{"id":52243,"date":"2017-03-08T19:32:11","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T19:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52243"},"modified":"2017-06-12T14:58:42","modified_gmt":"2017-06-12T14:58:42","slug":"why-mixed-race-americans-will-not-save-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52243","title":{"rendered":"Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save The Country<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed<\/a>
\nNational Public Radio<\/a>
\n2017-03-08<\/p>\n

Alexandros Orphanides<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nWhat do mixed-race Americans mean for the future of racism?
\nRoberto Westbrook\/Getty Images<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Americans like to fantasize that a mixed-race future will free them from the clutches of racism.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

If the election results are a vindication for those championing the politics of President Trump<\/a>, the demographic trends point in the opposite direction. Today, the United States’ mixed-race population is growing three times faster<\/a> than the general population, and optimism about the impact that mixed-race people can have on a racially-divided country abounds.<\/p>\n

“What Biracial People Know<\/a>,” a recent op-ed in The New York Times<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

But this hope that a mixed-race future will result in a paradise of interracial and ethnically-ambiguous babies<\/a> is misleading. It presents racism as passive \u2014 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<\/a> 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…<\/p>\n

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

Americans like to fantasize that a mixed-race future will free them from the clutches of racism.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,394,20],"tags":[26379,14788,286,2309,2833,2113,5161,2112],"class_list":["post-52243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-alexandros-orphanides","tag-code-switch","tag-diana-sanchez","tag-national-public-radio","tag-npr","tag-tanya-hernandez","tag-tanya-k-hernandez","tag-tanya-kateri-hernandez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52243","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=52243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54159,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52243\/revisions\/54159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}