Multi-Racial People becoming the Fastest growing US Group.

Associated Press Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group, wielding an impact on minority growth that challenges traditional notions of race.

The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates. First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population — with millions more believed to be uncounted.

Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in particular the high public profiles of Tiger Woods and President Barack Obama, a self-described "mutt," who are having an effect on those who might self-identify as multiracial.

Population figures as of July 2008 show that California, Texas, New York and Florida had the most multiracial people, due partly to higher numbers of second- and later-generation immigrants who are more likely to "marry out." Measured by percentages, Hawaii ranked first with nearly 1 in 5 residents who were multiracial, followed by Alaska and Oklahoma, both at roughly 4 percent.

Utah had the highest growth rate of multiracial people in 2008 compared to the previous year, a reflection of increasing social openness in a mostly white state.

"Multiracial unions have been happening for a very long time, but we are only now really coming to terms with saying it's OK," said Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in family, race and ethnicity.

"I don't think we've nearly tapped the potential. Millions are yet to come out," she said.

In Middletown, N.J., Kayci Baldwin, 17, said she remembers how her black father and white mother often worried whether she would fit in with the other kids. While she at first struggled with her identity, Baldwin now actively embraces it, sponsoring support groups and a nationwide multiracial teen club of 1,000 that includes both Democrats and Republicans.

"I went to my high school prom last week with my date who is Ecuadoran-Nigerian, a friend who is Chinese-white and another friend who is part Dominican," she said. "While we are a group that was previously ignored in many ways, we now have an opportunity to fully identify and express ourselves."

The latest demographic change comes amid a debate on the role of race in America, complicating conventional notions of minority rights.

Under new federal rules, many K-12 schools next year will allow students for the first time to indicate if they are "two or more races." The move is expected to cause shifts in how test scores are categorized, potentially altering race disparities and funding for education programs.

Five justices of the Supreme Court have signaled they would like to end racial preferences in voting rights and employment cases — a majority that may not change even if Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as the first Hispanic justice. Blacks and Hispanics, meanwhile, are touting a growing minority population and past discrimination in pushing for continued legal protections.

Left out of the discussion are multiracial people, who are counted as minorities but can be hard to define politically and socioeconomically. Demographers say that while some multiracial Americans may feel burdened or isolated by their identity, others quickly learn to navigate it and can flourish from their access to more racial networks.

"The significance of race as we know it in today's legal and government categories will be obsolete in less than 20 years," said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings Institution.

"The rise of mixed-race voters will dilute the racial identity politics that have become prevalent in past elections," he said.

Liebler noted a potential dilemma where a white student who is one-eighth Cherokee applies to college and seeks an admissions preference based on race and disadvantaged status. Should the college give the multiracial student the boost, if one-eighth of his family suffered a past racial harm but seven-eighths of his family were the perpetrators?

"It's a huge question for our legal system and our policies," she said. "Tomorrow we could have a legal case that challenges whether a multiracial person is a minority."

Census data also show:

More than half of the multiracial population was younger than 20 years old, a reflection of declining social stigma as interracial marriages became less taboo.

Interracial marriages increased threefold to 4.3 million since 2000, when Alabama became the last state to lift its unenforceable ban on interracial marriages. (The Supreme Court barred race-based restrictions on marriage in 1967.) About 1 in 13 marriages are mixed race, with the most prevalent being white-Hispanic, white-American Indian and white-Asian.

Due to declining immigration because of legal restrictions and the lackluster economy, the growth rates of the Hispanic and Asian populations slowed last year to 3.2 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively, compared to multiracial people's 3.4 percent. The black population rose at a rate of about 1 percent; the white population only marginally increased.

Currently, census forms allow U.S. residents to check more than one box for their race. But there is no multiracial category, and survey responses can vary widely depending on whether a person considers Hispanic a race or ethnicity.

"It's all about awareness," said Susan Graham, founder and executive director of California-based Project Race, which advocates for a multiracial classification on government forms. "We want a part of the pie chart."

The 2008 census estimates used local records of births and deaths and tax records of people moving within the U.S. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race.

(via The Guardian)

Multiracial Americans surge in number, voice

If you want a good glimpse of the multiracial experience in America, get inside Louie Gong’s skin.

“I’m Nooksack, I’m Chinese, I’m French and I’m Scottish,” Gong tells viewers of a multimedia piece he placed on YouTube to help spark discussion of multiracial issues. “... When I was a kid, I drank my Ovaltine with real milk, and my cousins and I liked our fried rice with salmon.” more here..

Trans-Racial Adoption: Is It REALLY Common?

Angelina Jolie did it. As did Steven Spielberg. So did Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when they were married.

Celebrity aside, what the above individuals have in common is that they are white and adopted black children. Though images of Jolie and her multi-cultural brood are common, statistically, the rate of children being adopted outside of their race is small (only one percent of white women adopt black children.)

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, tens of thousands of nonwhite children are waiting for adoptive families, and many have remained in foster care for at least two years. Of the 525,000 children in foster care, 45 percent are African American.

-->read the full story here.

(Via Black Voices)

Multi-Racial Beauty: Sade Adu

Who She Is:
Soulful Jazz Artist.

Her Life:
Helen Folashade "Sade" Adu was born in Ibadan, Ọyọ State, Nigeria. Her parents, Bisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, and Anne Hayes, an English nurse, met in London and moved to west Africa. Later, when the marriage ran into difficulties, Anne returned to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, England, taking four-year-old Sade and her older brother Banji to live with her parents. Living in Colchester, Essex, Sade read a good deal, developed an interest in fashion, acquired a taste for dancing and listened to soul artists like Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and Marvin Gaye.

In 1982, she joined Ray St. John's band Pride, which also included guitarist Stuart Matthewman, bassist Paul Denman, and drummer Paul Cooke. However, St. John left Pride shortly after, later resurfacing in the band Halo James, and Pride eventually petered out.

The other four members then formed a new group, the eponymous "Sade" and began to write their own material. Keyboardist Andrew Hale joined the band as a keyboard player in mid-1983, and in 1983 she signed a solo deal with Epic Records and sister imprint Portrait Records for the U.S. and Canada until the Portrait label folded in 1986.

In 2005, Sade recorded a new track, "Mum", which appeared on a DVD Voices for Darfur to support charity concert of the same name at the Royal Albert Hall in London, to raise awareness and funding for the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region.[citation needed]


I recommend:
Best Of Sade, 1995. Her hits "Cherish the Day", "No Ordinary Love" and "Smooth Operator" and are SURE to please...

(Via Wikipedia)

As Requirements Change, Just Who Is An Indian?

The struggle for identity among Native Americans isn't just about outsiders; Lompre says other natives have looked down on her for not growing up on the reservation.

"I wish there was a magical mutt nation that you could put people in that could have that identity given to them, but there's not," she says.

Read the full story.

(Via Indigen)

Interracial Love: Should We Have Children?

I am black and I have been dating a white man for several years now, and I feel that we have an incredible relationship. We are honest, loving, and faithful, and we work hard to make sure that both of us are happy. In the past I have dealt with racism from both white and black people, and I worry that if we have kids they will deal with more racial attacks than us. Is it right to bring your children into a situation in which they will deal with such harsh racism? Tanya B. Greenfield, CA, 35

Racism is prevalent through out the world, and if you are mixed you may experience it from either race. Your concern that your children will be faced with more racism than other children should not limit you from having children. No matter what your race, your children are going to face the trials and tribulations of life, and be exposed to prejudice and racism because it is the human nature of the ego to judge others. The key is to teach them who they are as human beings, and that all people are equal because we are all connected to the human condition. We all love, hate, cry, and feel pain. We all live and as Susanna Moodie described, "death, the great equalizer," we all die. Teach your children to judge people by their character not by their color, and instill all the great qualities and lessons you have learned from your own experiences. Choose to live your life ruled by love, and don't allow fear to limit the great family you want to bring into this world.

(Via Black Voices)

Your Other Five 'Bi-Racial' Presidents.

"It has been said that this year was the first time a major political party in the United States nominated a woman or a Black person as its presidential candidate. For women, that is true, but some historians say Barack Obama will not be the nation's first Black president. They say he certainly won't be the first president with Black ancestors--just the first to acknowledge his Blackness.

Which other presidents hid their African ancestry? Well, it's not Bill Clinton, even though the Congressional Black Caucus honored him as the nation's "first Black president" at its 2001 annual awards dinner. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge all had Black ancestors they kept in their genealogical closets, according to historians.
Harding did not deny his African ancestry when Republican leaders called on him to deny his "Negro" history. He said, "How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence?"

Does African ancestry make these men Black? If the bar is the one-drop rule, then yes. The one-drop rule is a historical term used during the Jim Crow era that defines a person with one drop of sub-Saharan-African ancestry as not white and therefore must be Black. If that's the bar, then there have already been other Black presidents, says historian Leroy Vaughn, author of Black People and Their Place in World History.

The first president with African ancestry was Jefferson, who served two terms between 1801 and 1809. Jefferson was described as the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father," as stated in Vaughn's findings. Jefferson also was said to have destroyed all documentation attached to his mother, even going to extremes to seize letters written by his mother to other people.

President Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president, was in office between 1829 and 1837. Vaughn cites an article written in The Virginia Magazine of History that states Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a Black man. The magazine also stated that Jackson's oldest brother had been sold as a slave.

Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, served between 1861 and 1865. Lincoln was said to have been the illegitimate son of an African man, according to Vaughn's findings. Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and his mother allegedly came from an Ethiopian tribe. His heritage fueled so much controversy that Lincoln was nicknamed "Abraham Africanus the First" by his opponents.

President Warren Harding, the 29th president, in office between 1921 and 1923, apparently never denied his ancestry. According to Vaughn, William Chancellor, a professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy. Evidently, Harding had Black ancestors between both sets of parents. Chancellor also said that Harding attended Iberia College, a school founded to educate fugitive slaves.

Coolidge, the nation's 30th president, served between 1923 and 1929 and supposedly was proud of his heritage. He claimed his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor," and in Europe, the name "Moor" was given to all Blacks, just as "Negro" was used in America. It later was concluded that Coolidge was part Black.

(via Your Other "Black" Presidents.)

Why "Beautifully Blended"?

The Title-
During college, my friend Danielle formed a campus organization called the Multi-Racial Student Association in which I was Secretary and later Vice-President. During this time, there was a Bi-Racial Conference held in Canada and the theme of it was "Beautifully Blended". It was about empowerment for people of Mixed Races, or those living in Mixed Race environments, because many bi-racial people grow up on the outskirts of racial divides being stigmatized, or feeling/being misunderstood. I thought it was a good message and thus the title of this blog.

Who is this blog for?
Everyone! I love…well..race! I love talking about it, learning about it and the problems/misconceptions that it forms.

Who is this blog about?
In addition to mixed folks, It also pertains to:

- people who grew up in a multi-cultural environment (ie a white child adopted by two black parents; a Hispanic girl who grew up in a predominately white area and went to a predominately white prep school; etc.)

- Immigration. Being new to a new land and having to forge together cultures.

- people who are: in an interracial relationship; by products of interracial parents or one interracial parent; has an interracial child.

- Native American Issues.

What else?
I will also be relating news, info, bits and pieces about cultures around the world and issues within certain cultures. I want to share personal stories, debate, share - so i’ll have an email address where you send in questions, comments, concerns, answers. ya digg? :)

About Me.

lived, breathed race and gender politics in college. continues to educate herself on race issues and how they affect our world. she has specifically made an effort to shed light on the growing Bi/Multi-Racial Population in the US and the "post-racial" movement to racial equality but is intrigued by all cultures. is no expert by any means. just a girl with big, hippie, 'one love' dreams.

hi. my name is Marenna Nicole.