Multiracial identities, single race history: Contemporary consequences of historical race and marriage laws for racial classification.

This work interrogates the role of the law as an "actor" in the spatial patterning of racial classification. Laws governing racial intermarriage represent key ways that rigid distinctions between groups were codified. Critically, there is a great deal of state variation in these laws.

Single mother families and employment, race, and poverty in changing economic times.

Using American Community Survey data from 2001, 2005, and 2010, this paper assesses the relationships between employment, race, and poverty for households headed by single women across different economic periods. While poverty rates rose dramatically among single-mother families between 2001 and 2010, surprisingly many racial disparities in poverty narrowed by the end of the decade. This was due to a greater increase in poverty among whites, although gaps between whites and Blacks, whites and Hispanics, and whites and American Indians remained quite large in 2010.

Is discrimination an equal opportunity risk?: racial experiences, socioeconomic status, and health status among black and white adults.

Using the 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we explore the relationship between racial awareness, perceived discrimination, and self-rated health among black (n = 5,902) and white (n = 28,451) adults. We find that adjusting for group differences in racial awareness and discrimination, in addition to socioeconomic status, explains the black-white gap in self-rated health. However, logistic regression models also find evidence for differential vulnerability among black and whites adults, based on socioeconomic status.

Does multiracial matter? A study of racial disparities in self-rated health.

How do self-identified multiracial adults fit into documented patterns of racial health disparities? We assess whether the health status of adults who view themselves as multiracial is distinctive from that of adults who maintain a single-race identity, by using a seven-year (2001-2007) pooled sample of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). We explore racial differences in self-rated health between whites and several single and multiracial adults with binary logistic regression analyses and investigate whether placing these groups into a self-reported "best race" category alters patterns of health disparities. We propose four hypotheses that predict how the self-rated health status of specific multiracial groups compares with their respective component single-race counterparts, and we find substantial complexity in that no one explanatory model applies to all multiracial combinations.