Are mixed-race people less happy?

People who are racially mixed often say they feel like they are in a racial "no man's land," neither one race nor the other. Are they less happy than people of only one race? Let's look at Black-Whites first (2021 GSS data): 

Mean happiness for White-Blacks (2.02) is slightly higher than the mean for Whites (1.96) or Blacks (1.90). Those who say their "race" is both Hispanic and White are less happy (1.78) than Whites (1.97) or Hispanics (2.08).

The same pattern is found for those who say they are both White and Native American: a mean of 1.82 versus 1.97 for Whites and 1.91 for Natives.

Finally, I merged Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans together and found that the White-NE Asian group tended to be less happy (1.78) than either Whites (1.97) or NE Asians (2.01). 

So with the exception of Black-Whites, people of mixed race tend to be a little less happy than those of one race. There is some support here for the contention that having a mixed identity is not conducive to happiness. 

Which white groups have noticeably low IQs?

To answer this question, I calculated mean IQs for all self-described whites by the country they said their ancestors came from. Only people born in the US are included since immigrants are at a disadvantage on a vocabulary test (the measure of IQ used here). Here are the results:

Mean IQ

Africa  93.4
Mexico  90.0
Puerto Rico  93.2
Spain  97.2
American Indian  94.7
India  95.8
Other Spanish  95.9
American only  90.4

It looks like many of these people are racially mixed. They label themselves as white but often have some non-white ancestry. The mixed groups that do not have low mean IQs are self-described whites whose ancestors came from east Asian countries--Japan, China, or the Philippines. 

UPDATE: The mean IQ for self-described whites whose ancestors are from east Asia is 99.8. 

 

Intermarriage and the drug and alcohol dependence of children

From the July issue of Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse:

The percentage of multiracial youth appears to be increasing in the United States. However, little has been disseminated about problem behaviors among multiracial Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians on a national level. Using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the authors compared multiple-race Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, while disaggregating by ethnic subgroups, with single-race individuals within respective Asian ethnic subgroups and Caucasians for prevalence of alcohol/drug use and dependence. For multiple-race Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, high rates of alcohol dependence were observed compared with both single-race Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander, and Asian subgroups and single-race Caucasians; for some multiracial Native Hawaiians, Other Pacific Islanders, and Asians, high rates of drug dependence were also observed.

I don't have access to the journal so I don't know how the authors interpret their results. The findings might suggest that people should marry within their own group to lower the risk of problems for their future children, but my guess is that people who marry inter-ethnically and inter-racially are more unconventional than other people, and their unconventionality is passed to their children, which in turn raises the risk of alcohol and drug dependence.