A Portrait Of Race And Ethnicity In California

This document examines differences in socioeconomic status by racial and ethnic groups in California, exploring changing patterns over time. It analyzes trends and outcomes in demography, geographic distribution, health, education, crime, labor markets, economic status, and political participation. Data on educational outcomes include: education of mothers; English language ability; preschool activities of children ages 3 and 4; reading and math proficiency for grade 4 and 8 public school students; high school completion rates; college completion rates; and measures of basic skills in the adult population. The educational outcomes of Hispanics and African Americans are the lowest among all racial and ethnic groups. Most recent population growth has occurred among Hispanics and Asians. Most counties were predominantly White in 1970, but between 1970-98, the share of Whites declined in all but one county. African Americans have the worst health status of any group. Hispanics often have less access to health care and lower health status than Whites. Health indicators for Asians are similar to those for Whites. Nonwhites generally have lower earnings than whites. Hispanics and African Americans have particularly high unemployment rates. Asian and White family incomes are substantially higher than those for African Americans and Hispanics. The ethnic distribution of those arrested and incarcerated has shifted dramatically. The proportion of Hispanics incarcerated has risen at a faster rate than has the Hispanic proportion of the general population. African Americans experience the highest risk of arrest and incarceration and are most likely to experience violence. Whites are over-represented in the voting population. Asians and Hispanics have the lowest participation rates. An appendix presents additional sources of information. (Contains 103 bibliographic references.) (SM)

The change in the way the federal government asked for information about race in the 2000 census marked an important turning point in the way Americans measure race. By allowing respondents to choose more than one racial category for the first time, the Census Bureau challenged strongly held beliefs about the nature and definition of race in our society. The New Race Question is a wide-ranging examination of what we know about racial enumeration, the likely effects of the census change, and possible policy implications for the future. The growing incidence of interracial marriage and childrearing led to the change in the census race question. Yet this reality conflicts with the need for clear racial categories required by anti-discrimination and voting rights laws and affirmative action policies. How will racial combinations be aggregated under the Census's new race question? Who will decide how a respondent who lists more than one race will be counted? How will the change affect established policies for documenting and redressing discrimination? The New Race Question opens with an exploration of what the attempt to count multiracials has shown in previous censuses and other large surveys. Contributor Reynolds Farley reviews the way in which the census has traditionally measured race, and shows that although the numbers of people choosing more than one race are not high at the national level, they can make a real difference in population totals at the county level. The book then takes up the debate over how the change in measurement will affect national policy in areas that rely on race counts, especially in civil rights law, but also in health, education, and income reporting. How do we relate data on poverty, graduation rates, and disease collected in 2000 to the rates calculated under the old race question? A technical appendix provides a useful manual for bridging old census data to new. The book concludes with a discussion of the politics of racial enumeration. Hugh Davis Graham examines recent history to ask why some groups were determined to be worthy of special government protections and programs, while others were not. Posing the volume's ultimate question, Jennifer Hochschild asks whether the official recognition of multiracials marks the beginning of the end of federal use of race data, and whether that is a good or a bad thing for society? The New Race Question brings to light the many ways in which a seemingly small change in surveying and categorizing race can have far reaching effects and expose deep fissures in our society. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series Copublished with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb focuses on the migration, settlement, and adaptation of Chinese and other Asian immigrants and their impacts on the transformation of metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These stories of the interactivity of Asian "people and place" in four nation-states are framed within the larger context of spatial and social patterns, migration, acculturation/assimilation, and racialization theories, and emerging landscapes in the inner cities and suburbs of metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, and Auckland. The book's primary arguments center on revisioning traditional "assimilationist" models of the Chicago School with the context of today's evolving metropolis. Other key elements include immigrant and refugee policies, new theories of ethnic settlement, and urban and suburban immigrant landscape forms. Nine chapters document the experiences of Asian immigrants and refugees--rich and poor, old and new. Their communities vary from no identifiable residential cluster (Vietnamese in Northern Virginia) to multiple residential and business clusters in both inner city and suburbs (Koreans in Los Angeles, Chinese in Toronto) to the largest suburban Chinese residential and business concentration (the San Gabriel Valley of suburban Los Angeles) and the "high-tech Mecca" of the U.S., if not the world (Silicon Valley), whose growth has been inseparable from workers, professionals, and entrepreneurs of Asian descents who are often local residents as well. Rich in detail and broad in scope, From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb is the first book to focus exclusively on the Asian immigrant communities in multiethnic suburbs. It effectively demonstrates the complexity of contemporary Asian immigrant and refugee groups and the strength of their communities across the Pacific Rim. It will be welcomed by a wide range of readers with interests in Asian American studies, urban geography, the Chinese diaspora, immigration, and transnationalism. Contributors: Richard Bedford, Kevin Dunn, David W. Edgington, Michael A. Goldberg, Elsie Ho, Thomas A. Hutton, Hans Dieter Laux, Wei Li, Lucia Lo, John R. Logan, Edward J. W. Park, Suzannah Roberts, Christopher J. Smith, Günter Thieme, Joseph S. Wood.