9349: In The Mix.

From USA TODAY…

More people claim black-white heritage

By Haya El, Nasser, USA TODAY

The number of people who say they are black and white has more than doubled in the past decade, a trend demographers say reflects a growing acceptance of a diverse society.

Blacks who reported more than one race grew at a much faster rate from 2000 to 2010 than those who listed themselves as black-only.

The black-white multiracial population showed the highest increase of any multirace combination, jumping more than 133% to 1.8 million from 2000 to 2010, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. People who say they are black and white make up 59% of the USA’s 3.1 million multiracial blacks, up from 45% in 2000. The nation’s black population stands at 42 million.

“It is dramatic,” William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution, says of the trend. “It’s the younger generation of blacks. Young people are not afraid to identify their race.”

The nation’s total multiple-race population went from 6.8 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2010. More than a third are multiracial blacks.

It’s not clear how many of those who identified their multiracial heritage in 2010 did not do so in 2000 — the first time the Census allowed people to designate more than one race. “There’s a significant increase in the number of biracial and multiracial people,” says Kerry Haynie, co-director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences at Duke University.

Even more striking is the doubling of multiracial blacks in the South, a region with a legacy of racial tension. About 1.1 million Southerners now report they are of more than one race.

“It’s quite remarkable in a region… where interracial relationships were frowned upon or punished either by law or by society,” Haynie says. “It’s very much a good change in the sense that African Americans are being seen as equals. … Those invisible barriers are starting to break down.”

Blacks are spreading out across the USA — returning to the South for work or retirement, for example — leaving the rural South and highly segregated city neighborhoods for more diverse suburbs. Those factors may contribute to the spike in black-white identification.

“People coming from other parts of the country don’t have the historical baggage,” Frey says.