11215: Multiracial Search Results.

Google celebrates Father’s Day with a slider gizmo that creates multiracial dads.

11213: Cheerios Crowd Rising.

From The Los Angeles Times…

More Americans consider themselves multiracial

The number of mixed or multiracial people in the United States jumped 6.6% between 2010 and 2012, according to the Census Bureau. Their ranks will only continue to grow, experts say.

By Emily Alpert, Los Angeles Times

The number of Americans who consider themselves multiracial has grown faster than any other racial group nationwide, new Census Bureau data reveal, a sign of slow but momentous shifts in the way that Americans think about race.

Mixed or multiracial people are still just a small slice of the American public, but their numbers jumped 6.6% between 2010 and 2012 — four times as fast as the national population, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Experts say their ranks will only continue to swell.

Researchers give two reasons for the rise: More people are wedding across racial lines than in decades past, bringing about more multiracial children. Roughly 15% of new marriages were interracial in 2010, compared with 6.7% in 1980, the Pew Research Center found last year. Census estimates show that children and teens were nearly three times as likely as adults to be multiracial, with 4.8% of people 18 or younger being identified as two or more races last year.

On top of that, experts say people who were long prodded to think of themselves as only “black” or “white” or “Asian” are becoming more comfortable choosing more than one race.

Mingling of races “has been with us forever in this country, and it has been erased and denied,” said G. Reginald Daniel, professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Today, “that has begun to unravel. That is what you’re seeing with these figures.”

Deanna Rafla-Yuan, a 20-year-old student at UCLA, is an example. Every now and then, Rafla-Yuan is asked to check a box: What race is she? There isn’t a box for “half Egyptian, half Chinese,” she said. Sometimes she answers “Middle Eastern,” sometimes Chinese or African.

“If they let you pick more than one, I’ll pick as many as I can,” Rafla-Yuan said.

The census started allowing Americans to select two or more races only recently, at the turn of this century — an example of how attitudes have lagged behind the reality of mixed race. The country is now led by a president with an African father and a white mother. President Obama identified himself solely as “black” on the last census, but his racially mingled family is a celebrated part of his story.

For African Americans, in particular, the “one drop rule” that historically defined blackness is relaxing. Sixteen years ago, when golfer Tiger Woods dubbed himself “Cablinasian” — Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian — critics said Woods was denying his black heritage, said New York University associate professor of sociology Ann Morning.

“If Tiger Woods said that today, I don’t think he would get the same flak,” Morning said. “There has been a sea change in American thinking…. We’re no longer looking at Barack Obama or Mariah Carey and automatically saying: ‘Those are black people.’”

The new estimates show multiracial people make up 2.4% of the national population, totaling more than 7.5 million people. Many scholars believe it is actually a much bigger group, particularly when it comes to people who have Hispanic roots. The census does not count Hispanics as a race, so people who see themselves as a mix of Hispanic and another race may end up marking off only one race in that section of the census — and not be counted as “two or more races.”

“For mixed Latinos there’s no answer,” said Thomas Lopez, director of Latinas and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry, a project of the nonprofit Multiracial Americans of Southern California. When the Census Bureau ran an experiment three years ago giving people a chance to claim Hispanic along with at least one other race, 6.8% did so.

The new estimates do not count the category of “some other race,” which is also likely to reduce the count of multiracial people. In addition, University of Minnesota sociologists found that even after the census started allowing people to mark more than one race, surprising numbers of children who had parents of different races were not being reported as multiracial — another sign that there are more mixed people than are counted.

Scholars caution the trend does not mean race barriers are collapsing. Marriage is still much more likely between people of the same race. Rafla-Yuan and other mixed students are still dogged by the persistent question: “What are you?”

“Americans are becoming more nuanced in their understanding of race,” said Carolyn Liebler, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. “But I don’t think race is becoming less important in our society.”

11159: Students Bond Through Differences.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Differences give mixed-heritage students a common bond

Increasing numbers of college campus clubs give voice to those who don’t fit into the traditional perceptions of race.

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times

No matter what their ancestry or their skin color, many members of UCLA’s Mixed Student Union say they have repeatedly been asked the same question by classmates and strangers curious about an ambiguous racial appearance: “What are you?”

And that shared experience, they say, helps to bond the otherwise extremely diverse group, which is devoted to the rising numbers of students who are biracial and from mixed ethnic heritages.

Jenifer Logia, 20, a UCLA sophomore who is one of the Mixed Student Union’s directors, said much of campus life is defined by distinct ethnic, religious or social groupings. But none comfortably fits someone like her — from a family that blends Nicaraguan, Filipino and Guamanian heritages.

In contrast, she recalled her first Mixed Student Union meeting: “I looked around the room, and every person was different, every person had a unique background. Yet I felt we all face similar experiences. We all know what it’s like.”

Faced with questions about their backgrounds, “mixed” students are aware that they “don’t quite fit into people’s perceptions of race,” said Logia, who is from Redwood City.

The UCLA group, which started three years ago and has about 50 members, is part of an increasing trend at colleges across the nation to give a social and political voice to these students. The movement began in the 1990s, inspired in part by early activism of Hapa organizations for people with part Asian ancestry. Campus clubs, including those at several UCs, are growing in response to demographics and increases in transracial adoptions.

Beyond social events, the UCLA group has been active in pressing the UC system to change its application forms to include a self-identification category as “mixed.” The form currently allows applicants to check several boxes for race or ethnicity but does not include specific “mixed” or “biracial” ones. The club also has been involved in health issues, by volunteering for genetic tests in case a multiethnic person needs a bone marrow donation that is difficult to match.

The growth of such campus organizations “reflects the kind of world we live in,” said Benjamin D. Reese Jr., a Duke University administrator who is president of the National Assn. for Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “It is the result not only of intermarriage but also reflects the broader, more complex way people, especially young people, think about things like this.”

Biracial college students increasingly refuse to identify themselves as belonging to just one category, even if they feel pressure to do so, he said. For example, his own daughter, with a white mother and an African American father, identifies herself as multiracial and multicultural.

UCLA sophomore Farhan Mithani is the son of immigrants from Burmese Buddhist and Pakistani Muslim families. Raised as a Muslim in a mainly white, Christian town in Texas, he said he did not focus much on his ethnic identity until he enrolled last year at UCLA and was stunned by the diversity.

He attended meetings of the Islamic and Pakistani student clubs, which welcomed him, but he became a leader at the Mixed Student Union. “It was a great way to meet different kinds of people who are passionate about their own cultural aspects and are willing to learn more,” said Mithani, 20.

Such explorations of self-identity often are sparked during college years “when you’ve left the nest and left your hometown and meet people from very different backgrounds,’” said Kendra Danowski, a recent Smith College graduate who co-founded the National Assn. of Mixed Student Organizations in 2010.

Another influence, she and others noted, was the 2008 election of President Obama, who is the child of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. Obama’s personal narrative has encouraged young people to emphasize their biracial backgrounds more, they said.

Off campus, groups such as the Assn. of MultiEthnic Americans and Multiracial Americans of Southern California have been active for decades. The “mixed” movement won a breakthrough in 2000 when the U.S. census allowed people to self-identify with more than one race.

By the 2010 census, the percentage of people who reported more than one grew to nearly 3% of the overall population. However, since the census methodology did not include a separate category for Latino or Hispanic, critics say, the true level of “mixed” Americans was greatly undercounted. The census also experimented in 2010 on a limited basis with questions that listed Latino or Hispanic “origin” alongside white, black, Asian and other designations and allowed more than one to be chosen; in those tests, the mixed-race population rose to as high 6.8%, officials said.

At recent meetings of the UCLA Mixed Student Union, leaders put posters on the walls around the room with handwritten statements that generated lively discussion.

“Sometimes I feel like an outcast in my family,” one placard said. Others stated: “I sometimes feel I can pass for white, but I don’t feel like I really fit it in.” “I feel like a minority no matter where I go.” “Sometimes I think it’s weird my parents got together.”

Students talked about happy blends of family customs and food as well as painful racial rifts between family factions and pressures to choose one side. They told childhood stories, blending humor and sadness, of strangers in supermarkets assuming that their mothers, with a different skin color than the youngsters, must be a baby sitter or, worse, a kidnapper.

Others, some wearing club T-shirts proclaiming “Mixed Love,” spoke about exhilarating and difficult overseas trips to investigate complicated family trees.

“There’s always some conflict, and there’s always some triumphs,” said Matthew Sanchez, 18, a UCLA freshman from Moreno Valley, referring to the life stories recounted by fellow members of the group. Sanchez, whose family combines Mexican, Ivory Coast, African American and Native American roots, said it is a relief to join with other students “who try to embrace all that they are all the time.”