Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The CountryPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2017-03-08 19:32Z by Steven |
Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The Country
Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2017-03-08
 What do mixed-race Americans mean for the future of racism? Roberto Westbrook/Getty Images |
Americans like to fantasize that a mixed-race future will free them from the clutches of racism.
But this illusion is incompatible with an America in which the presidential election was won by the candidate who ran a “Make America Great Again” campaign, which many critics have pointed out was widely heard as a call to “Make America White Again.”
If the election results are a vindication for those championing the politics of President Trump, the demographic trends point in the opposite direction. Today, the United States’ mixed-race population is growing three times faster than the general population, and optimism about the impact that mixed-race people can have on a racially-divided country abounds.
“What Biracial People Know,” a recent op-ed in The New York Times, argues that the growing multiracial population may act as a “vaccine” to the bigotry that buoyed Trump’s campaign, granting America “immunity” to the longstanding politics of exclusion shaped by racism.
But this hope that a mixed-race future will result in a paradise of interracial and ethnically-ambiguous babies is misleading. It presents racism as passive — a vestigial reflex that will fade with the presence of interracial offspring, rather than as an active system that can change with time. A 2015 study by Pew Research Center concluded that mixed-race Americans describe experiences of discrimination in the form of slurs, poor customer service, and police encounters. These figures were highest among people of black-white and black-Native American descent…
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