Number of Interracial Marriages, Multiracial Americans Growing RapidlyPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2017-03-07 01:34Z by Steven |
Number of Interracial Marriages, Multiracial Americans Growing Rapidly
VOA News
Voice of America
2017-03-04
Elizabeth Lee, West Coast Bureau Reporter
LOS ANGELES — Delia Douglas’ experience growing up has been different from the rest of her schoolmates.
“In any of the storybooks that I was reading growing up, I remember the families always looked a certain way. Both parents matched,” she said. “Even it seemed like in many of the storylines that were about animal families, both bears kind of looked the same, and the baby bear looked the same.”
These storybooks did not reflect her family. Douglas’ father is African American and American Indian. Her mother is white. And Douglas is married to William Haight, who is white. They have a 5-year-old daughter who is fair skinned, with light hair.
“Especially in the first three years of my daughter’s life, people often would stop and ask me if I was the nanny. There were days when that would be incredibly frustrating,” Douglas recalled…
…“In the year 2000, the U.S. Census actually allowed for individuals to check more than one box, so now each person was able to see, for instance, I’m Mexican and black, so I was able to check more than one box. And so we’ve noticed an uptick in the amount of multiracial folks,” Smith-Kang said…