I’m sure it’s been happening for a long time, but I first noticed it in 2012 or so. I’m talking about the studies on race and ethnicity that pretend multiracial or biracial people don’t exist. It was while digesting a news story about research into how babies react to people of various “races”. (Weirdly, all these stories also pretend races are natural, real divisions amongst humanity, rather than socially constructed and arbitrary categories, but my focus here is on the particular group of people they ignored.) In all related studies I could find, and in all the news stories about these studies, researchers referred to white or Caucasian people, and Black or African-American people, and sometimes Asian people. None of them referred to people of mixed race, sometimes called biracial, multiracial, or other terms.

Perhaps I began to notice this because I had recently become the parent of biracial children, and because my household is “blended” or biracial. Regardless, I kept noticing it in further studies.

In the babies study, all the infants were white — products of two white parents. Naturally, for such a baby, it’s highly likely that almost everyone they see is white too — siblings, grandparents, neighbors, people at church or in stores... If the study had included only babies from Black families, I imagine the results might have been similar. It got me to wondering why the researches didn’t think to include babies with parents of more than one ethnic group — like my own babies. Because every day of their lives, my children have seen both white and Black people. Neither type of person would seem odd or unusual to them.

I noticed it again in 2018, when I read about a study of gut microbiomes, which supposedly differ recognizably amongst ethnicities. The researchers looked at the gut microbiome of 1,700 different people — including a wide variety of ages, genders, body types, and ethnicities. They found that the “most consistent factor” in differing microbiomes (the collection of billions of one-celled organisms in our digestive system) was ethnicity. The “ethnicities” listed in the results were: African-American, Asian or Pacific Islander, Caucasian, and Hispanic. There were marked and notable differences between the gut microbiomes, and these differences could predict ethnicity (and vice versa).

Right away I noticed that “Hispanic” isn’t the same kind of category as the other three. It refers, broadly, to the “people, nations, and cultures that have a historical link to the Spanish language... or the country of Spain” (and sometimes Portugal) and has never been considered a “race”. As Pew explains, someone can be “Hispanic” (according to U.S. law) “of any race, any ancestry, any country of origin” IF they self-apply the label. The same isn’t really true of Black, white, or Asian. But that’s another rabbit hole; again the big omission was mixed-race families, or families that combine ethnicities.

In both those studies (and hundreds of others), the research misses something valuable for scientific knowledge when it skips, overlooks, or otherwise isn’t aware of people who don’t fit neatly into those categories.

In the case of the gut microbiome study, the omission meant some of the possible answers to their questions were off the table before they even began. It’s important research, because increasingly the gut microbiome is linked to various bowel maladies, diabetes, and sometimes even cancer. A variety of targeted treatments to this group of bacteria can drastically alter health outcomes. Knowing the likelihood of the microbiome’s makeup can affect which treatment is proposed.

Researchers guessed why varying ethnic groups show marked, predictive differences in the gut microbiome, including environment, diet, and genetics. Each makes some bit of sense. In most of the world, ethnic groups are typically segregated into different neighborhoods, and even into different regions of the country. They go to different schools, shop at different stores, and frequent different parks. This is true even in the most urban, liberal cities in the U.S. (additional source). Also, ethnic groups are associated with varying diets and differing ancestries.

But one surefire way to eliminate some of those possibilities would have been to include people like my wife and I. Though one of us is white and the other is Black, we live in the same neighborhood, shop at the same stores, and eat very similarly to each other. Our diets aren’t identical — that would just be weird — but they’re much closer than they would be if we had never met each other.

Would my gut microbiome still match that of other white people, and hers still match that of other Black people? If so, then we could eliminate environment as the likely cause, and at least partially eliminate diet. Genetics would become the prime suspect. But then what about our children, who share a little bit of each of us? If the study had made an effort to include more unsegregated people — either with combined-race heritage or living with a non-homogeneous partner — I suspect they would be much closer to finding their answers.

In 2020, I came across a startling story about Black Americans paying higher property taxes than white people in the U.S. (relative to the price of the home), which has implications all its own. But again, mixed race people were omitted. The story refers to “Black families”, “Black-owned homes”, “white homes”, “minority households”, and so on. But it never once mentioned households, homes, or families that were more than one of those. Like mine. It leaves me to wonder, am I paying too much property tax because my wife is Black, or is she paying too little because I’m white? Or did we get a break because we don’t fit any of the categories? I know it’s actually none of those, but still.

Something like 15 percent of all babies born in the U.S. today are multiracial or multiethnic. Seventeen percent of all new marriages in the U.S. are between people of differing race/ethnicity, and about ten percent of all marriages in the U.S. include more than one race/ethnicity. The U.S. Census Bureau says the same, giving a figure of “7.4 to 10.2 percent” of “married-couple households”

That’s a lot of people to leave out of these studies, and (as we saw with the gut microbiome story) a lot of potential for missing an obvious answer.

Further, I continue to see studies on wealth and income gaps in the United States (like this one from CNN) that ignore a whole bunch of us. The studies cited talk about Black families, white households, and sometimes mention Latino or Asian groups as afterthoughts. But they never mention households like mine. As the 2020 pandemic raged on, NPR published this story, talking about the widening “racial wealth gap”; again, it completely ignored mixed-race households. It’s important information in a country with this many blended families. Politico ran a similar story, with the same omissions. Neither reporter (nor their editors) even thought about asking why multi-racial households were omitted.

Conclusion

Please don’t misunderstand; I’m not complaining just to be complaining; I’m wondering why this occurs, what damage it results in, how it can be fixed, and so on. It’s just really odd for professional study-doing-type-people to ignore such a large swath of the population.

Comments From Original URL:

Anderson Connors, 2018.12.09, 11:51

I never would have thought of this, but you’re probably correct. Including mixed-race marriages would likely have (at least) given them some clues.

I see something similar in post-election polls. “White men over 50 voted for [candidate]” or “Black women” primarily voted for Doug Jones. But these surveys NEVER say what mixed-race people did, and they certainly don’t mention “white people married to persons of color” or “people of color married to white people”. Would being married to a Hispanic person change the way I vote? Possibly. Would it change the way I eat? I assume so.

Maybe researchers and survey-takers need to change the way they ask questions...

Wil C. Fry, 2018.12.09, 13:20, in reply to Anderson Connors

Ah. And I didn’t think about the election result polls... It’s a good point. “White men married to people of color” will probably vote differently, on average, than “white men”.