{"id":11827,"date":"2011-01-30T04:36:05","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T04:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11827"},"modified":"2015-07-22T20:20:06","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T20:20:06","slug":"black-white-asian-more-young-americans-choose-all-of-the-above","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11827","title":{"rendered":"Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times
\n<\/a>2011-01-29<\/p>\n

Susan Saulny<\/strong>, National Correspondent<\/p>\n

Race Remixed<\/strong>: A New Sense of Identity. Articles in this series will explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.<\/em><\/p>\n

COLLEGE PARK, Md.<\/a>\u2014In another time or place, the game of \u201cWhat Are You?\u201d that was played one night last fall at the University of Maryland might have been mean, or menacing: Laura Wood\u2019s peers were picking apart her every feature in an effort to guess her race.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many mixtures do you have?\u201d one young man asked above the chatter of about 50 students. With her tan skin and curly brown hair, Ms. Wood\u2019s ancestry could have spanned the globe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m mixed with two things,\u201d she said politely.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you mulatto<\/a>?\u201d asked Paul Skym, another student, using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles.<\/strong> When Ms. Wood confirmed that she is indeed black and white, Mr. Skym, who is Asian and white, boasted, \u201cNow that\u2019s what I\u2019m talking about!\u201d in affirmation of their mutual mixed lineage.<\/p>\n

Then the group of friends\u2014formally, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association\u2014erupted into laughter and cheers, a routine show of their mixed-race pride.<\/p>\n

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage…<\/p>\n

…No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.<\/p>\n

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.<\/p>\n

And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley<\/a>, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)<\/p>\n

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.<\/p>\n

Prof. Rainier Spencer<\/a>, director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of \u201cReproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix<\/a>,\u201d says he believes that there is too much \u201cemotional investment\u201d in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation\u2019s age-old divisions. \u201cThe mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it\u2019s a new tribe,\u201d he said. \u201cA new <\/strong>Balkanization<\/strong><\/a> of race.\u201d…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…The Way We Were<\/strong><\/p>\n

Americans mostly think of themselves in singular racial terms. Witness President Obama\u2019s answer to the race question on the 2010 census<\/a>: Although his mother was white and his father was black, Mr. Obama<\/a> checked only one box, black, even though he could have checked both races.<\/p>\n

Some proportion of the country\u2019s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans.<\/strong> What has changed is how mixed-race Americans are defined and counted…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above The New York Times 2011-01-29 Susan Saulny, National Correspondent Race Remixed: A New Sense of Identity. Articles in this series will explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans. COLLEGE PARK, Md.\u2014In another time or place, the game of \u201cWhat Are You?\u201d that was played […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,2895,33,125,8,394,20],"tags":[3125,3124,6532,45,180,4216,2327,1586,3843],"class_list":["post-11827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-campus-life","category-census","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-jeffrey-passel","tag-jeffrey-s-passel","tag-race-remixed","tag-rainier-spencer","tag-reynolds-farley","tag-susan-saulny","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-university-of-maryland","tag-warren-kelley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41858,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11827\/revisions\/41858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}