Interracial Breeding: White Women

UPDATE 03/31/10: New post on this subject- By the numbers: Interracial Mating in America

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Curious about the general phenomenon of interracial couplings, I recently downloaded the CDC’s 2006 Natality Detail File to figure out just how much interracial matin’ goes on. For non-Hispanic white mothers who gave birth in 2006 (or at least 2,309,212 of them), the reported race of father looks like this.

Race of Father (white women):

Hispanic:                                             4.7%

NH White:                                          81.3%

Black:                                                    2.6%

NH Other:                                           1.7%

Unknown/Not Stated:                   9.7%

Couple of things that jump out at me:

• WTF is other? Asians? Native Americans? Whoever they are they seem to be reasonably reproductively successful relative to other minorities..
• Unknown? Are there that many women who don’t know who the daddy is?

While it would be easy to make the unknown category proportional with the rest of the data, I think it would be a mistake to assume that when a mother is so destitute as to be unable to name a father on the birth certificate, the dad will 90% of the time be of the same race. If we compare the mean educational attainment (in terms of years of schooling) of white females who breed with men of different groups, we see an interesting trend:

Race of Father	Mean educational attainment	Std. deviation
NH Other	14.93	10.073
Cuban	14.85	6.443
NH White	14.63	6.954
Black	13.47	7.515
Mexican	13.41	7.918
Unknown/Not Stated	13.31	10.790
All	14.45	7.531

This trend was not exclusive to whites. Mexican-origin and black mothers who were unsure of the father of their child, 12.9% and 36.6% respectively, had the least mean educational attainment of their respective groups. Similarly, for Mexican-origin and black mothers who had a father in the “Other” category the reverse was true. Black women with fathers in the “Other” category (n=2429) had a mean of 16.11 years of schooling, the highest of any non-Asian group I can find.

Only 55% of white mothers (n=1273706) live in states that collect data on which particular Asian nationality knocked them up.  From that data we find that white women with Chinese fathers (n=796) have a mean of 16.03 years of schooling, the highest of any particular white subgroup I can find. Following them closely are those with Asian Indian fathers (n=775) with a mean of 15.78 years of schooling. A significant portion of “Other” males appear to be Native American/Alaskan Indian (n=7584) vs. about 10000 or so total azns.

I would guess that overall for white women, the Other category is about 1/2-2/3 Asian while the “Unknown” category is disproportionately black and Hispanic. My puny laptop can’t handle any meaningful checks for bimodality, though a random sample of 5% of all responses showed very high variance in both of those groups.