Racial Divides in a Multicultural AmericaPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-02-03 02:33Z by Steven |
Racial Divides in a Multicultural America
The American Prospect
2011-01-31
In The New York Times, Susan Saulny writes about the apparent malleability of race in an increasingly multicultural America. To that end, she profiles a group of students in the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland:
Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”
It’s interesting to see a group of kids who want to live in a colorblind—or at least, racially fluid—world. But I’m not sure how meaningful this is for future demographic trends. I’ve said this before, but it remains true that “black/non-black” is the main racial divide in American life. For proof, it’s useful to look at rates of interracial marriage:…
…The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians, and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants…
Read the entire article here.