From 2011: Lansing has nation's highest percentage of people who identify as multiracial black

This story was originally published on Nov. 18, 2011. 

Gianni Risper has a black mother, a white biological father and a way of describing himself that isn't found on any Census form: Italian-Caribbean-American.

"Race is becoming more muddled," he said, and, at 19, he is part of a generation that is muddling it, more likely to be multiracial than their elders, more likely to reject the rigidity of prevailing racial categories in favor of more fluid identities.

"I try not to put myself into a category of being either black or white or just one thing," Risper said, "because I'm not."

And, living in Lansing, he has plenty of company.

Lansing has the highest percentage of people who identify as black and some other race of any place in the country with a population of 100,000 or more.

According to the 2010 Census, it's 4.1 percent, more than one out of every 25 people in the city.

Which is a matter of something more than biology or ancestry.

Most Americans still think of themselves as belonging to one race or another, even when their heritage would allow for other possibilities.

The fact that many people in Lansing checked multiple boxes on their Census form raises as many questions about why people here feel comfortable with that choice than it does about who their parents and grandparents were.

'This is my family'

Ophelia Dabney Allen held out a sheet of paper, a printout from a genealogy website with a photo of a well-dressed blond man identified as Willis Dabney, born a slave in Arkansas, the child of a slave and her slave master.

"That's my grandfather," said Allen, who is 87 and lives on the city's west side.

"I knew him. He had a big farm, and we lived on it in Tennessee. And he looked just like that, he had blond hair, blue eyes."

Blue eyes that were passed on to his granddaughter.

"This is my family," Allen said, holding up another photograph. "We're all different colors. You know, we're not ashamed to be part white. That's the way God made us."

But the logic of racial identity in America has worked to erase the in-between categories. The legal notion of hypodescent, the "one-drop rule," held that anyone with the barest trace of African ancestry was black, and it's a notion that even still informs popular perceptions.

Though earlier censuses had included categories for people of mixed race, those options had disappeared by 1930, not to be revived until 2000.

Kristen Renn, a professor of education at Michigan State University who has studied mixed-race identity in college students, said space began to open up for more complicated racial identities in the latter part of the 1990s.

"Part of this is liberal baby boomers marrying outside their race or having kids with people of other races and liberal baby boomers being very vested in raising happy children," she said.

But the shift also coincided with the growth of the Internet, which made it easier to create communities around mixed-race identities or even specific racial combinations.

It coincided with celebrities - Renn mentioned Tiger Woods - beginning to speak publicly about their blended ancestries.

As a result, among the younger generation in particular, "it has become more OK," she said. "There is a youth movement around mixed race."

And if that's more true in Lansing than other places, she sees it as a good sign.

"When people are less comfortable, they have to draw the boundaries much more clearly, 'You're one of them. You're one of us. You've got to be one or the other,' " she said.

"People in more cosmopolitan areas are just used to a more diverse, global kind of population."

Dissimilarity index

Except Lansing isn't what most people would call cosmopolitan.

But it is relatively integrated.

There is a measurement of segregation called the index of dissimilarity, which measures how evenly racial groups are distributed across census tracts, in essence, the degree to which people of different races are clustered into separate neighborhoods.

On a scale where 100 is complete segregation and zero complete integration, a Brown University analysis of 2010 Census data put black-white segregation in Lansing just below a 28. For the nation as a whole, it was 59. The city hasn't always been so integrated, but it has been well below the national average for decades.

"The neighborhoods I've lived in have always been blended," said Michelle King, who grew up in the city's Baker Donora and Colonial Village neighborhoods.

Because of that, interracial relationships "never seemed odd."

King is white. Her three daughters have black fathers. The youngest, Samarhia, King's one child with her husband, Milton, is so fair she has trouble convincing people she's not just white.

"We've traveled as a family outside of Lansing, and we've been in situations where we might have felt uncomfortable," King said. "Here, it doesn't seem like people give it a second thought."

'Other' option

In filling out her 2010 census form, Rina Risper checked the box for "black." She also checked the box for "other," writing in Caribbean-American.

Risper, Gianni's mother and publisher of The New Citizens Press, is the child of immigrants. She grew up in New York city in a largely Caribbean neighborhood.

"It's an interesting place to be, when you are culturally different but you look the same," she said. "As time goes on, you begin to assimilate, but you don't drop the Caribbean portion of who you are."

It seems likely that some portion of Lansing's black-and-some-other-race population is made up of immigrants and their children, people from countries where the racial categories don't match those of the U.S., people who might identify as black but not as African-American.

More than 15,000 refugees have resettled in the region over the past 40 years. There have been other immigrants besides.

Self-definition

Nikki O'Brien was raised by her white mother. She didn't know her black father until she was an adult. She identifies herself as black.

"You'd think I would be more malleable in my racial identity," she said, "but really the experience of being other or different was enough that I constantly knew that I was black and the strength and community that I pulled from that identity just pushed me."

But O'Brien, a program adviser at MSU who spent years working with minority students, sees the conversation about mixed-race identity more as one about self-definition, including the right to identify as one race or another.

"Before, the push was from society, from parents, from family, from community, saying, 'No, we get to define you. You don't get to define yourself,' " she said, "and the push back is, 'Yeah, you know what, we do get to define ourselves.' "

Multiple-race black populations

Places with the highest proportion of people who identified as multiple-race black, populations of 100,000 or more:

Lansing, Mich. 4.1 %

Tacoma, Wash. 3.8 %

Killeen, Texas 3.8 %

Syracuse, N.Y. 3.6 %

Providence, R.I. 3.3 %

Source: The Black Population: 2010, 2010 Census Briefs

Index of dissimilarity

The index of dissimilarity measures whether one group is spread across Census tracts as evenly as another. In essence, it's a measure of whether groups are clustered in separate neighborhoods. The scale runs from zero, which indicates complete integration, to 100, which indicates complete segregation. Lansing has long been below the national average for black-white segregation.

Census Lansing U.S.

1980 - 38.5 - 73

1990 - 36.4 - 67

2000 - 32.3 - 64

2010 - 27.8 - 59

Source: US2010 project