COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The crop of students moving through college now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: The country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage.
One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. Experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.
Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle Lopez-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”
They are also using the strength in their growing numbers to affirm roots that were once portrayed as tragic or pitiable.
“I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” said Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the group. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.”
Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.
Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans. And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.
Rainier Spencer, author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” says, “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race; it’s a new tribe,” he said. “A new balkanization of race.”
But for many of the University of Maryland students, that is not the point. They are asserting their freedom to identify as they choose.
“All society is trying to tear you apart and make you pick a side,” Wood said. “I want us to have a say.”
Americans mostly think of themselves in singular racial terms. Witness President Barack Obama’s answer to the race question on the 2010 census: Although his mother was white and his father was black, Obama checked only one box, black.
Starting with the 2000 census, Americans were allowed to mark one or more races, and 7 million people — about 2.4 percent of the population — reported being more than one race.
According to estimates from the Census Bureau, the mixed-race population has grown by roughly 35 percent since 2000.
The faces of mixed-race America are not just on college campuses. They are in politics, business and sports. And the ethnically ambiguous are especially ubiquitous in movies, television shows and advertising.
Student groups like the one at Maryland, offering peer support and activism, are more common. Such a club would not have existed a generation ago. “It’s kind of a taking-back in a way, taking the reins,” Lopez-Mullins said. “We don’t always have to let it get us down,” she added, referring to the question multiracial people have heard for generations.
“The No.1 reason why we exist is to give people who feel like they don’t want to choose a side, that don’t want to label themselves based on other people’s interpretations of who they are, to give them a place, that safe space,” she said. Lopez-Mullins is Chinese and Peruvian on one side, and white and American Indian on the other.
That safe space did not exist when Warren Kelley enrolled in 1974. Though his mother is Japanese and his father is African-American, he had basically one choice. “I was black and proud to be black,” Kelley said. “There was no notion that I might be multiracial. Or that the public discourse on college campuses recognized the multiracial community.”
Almost 40 years later, Kelley is the assistant vice president for student affairs at the university and faculty adviser to the multiracial club, and he is often in awe of the change on this campus.
When the group was founded in 2002, Kelley said, “There was an instant audience.”
By the 2000 census, Kelley’s notion of his racial identity had evolved; he modified his race officially on the form. After a lifetime of checking black, he checked Asian and black.
“As I moved into adulthood and got a professional job, I started to respect my parents more and see the amount of my mom’s culture that’s reflected in me,” he said. “Society itself also moved.”
FINDING CAMARADERIE
The multiracial group at Maryland, a public university with 26,500 undergraduates, holds weekly meetings, in addition to hosting movie nights, dinners, parties and, occasionally, hosts broadcasts on YouTube.
Not all of its 100 or so members consider themselves mixed race, and the club welcomes everyone.
At a meeting in the fall, David Banda, who is Hispanic, and Julicia Coleman, who is black, discussed the frustrations of being an interracial couple, especially in their hometown, Upper Marlboro, Md. Banda and Coleman are thinking about having children someday. “One of the main reasons I joined is to see the struggles mixed people go through,” he said, “so we can be prepared when that time comes.”
Though Lopez-Mullins sees herself largely in nonracial terms, it was not long before she came to detest what was the most common question put to her in grade school, even from friends.
“What are you?” they asked, and “Where are you from?” They were fascinated by her father, a Latino with Asian roots, and her mother with the long blond hair, who was mostly European in ancestry, although mixed with some Cherokee and Shawnee.
“Now when people ask what I am, I say, ‘How much time do you have?’ ” she said. “Race will not automatically tell you my story.”
At one meeting, Wood shared that “until I was 8 years old, I thought I was white. My mother and aunt sat me down and said the guy I’d been calling Dad was not my father. I started crying. And she said, ‘Your real father is black.’ “
Wood’s mother, Catherine Bandele, who is white, and her biological father split up before she was born. Facing economic troubles and resistance from her family , Bandele gave her daughter up for adoption to a couple who had requested a biracial baby. But after two weeks, she changed her mind. “I had to fight to get her back, but I got her,” Bandele said. “And we’re so proud of Laura.”
Eventually Wood’s closest relatives softened, embracing her.
But more distant relatives never came around. “It hurts a lot because I don’t even know my father’s side of the family.”
Wood has searched the Internet for her father, to no avail.
“Being in MBSA, it really helps with that,” she said. “Finding a group of people who can accept you for who you are and being able to accept yourself, to just be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m OK just the way I am!’ — honestly, I feel that it’s a blessing.”
There is a wider debate among mixed-race people about what the long-term goals of their advocacy should be, both on campus and off.
“I don’t want a colorblind society at all,” Wood said. “I just want both my races to be acknowledged.”
Lopez-Mullins countered, “I want mine not to matter.”