Mixed Race Studies

Hate Takes the Bus

The New York Times
2015-03-11

Charles M. Blow

A University of Oklahoma Fraternity’s Chant and the Rigidity of Racism

This week, when video was posted showing members of the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon gleefully engaged in a racist chant on a bus, some people were shocked. Others, like me, were not.

This was just video confirmation of a racism that envelops us like a fog, often just as evanescent and immeasurable.

Some people seemed surprised because these were millennials, and college students to boot. Both because of generational easing and educational enlightenment, weren’t these sorts of things supposed to be vestiges of the past?

After all, as the Pew Research Center put it last year, “Millennials are the most racially diverse generation in American history,” with “some 43 percent of millennial adults” being nonwhite.

A 2010 Pew report found that “almost all millennials accept interracial dating and marriage.” An MTV poll of millennials found that “84 percent say their family taught them that everyone should be treated the same, no matter what their race,” and that 89 percent “do believe that everyone should be treated the same no matter their race.”

But these numbers can be deceiving. They don’t herald an age of egalitarianism as we might think…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race families are becoming more common in advertising

The Oklahoma Daily
University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
2013-11-04

The Editorial Board

If an artist was assigned to paint a portrait of the average American family 75 years ago, odds are, he or she would paint a family of one race — typically either white parents with white children or black parents with black children.

Today, however, families are more diverse than ever, and this is a good thing for our country. As our nation progresses toward equality for everyone, regardless of sexuality or race, families are looking a lot more colorful than they used to.

Marriages between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from each other increased to 15.1 percent in 2010, according to a Pew Research report. In that same year, the report states interracial or interethnic marriages in America reached an all-time high of 8.4 percent. If that was in 2010, imagine how many more interracial couples there are today.

The increase in mixed families clearly demonstrates the historical barriers of segregation are crumbling down, but while much of the U.S. is making headway, some Americans are still lagging behind the times, letting their actions and words showcase their ignorant social morality…

Read the entire opinion piece here.