous, I told my son in-law to keep her on a short leash so to speak.
Obama came from upper class echelon. MSM even reported that he came from “blue” blooded lineage and related to a number of well-known personages.
You wind up with someone as maladjusted and self centered as Obama? At least sometimes...
Related to a number of well-known personages? Is Jimmy Carter one? They sure LOOK related.
Is it me or do mixed race black/white children seem mostly to come from black father/white mother combos? I know of a few white father / black mother couples, but not nearly as many of the former.
I hate to say this, but these days it’s an advantage...you can pull either out when you need to.
A real pet peeve of mine about mixed race kids are most folks want to categorize them as one or the other.. white or black.. It usually turns out black. How is Obama black? His mother was white. Is there none of his mother in him? Did she not contribute half of his DNA and carry him for 9 months? Race in general just irritates me. What can’t people just be PEOPLE for Christs sake!
“What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white?”. As a mixed race person myself I can tell you that it is absolutely nothing like the information written by Steven D. Levitt and his three co-authors. Growing up bi-racial is just like growing up white or growing up black - It varies from home to home and environment to environment.”
— Posted by NYC
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The funny thing is Levitt basically admits that he can’t come to any conclusions. I would say that historically, things were a lot brutally simpler in the Bad Old Days, and the One-Drop rule when you were judged “black” no matter what and people who were white enough to “pass” lived in fear of exposure and cut themselves off from their relatives. Not to mention the dirty little secret of “high yaller”, “red bone” and “brown-bag test” color-ranking in the black aristocracy.
Nowadays, I like to think that tortured agonizing over being “torn between two communities” and other maudlin self-obsessions are for the relative handful who choose to indulge themselves or who think they can make a living out of it.
From his obsession over his race and his lifelong determination to establish his “blackness” (done to death in his autobiography) I think we can all guess which category our next soul-brother-number-one falls into.
However, I do see a bright side to this. Those of us—like myself—who are half-something-else are thankfully ignored by the PC racialists (as everyone who’s anyone knows, the world is divided into “black” and “non-black”), and are not encouraged towards self-pity and entitlement, and indeed, may be forming the core of a new “get over it” vanguard, who, like me, insist on checking off the two-or-more-flavors box on the forms.
Obama came from upper class echelon. MSM even reported that he came from “blue” blooded lineage and related to a number of well-known personages.”
All of those connections Nobama claims are from tribal Kenya.......
But Obama isn’t “mixed race” - He’s BLACK!
- Or so he claims
He has thrown his white heritage under the bus.
Imagine the uproar if he claimed he was white (which he equally could) and denied his black heritage!
Then again, I could be cheering too soon. If the likes of Obama and his radical ilk get their way, we will eventually all have to be carrying something like a USDA-certified, red-meat injun’s blood-quanta racial identity card; minutely defining our rights and privileges under the New Order.
What about Asian-White and Asian-Black and Asian-Latino and all the other mixes there can be? Or is it only blacks and whites that have mixed race children?.............NYT is racist................/s
Granted,Halle Berry and Tiger Woods are but Obama has huge ears and wierd purple lips. And now its a non scientific discussion.
A white woman can have a black baby, but a black woman can't have a white baby......or so it seems......
Gee, the timing of this article seems odd. Why bring this up now? I recall the spate of “Everybody lies about sex” studies.
Which simply points out the idiocy of race and racial stereotyping. Most of the world's population is of so-called mixed race origin.
As a parent of quote-unquote "mixed race" children, I echo your sentiment. But, I understand now why people end up identifying as black only: It doesn't matter what we their parents teach them. As soon as they walk out the front door, the rest of the world identifies them as black.
So far, our younger children are clueless about race. We've managed to preserve their innocence this far. But, eventually, another kid will point it out to them. It's only a matter of time.
The West is the only part of the globe that has mixed races in large numbers. Look at China, they can still call themselves Chinese, Look at Japan it is the same as above,
Look at Korea the same, I could go on. Let me ask one question, what is the big deal about being mixed.
I can still tell you what tribes I came from in Europe.
You mix a white in the USA and black in the USA and you can forever forget to try and find your ancestors.
The black in the USA today can not tell you which tribes they came from in Africa, that part of their history is gone forever.
I prefer knowing a little about my family tree.
What God made I prefer to leave it alone!
“Which simply points out the idiocy of race and racial stereotyping.”
The races *do* differ in important ways other than skin color and facial features. Some of our public policies, such as No Child Left Behind, *mandate* that our institutions achieve the same results for all races, which will accomplish little but waste a lot money. What should be mandated is that schools and other institutions treat people the same, regardless of race, but empirically, that has not lead to equal results.
ping
Your observation is accurate. It's much more common for a black man to marry a white woman that it is for a white man to marry a black woman.
As you can read on the blog you linked, several "mixed race" people responded that the "study" did not match their experience at all, and they question the results. (But, I have to say, one finding is absolute fact: "mixed race children are more attractive." Ahem! LOL... I see the study used the objective qualifier of "interviewer rated attractiveness".)
So.....he's part Ross Perot and part Mick Jagger?
If you agree with the scientists, like I do, that all peoples originated in Africa and all current differences are due to adaptation, then what does race actually mean? Only temporary differences in my estimation.
But due to DNA many African-Americans can tell where they came from. I do agree with the idea that it's no big deal to mixed. And if we can go back far enough we would find peoples from the far east being mixed too. But again, so what?
My sister is getting married to a black man next week and they are planning on having children.
They are both very liberal so I don't talk politics with them. Both have very good jobs and have been together for 8 years so I am pretty confident my nieces/nephews will have a stable home. My sister is very blonde with green eyes so I am guessing the kids will be gorgeous.
I think Obama has some serious mommy issues. In one of his biographies I believe he writes something to the effect that she just liked dark men. I also remember hearing that he broke up with his white girlfriend and chose to be with a black woman.
Sounds like they have their ducks in a row and all will be fine, now if you can work on the liberal thing. Sometimes having children brings out conservative values.
Here is something I have observed. Black male/white female couples are often, but not always, in the lower class. (Ghetto boys/trailer park girls.)OTOH, white male/black female couples tend to be higher class and professional. A lot of the time, the black female is foreign-born (from the Caribbean or sometimes Africa). Lenny Kravitz’s father is Jewish and his mother was from the Caribbean.
I think we read the same article. In all fairness, I didn’t read the biography itself. But, if those quotes are accurate, the comments he made were pretty low. And with the church he joined, and some of the comments he’s made even on the campaign trail, obviously he still has issues.
I don’t know what the statistics are, but if that summation is true, it does not fit the complaints many people have about high-income-earning black men not marrying “within their race.”
I personally have come across a variety of other people in interracial marriages, and all I know is, we all don’t get along with each other. ;-) We’re each different, just like everyone else.
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