{"id":34637,"date":"2013-11-08T16:20:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T16:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=34637"},"modified":"2013-11-08T16:20:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T16:20:00","slug":"the-future-of-race-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=34637","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Race in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Future of Race in America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Root<\/a>
\n2013-11-05<\/p>\n

Jen\u00e9e Desmond-Harris<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Staff Writer<\/p>\n

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a three-part series. To read part 1, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Will we ever abandon stereotypes? Will \u201cpeople of color\u201d act as a group? Here are four possible theories about where we are headed as a country.<\/em><\/p>\n

(The Root)\u2014When it comes to race in America, there\u2019s no question that things are changing.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we know for sure: The country is becoming more diverse. Half of kids under age 5 are members of racial and ethnic minority groups. Non-Hispanic white Americans will almost certainly be outnumbered by everyone else over the next three decades. Americans who consider themselves multiracial are growing in numbers faster than any other group.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the part that the census can\u2019t measure\u2014the stories that reveal that racial identity is getting more complicated and convoluted all the time: a teen who once called herself Latina \u201ccoming out\u201d as black<\/a>; a woman everyone thinks is Greek announcing that she\u2019s biracial<\/a>; the news that 12 percent of Jewish households consider themselves \u201cmultiracial or nonwhite\u201d<\/a>; a leading African-American history scholar\u2019s discovery that he has 49 percent European ancestry…<\/p>\n

…Is this a sign that we\u2019re swiftly approaching an America in which we all look about the same, and we will dispense with the messy and imprecise exercise of putting one another into racial categories?<\/p>\n

Almost certainly not. Experts agree on that.<\/p>\n

So what are their predictions about the future of race in America? How might the ways in which we think about it and talk about it actually change in our lifetimes? If we\u2019re not postracial\u2014or even close\u2014what are we? And where are we going?<\/p>\n

The only real consensus about the answer to this complicated question is, it depends.<\/p>\n

Here are four very different theories about the evolution of race in America and what exactly the meaningful changes that are within reach will require from all of us.<\/p>\n

1. We could all finally reject the idea that biology divides human beings into five racial groups.<\/strong> But science isn\u2019t enough. It will take a political movement.<\/p>\n

Dorothy Roberts<\/a>, author of Fatal Invention: How Politics, Science, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century<\/a><\/em>, says it\u2019s no longer a secret or even a little-known fact that what we think of as \u201crace\u201d is simply a set of political categories that were created to govern people.<\/p>\n

According to the University of Pennsylvania School of Law professor, the information has been out since the scientists who mapped the human genome declared that racial differences didn\u2019t exist at the genetic level.<\/p>\n

Sure, says Roberts, race \u201cuses various biological demarcations that help distinguish who belongs to one or another [group]. But those\u2014skin color, hair color, the shape of the nose or the lips\u2014are only part of what we use to determine what race someone is.\u201d Thus, the same person\u2019s racial identification could change with time, place and perspective\u2014or even over a lifetime\u2014and is impossible to pin down objectively in the way that good science would require…<\/p>\n

…2. We might develop more accurate ways to describe our identities.<\/strong> But only if the census does it first.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Prewitt<\/a>, author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans<\/a><\/em>, sees an American population rapidly outgrowing what he calls \u201cthe 18th-century, antique races\u201d that currently appear on the census and other government forms.<\/p>\n

But, he says, it\u2019s difficult for people to identify themselves in nuanced ways\u2014and even harder to make accurate social policy\u2014when newspapers, statistics and accountings of disparities all use those federally mandated categories that fail to reflect the details of our actual experiences…<\/p>\n

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

The Future of Race in America The Root 2013-11-05 Jen\u00e9e Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a three-part series. To read part 1, click here. Will we ever abandon stereotypes? Will \u201cpeople of color\u201d act as a group? Here are four possible theories about where we are headed as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[1301,10148,1272,4760,2544,16318,3234],"class_list":["post-34637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-angela-glover-blackwell","tag-dorothy-e-roberts","tag-dorothy-roberts","tag-jenee-desmond-harris","tag-kenneth-prewitt","tag-sheryll-d-cashin","tag-the-root"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34637","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=34637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}