Melinda Miller Publishes on Race and Agriculture

Melinda Miller, core faculty of the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a faculty member of the Department of Economics at Virginia Tech, co-authored with Matt Greg an article on “Race and Agriculture During the Assimilation Era: Evidence from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.” The article appeared in Demographic Research, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of population sciences.

Here is a link to the article and abstract. The role of race within tribal communities is a contentious topic, and some of this acrimony emerged from 19th-century Indian policies rooted in scientific racism. There has been relatively little written on the role of intermarriage within indigenous communities. Results find that the racial gap in property does not follow simple racial hierarchies but rather depends on the gender of the household head. However, once selection into intermarriage is accounted for, the racial gap in property from intermarriage is eliminated. In fact, households containing a male head with close white ancestors held less property than households containing a male head without white ancestry.