growing up mixed race essay

The loneliness of being mixed race in America

“I had to figure out the language to describe myself”: 6 mixed-race people on shifting how they identify.

by Vox First Person

This is part one of Vox First Person’s exploration of multiracial identity in America. Read part two here and part three here .

In 1993, the cover of Time bore a digitally rendered face, a supposed “mix of several races” that created a lightly tinted brown-skinned woman. “The New Face of America,” the headline proclaimed, heralded a future where interracial marriages held the promise of a raceless society of beige-colored people.

Almost 30 years later, the United States is getting ready to inaugurate its first female vice president, who is of Black and South Asian descent; the nation has already sworn in its first multiracial and Black president, Barack Obama. By 2013, 10 percent of all babies had parents who were different races from each other, and the number is only growing : In a 2015 Pew study, nearly half of all multiracial Americans were under 18 years old.

Demographically at least, Time’s cover story seems to have gotten it right. But inherent to their vision was a kind of multiracial utopia free of racial strife. This is a popular modern understanding of mixed-race identity. But multiracial people have long been targets of fear and confusion, from suspicions of mixed people “passing” as white under the Jim Crow system to accusations of not embracing one’s “race” enough — something Kamala Harris experienced on multiple sides this past election. Research has shown that, even today, monoracial people experience mixed people as more “cognitively demanding” than fellow monoracial people.

As the mixed population grows in size, it will likely continue to serve as projections for people to sort through America’s complex race relations. But what about the experiences of those who are actually multiracial? Studies illustrate a group of people who struggle with questions of identity and where to fit in, often feeling external pressures to “choose” a side. There’s evidence that mixed-race people have higher rates of mental health issues and substance abuse , too.

• On being “ethnically ambiguous”

As Black Lives Matter protests swept the country in 2020, the issue of race came to the forefront of the national conversation. Everywhere, Americans engaged in deep discussions around the experience of Black and other non-white people in our country, including how race impacts the daily lives of all Americans in unequal ways.

Last year, Vox asked people of mixed descent to tell us how they felt about race and if the language about their identities had shifted over time. Among the 70 responses submitted, we read stories of people with vastly different experiences depending on their racial makeup, how their parents raised them, where they lived and where they wound up living, and, perhaps most importantly, how they look. But over and over again, we heard from respondents that they frequently felt isolated, confused about their identity, and frustrated when others attempted to dole them out into specific boxes.

Here are six selected stories, edited for concision and length.

Michael Lahanas-Calderón, 24, based in Berkeley, California

I’ve found terms to identify myself that feel somewhat comfortable but also somewhat unsatisfying. I don’t really know how to account for my mother’s background, which at best could be described as mestizo   Colombian. Using the term “person of color” to account for it feels strange, just given what I see when I look in the mirror. But I also feel a kind of obligation not to let the complex mix of identities I inherited from my mother disappear into the whiteness inherited from my father. I don’t really know where that leaves me, to be honest, beyond using broader terms like Latino, Colombian-American, white-passing, mixed, or multiracial. 

Race didn’t come up a lot when I was growing up in suburban Ohio. Obviously, there was a Latino population there, but it wasn’t really a huge part of my life, beyond my mother in our home. It wasn’t like the way that Miami has the strong Cuban-American community. It was almost more an issue of whiteness and skin color being associated with some of those terms, which sort of changed the dynamic depending on the environment because I’m white-passing even with like a tan.

My mom went to great lengths to make sure that I could succeed in the US. When I was still quite little, my Spanish skills were actually developing at a better pace than my English ones. That is, until someone suggested to her that if my English skills didn’t improve, I would be at risk of falling behind the other kids and need speech therapy. This really spurred her to take serious action. She read countless books to me every night in English until I was a bookworm who sounded as Midwestern as the rest of my neighbors. To this day, out of all the things she remembers about my academic career, my high marks on English tests are some of the ones she’s proudest of. But I would be remiss if I did not mention the efforts of my mother to teach me about her and my identity, homeland, and culture, too. She always taught me to be fiercely proud of my blended heritage, and to never be afraid to share it with others.

At times it was pretty easy how well I had adjusted to suburban Ohio. I didn’t really think about the consequences of it until I was a little bit older, because it just got easier to not show that heritage. The shift away from that started in college, which was a much more progressive environment. I was sort of encouraged to explore that identity. We had a Latinx affinity group on campus and I think at times it was a little bit difficult for me to relate to others in the group. They were always welcoming, and it wasn’t that I didn’t feel included, but I think it was more that their experiences were so different from mine. The experience of being a Salvadoran American who is brown and grew up in, say, San Francisco with a pretty solid Latino community around them felt so wildly different from a white-passing, half-Colombian, half-American person growing up in suburban Ohio. We didn’t really have a lot in common beyond the shared language.

It’s always been important to me to recognize both parts of my heritage. But I suppose the only one that really felt like it needed exploring was my Colombian side, because I was always within the dominant side of mainstream American culture. I think that at times it almost felt easier, like everyone encourages you to kind of fall into that mainstream culture and assimilate. If you don’t have that kind of connection to a first-gen or community of immigrants who are actually actively forming a social group, it’s very easy to let one side of your heritage — the one that’s not the dominant culture — slip away. It’s kind of one of my regrets, to be honest, and I’ve made an effort as I’ve gotten older to embrace that again.

Abbey White, 29, based in Brooklyn, New York

Right now, and this may change, I identify as a mixed-race Black person. But initially, I identified as bi-racial. I felt like growing up in the environment that I was in, in Cleveland, it was very clear to me that I was Black and I was mixed, but when I moved to New York, that dramatically changed. I got a lot of people not really being able to recognize me on sight. I’ve had to deal with an ethnic ambiguity that I never had to deal with before. So I had to figure out the language that I wanted to use to describe myself.  

I think part of that stems from the fact that when I grew up, my dad, who is Black, wasn’t really in my life, so a lot of my Black identity came from the Black people that my mother worked with and the neighborhood that I lived in. But also, my family was so white and, frankly, for as much as I love my mother, racist. My grandfather would not be in the same room with her the entire nine months she was pregnant. He couldn’t even hold me for the first couple months of my life.

I sort of remember realizing my race when I was late elementary school age and I had gotten in trouble at my grandmother’s house. And I remember putting, like, baby powder on my skin and like trying to convince myself for whatever reason that I would not be as in trouble if I looked more like my mom. 

I also felt this struggle to feel connected with Black people when I was growing up.   I felt often like a conditional Black person, and I think there are some mixed-race Black folks that have a lot of anger about that. When I was younger, I did. But I’ve also come to understand that the idea of being “authentically” Black is literally a response to things like the one drop rule and this white supremacist idea of how we define race and mixed race, and Black identity being tied to sexual violence. So this reclamation of what it means to be Black is a byproduct of racism.  

There are also privileges I have that other non-mixed Black people don’t. I am lighter-skinned. I might not be white-passing, but I can pass as something else. Because for some people, I’m “racially ambiguous,” what has happened is I have found myself in situations with white people who feel very comfortable saying things that are not okay. It’s this sort of, “you’re not like other girls.” Like my grandfather wouldn’t even be in the same room with my mom, but then once I came into this world and they realized, “oh, she’s a baby and race has nothing to do with this,” it wasn’t, “we see Black people as human beings and we respect them.” It became: “You’re our Black child. And you’re the exception to the rule. ”

It’s weird being in places with people who try to make you the exception to the rule, and it makes me want to double down. Because I’m not an exception. I think that that has really made me embrace this idea of I am Black. I’m mixed, but I’m Black. 

Josh S., 24, based in Brooklyn, New York

I identify as multiracial. There hasn’t really been another term that’s resonated with me in the same way. I like breaking it down a little — my family is white, and then on my dad’s side, I have family in Japan. I think the change in identity from when I was younger is that I actually have the language to describe who I am, which I lacked back then. I only knew that I wasn’t wholly white, but that it was thrown into pretty sharp contrast because I grew up in a town that was like 99 percent white.

Being thought of as Asian was definitely foisted onto me. Because I did relatively well in school, there was a lot of like, “Oh, the Asian got a good math score.” There was something that felt off about that. Later I realized that, well, my race has absolutely nothing to do with how I perform in school. They were creating this entire persona and this cruel game out of where my grandmother came from. Toward the end of high school, there was just this resentment of that part of myself. Not necessarily that I wanted to stop being mixed race, but that I just kind of wanted being treated differently to go away.

Going to college in Washington, DC, gave me that opportunity. Hardly anyone could tell that I was like anything but white. And so for a couple of years there, I got to experience the world without micro-aggressions and the casual racism that I had growing up. I was just able to coast by on whiteness, which was, coming from where I was, a bit of a relief. Of course, this was an environment that I didn’t fit into for a number of other reasons, even if I could present and act white. There was a substantial difference from my rural, more middle-class upbringing as opposed to the white wealthy upbringing many of my peers had. Even being white, it was a different kind of white.

• Kamala Harris, multiracial identity, and the fantasy of a post-racial America

I think after a couple of years of wrestling with, “I’m never going to be white enough or rich enough to fit in with this,” brought me back to trying to reflect more on my grandma and her heritage and my father’s experience. My father identifies as a person of color, but his response to it, especially as he had children, was to sort of push it to the side. For all intents and purposes, my brother and I were raised with no connection to being Japanese, and he didn’t really do anything to encourage it. His experience growing up in rural Minnesota being called every racial slur under the sun, I think there’s trauma there. I think my parents operated to try and raise us to have a better and easier life.

How I identify, and being non-binary, it’s something I’m grappling with constantly. This isn’t to say that my experience is harder than other people’s. But there is that constant vigilance to not, you know, slip into comfortable. As a masculine, white-passing person, life would probably go by fine for me. It’s having that self-awareness and continuously working on the awareness to keep pushing against white supremacy and patriarchy wherever it shows up.

Thema Reed, 27, based in Austin, Texas

I consider myself to be Chicana and Black. On my dad’s side, I’m what a lot of New Mexican people would call Hispanic, which is a pretty generic term. And then my mom is a Black woman who was adopted and raised by a white woman when she was 14. She is still really connected to her Black roots, and we have a big Black family that we’re so very connected to. But there’s kind of a few different layers in there.

I’ve always identified as both, but I definitely felt a lot of pressure to identify or present myself in different ways throughout my life. I’ve heard some Black people say, “Well, mixed people aren’t actually Black.” And I think that a lot of that comes from a feeling that mixed people can maybe turn off their Blackness sometimes or that mixed people have features that may give them privileges. I would also hear things like, “Oh, well, it’s a shame that Thema is not more light-skinned.” It’s like, I’m not Black enough, but I’m simultaneously too Black, you know?

At the same time, people who maybe aren’t Black or who aren’t mixed look at me as a Black woman. It is hard for me to get people to understand that just because I don’t look Chicana doesn’t mean that I’m not. In New Mexico, Chicana culture is such a big thing there, I think that most people in New Mexico identify with it to some extent. So I didn’t face as much judgment for not being “Chicana enough” as I did until I moved away.

When I was in college, I went to Howard, and that really changed the way that I was able to identify with the Black part of me. I had never been in a place where there were so many Black people that looked so many different ways. There were so many mixes, and with so many different countries, so many different socioeconomic backgrounds. I really felt really accepted and loved for the first time.

I think I kind of really grew up as a chameleon and I learned how to code switch and communicate with a lot of different people when I was really young. I think that there’s something special about that. But I think it does come with a cost. I really experienced it from both sides — I’ve experienced colorism, I’ve experienced people saying, “Well, you’re not Black and you’re not Mexican enough.” I feel really strongly connected to both, but at the same time, sometimes I feel like I belong to neither.

Jaymes Hanna, 35, based in Washington, DC

I am a mix of Brazilian and Lebanese descent. I think my identity is very much like a Venn diagram, where I keep moving around those various circles and the overlap keeps changing all the time. The one thing I have kept constant is some sense of mixedness. If I have to put myself in a commonly recognized box, it would be Latino. 

I grew up in inner-city Philly, in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. I very much connected to those communities and those cultures and tried to do everything to highlight my Latino-ness — from clothes to manner of speech. My father being Lebanese, I think he experienced some prejudices when he moved to the country, given the long history with our region, and was never eager for me to play up that part of my heritage and culture. So growing up in a predominantly Brazilian household, it was just easier to move forward with that, which is another reason why I think I’ve identified as Latino more predominantly.  

As I got older and progressed into the engineering world, I sort of shifted. That was probably the first time I was in a very white-dominant setting. I did a lot of stuff to play my Latinoness down until I left for the social impact field where I thought I could sort of reconnect with the Latino pieces of me .

Even now, there’s elements of my identity that don’t get represented so clearly to someone who sees me as an early- to mid-career professional, especially if they’re white. I do get, “Oh, you’re not bad!” especially if I talk about being Latino, growing up in that neighborhood and going to an inner-city public school where I’m treated a certain kind of way by teachers and the powers that be. It’s always frustrating or disappointing because when I hear that, that very much means to me that you don’t see me. Like you want to be comfortable with me in a certain box. You’re not interested in the actual things that have shaped me to be who I am today.  

I’ve been called ethnically ambiguous by more than one person. It makes me feel like a blank slate sometimes. But in some ways, it is kind of cool because I feel like if someone’s trying to identify with you or call you one of them, that creates openness to actually connect with people.

Kristina, 43, based in Los Angeles, California

I identify proudly as a multiracial woman and as a woman of color. This is because the world sees me as a woman of color. I’ve never been perceived as a white woman.

I only recently became confident that I could just, in some circumstances, say “I’m Filipino.” I don’t always have to qualify the basis of my identity to everybody. That is very new for me because people always felt the need to say, “You’re only half,” or remind me that I’m also white . But as I’ve gotten older, and just with more recent conversations about race, I’ve come to realize that I don’t care anymore. I am Filipino, I am white. I don’t always have to say all of my mixed percentages to everybody.

When I was younger, I would always qualify everything by saying, “I am half white.” I didn’t want people to think I was trying to co-opt any identities or infringe on anyone’s spaces. In college, friends would take me to Filipino student group meetings, and I just always felt like an imposter, like I didn’t have a right to be there. I don’t know if that’s true or not to this day. I still don’t quite know my place sometimes. I just know I feel at home in the Filipino community with my Filipino family.

At the same time, I didn’t want to feel like that was denying my mom. Even though I don’t identify as a white person, I was raised by a white mom who has a beautiful history and life too. So I don’t like to discount that.

I sort of loathe the inevitable reductive discussions that pop up whenever a multiracial person comes up, whether that’s Kamala Harris or Bruno Mars . I just wish the world knew they don’t get to tell multiracial people how we identify. Each of our own experiences is incredibly unique, depending on who we are raised by, where we were raised, how we look.

I also wish people would stop portraying mixed people as so tragic. I grew up in the ’90s and every discussion about it was about how we were so tortured. It almost seemed like they were putting it out there as a cautionary tale about having multiracial children. But for me, most of the “negative” aspects of being mixed were external, not internal. I absolutely would not change being mixed for the world.

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Challenges and benefits of growing up mixed-race

“Matthew, why can’t you speak Arabic?”

“Matt, why can’t you ‘talk Tagalog’ like your cousins?”

These are phrases I often heard growing up as a mixed-race child when I traveled abroad to visit my extended family. As a son of immigrants from third world countries, I’ve been removed from the lifestyles and experiences of my cousins, nieces, nephews: catching trains and buses in movement, selling soap to make some pocket cash and performing manual labor (scrubbing tables and working on rural farms). For them, there is little to no opportunity for scholarly activity. 

As a first-generation American, I’ve mostly seamlessly adapted to the American way of life: relying on machine household appliances, driving to places in our family’s car and educating myself through technology. My point is that growing up as a mixed-race child in the United States is far more comfortable than growing up mixed race in my father’s and mother’s home countries (Egypt and the Philippines, respectively); I am thankful for this situation. Furthermore, growing up in Hawaii –– a “melting pot” of diverse cultures –– has enhanced my quality of life substantially, especially since I don’t fully experience racism when traveling to other states or abroad.  

It would be a lie if I were to say that there aren’t certain benefits that are part of the “package deal” of existing with a mixed-race identity. One such advantage is that many mixed-race individuals, in my experience, are like social chameleons and can blend into cultures fairly easily because of our unique phenotypes. For instance, I face little trouble receiving invitations to various Stanford cultural group events because, I appear ethnically ambiguous –– almost as if I claim a part of every heritage. As a result of this assumption, mixed-race people tend to relate to others fairly easily (hence the “Barack Obama effect”). 

But like with every good thing, there is a flip side, a counterargument, another dimension. For instance, when I travel back to my parents’ home countries, I feel cut off from my non-English-speaking family. There exists a cause for limited communication: the language barrier. Additionally, people constantly believe that I am not American and ask me, “What are you?” (what they’re really asking is, “What ethnic box do you fit into?”). This question fails to account for the fact that I am much more than my ethnicity: I am also a friend, a son, a brother, a student. And in the realm of being a student, finding a campus community on Stanford’s campus that I can claim as my own tends to be incredibly difficult. In all honesty, at times I doubt whether or not I belong in PASU (Pilipino-American Student Union) or ASAS (Arab Students Association at Stanford). 

Nonetheless, these are simply my experiences growing up and currently living as a mixed-race identifying person. The mixed-race experience deviates widely depending on the age, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status of each person. All in all, however, although growing mixed race is still a double-edged sword, I have learned to accept myself and my identity, as well as their opportunities and their challenges. 

Contact Matthew Mettias at mmettias ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Matthew ("Matt") Mettias '23 writes for the Grind. He is from Aiea, Hawaii. His hobbies include taking care of his Chihuahua puppy; playing pickup basketball; and listening to Jawaiian, rap/hip-hop and 1960s music. Contact him at mmettias 'at' stanford.edu.

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The Biracial Advantage

People of mixed race occupy a unique position in the u.s. their experiences of both advantage and challenge may reshape how all americans perceive race..

By Jennifer Latson published May 7, 2019 - last reviewed on December 21, 2020

One of the most vexing parts of the multiracial experience, according to many who identify as such, is being asked, "What are you?" There's never an easy answer. Even when the question is posed out of demographic interest rather than leering curiosity, you're typically forced to pick a single race from a list or to check a box marked "other."

Long before she grew up to be the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle wrestled with the question on a 7th-grade school form. "You had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic, or Asian," Markle wrote in a 2015 essay. "There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up but not knowing what to do. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other—and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. 'Because that's how you look, Meghan.' "

The mother of all demographic surveys, the U.S. census, began allowing Americans to report more than one race only in 2000. Since then, however, the number of people ticking multiple boxes has risen dramatically.

Today, mixed-race marriages are at a high, and the number of multiracial Americans is growing three times as fast as the population as a whole, according to the Pew Research Center. Although multiracial people account for only an estimated 7 percent of Americans today, their numbers are expected to soar to 20 percent by 2050.

This population growth corresponds to an uptick in research about multiracials, much of it focused on the benefits of being more than one race. Studies show that multiracial people tend to be perceived as more attractive than their monoracial peers, among other advantages. And even some of the challenges of being multiracial—like having to navigate racial identities situationally—might make multiracial people more adaptable, creative, and open-minded than those who tick a single box, psychologists and sociologists say.

Of course, there are also challenges that don't come with a silver lining. Discrimination , for one, is still pervasive. For another, many mixed-race people describe struggling to develop a clear sense of identity—and some trace it to the trouble other people have in discerning their identity. In a recent Pew survey, one in five multiracial adults reported feeling pressure to claim just a single race, while nearly one in four said other people are sometimes confused about "what they are." By not fitting neatly into one category, however, researchers say the growing number of multiracial Americans may help the rest of the population develop the flexibility to see people as more than just a demographic—and to move away from race as a central marker of identity.

Hidden Figures

In 2005, Heidi Durrow was struggling to find a publisher for her novel about a girl who, like her, had a Danish mom and an African-American dad. At the time, no one seemed to think there was much of an audience for the biracial coming-of-age tale. Three years later, when Barack Obama was campaigning for president and the word biracial seemed to be everywhere, the literary landscape shifted. Durrow's book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky , came out in 2010 and quickly became a bestseller.

How did an immense multiracial readership manage to fly under the publishing world's radar? The same way it's remained largely invisible since America was founded: Multiracial people simply weren't talking about being multiracial. "There's a long, forgotten history of mixed-race people having achieved great things, but they had to choose one race over the other. They weren't identified as multiracial," Durrow says. "Obama made a difference because he talked about it openly and in the mainstream."

When Durrow's father was growing up in the '40s and '50s, race relations were such that he felt the best bet for an African-American man was to get out of the country altogether. He joined the Air Force and requested a post in Germany. There he met Durrow's mother, a white Dane who was working on the base as a nanny. When they married, in 1965, they did so in Denmark. Interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the U.S.

Durrow grew up with a nebulous understanding of her own identity. During her childhood , her father never told her he was black; she knew his skin was brown and his facial features were different from her mother's, but that didn't carry a specific meaning for her. Neither he nor her mother talked about race. It wasn't until Durrow was 11, and her family moved to the U.S., that the significance of race in America became clear to her. "When people asked 'What are you?' I wanted to say, 'I'm American,' because that's what we said overseas," she recalls. "But what they wanted to know was: 'Are you black or are you white?'"

Unlike at the diverse Air Force base in Europe, race seemed to be the most salient part of identity in the U.S. "In Portland, I suddenly realized that the color of your skin has something to do with who you are," she says. "The color of my eyes and the color of my skin were a bigger deal than the fact that I read a lot of books and I was good at spelling."

And since the rules seemed to dictate that you could be only one race, Durrow chose the one other people were most likely to pick for her: black. "It was unsettling because I felt as if I was erasing a big part of my identity, being Danish, but people thought I should say I was black, so I did. But I was trying to figure out what that meant."

She knew that a few other kids in her class were mixed, and while she felt connected to them, she respected their silence on the subject. There were, she came to realize, compelling reasons to identify as black and only black. The legacy of America's "one-drop rule"—the idea that anyone with any black ancestry was considered black—lingered. So, too, did the trope of the "tragic mulatto," damaged and doomed to fit into neither world.

Being black, however, also meant being surrounded by a strong, supportive community. The discrimination and disenfranchisement that had driven Durrow's father out of the U.S. had brought other African Americans closer together in the struggle for justice and equality. "There's always been solidarity among blacks to advance our rights for ourselves," Durrow says. "You have to think of this in terms of a racial identity that means something to a collective, to a community."

Today, Durrow still considers herself entirely African American. But she also thinks of herself as entirely Danish. Calling herself a 50-50 mix, she says, would imply that her identity is split down the middle. "I'm not interested in mixed-race identity in terms of percentages," she explains. "I don't feel like a lesser Dane or a lesser African American. I don't want to feel like I'm a person made of pieces."

She's always longed for a sense of community with other multiracial people who share her feeling of being multiple wholes. When she sees other mixed-race families in public, she often gives them a knowing nod, but mostly gets blank stares in return. "I definitely feel a kinship with other mixed-race people, but I understand when people don't," she says. "I wonder if that's rooted in the fact that they didn't know they were allowed to be more than one." It's true that the majority of Americans with a mixed racial background—61 percent, according to a 2015 Pew survey—don't identify as multiracial at all. Half of those report identifying as the race they most closely resemble.

It's also true that racial identity can change. The majority of multiracial people polled by Pew said their identity had evolved over the years: About a third had gone from thinking of themselves as multiple races to just one, while a similar number had moved in the opposite direction, from a single race to more than one.

The New Face of Flexibility

Because she craved an opportunity to connect with other multiracial Americans, Durrow created one: the Mixed Remixed Festival. In 2014, the comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, both of whom have a black father and a white mother, were named the festival's storytellers of the year. Like Durrow's book, their Emmy-winning show, Key & Peele , had found an immense audience. They credit the show's network, Comedy Central, for recognizing them as biracial—not just black—and giving them a platform to tell that story. "The only thing they ever got annoying about was, 'More biracial stuff!' It was never, 'Make it blacker,' " Key said when the pair accepted their award.

"Comedy is something one relates to, and in discussing the mixed experience, we found a comedy that doesn't speak just to mixed people but to everybody," Peele said. "It's about being in an in-between place and being more complex than you are given credit for." As multiracial people become more visible and more vocal in mainstream America, researchers are paying more attention . And they're finding that being mixed-race carries many advantages along with its challenges.

This complexity is itself both an advantage and a disadvantage, says Sarah Gaither, a social psychologist at Duke University. Being a mix of races can lead to discrimination of a different kind than single-race minorities face, since multiracial people often endure stereotyping and rejection from multiple racial groups. "My research, and the work of others, argues that there are benefits and costs at the same time," Gaither says. "Multiracials face the highest rate of exclusion of any group. They're never black enough, white enough, Asian enough, Latino enough."

It's surprising, then, that more people in this group say being multiracial has been an advantage rather than a disadvantage—19 percent vs. 4 percent, according to a Pew survey. And Gaither's research found that those who identify as multiracial, instead of just one race, report higher self-esteem , greater well-being, and increased social engagement.

One advantage of embracing mixedness, she says, is the mental flexibility that multiracial people develop when, from a young age, they learn to switch seamlessly between their racial identities. In a 2015 study, she found that multiracial people demonstrated greater creative problem-solving skills than monoracials—but only after they'd been primed to think about their multiple identities beforehand.

These benefits aren't limited to mixed-race people, though. People of one race also have multiple social identities, and when reminded of this fact in Gaither's study, they, too, performed better on creativity tests. "We said, 'You're a student, an athlete , a friend.' When you remind them that they belong to multiple groups, they do better on these tasks," she says. "It's just that our default approach in society is to think of a person as one single identity." What gives multiracial people a creative edge may simply be that they have more practice navigating between multiple identities.

Being around multiracial people can boost creativity and agile thinking for monoracials, too, according to research by University of Hawaii psychologist Kristin Pauker. Humans are compartmentalizers by nature, and labeling others by social category is part of how we make sense of our interactions, she says.

Race is one such category. Humans have historically relied on it to decide whether to categorize someone as "in-group" or "out-group." Racially ambiguous faces, however, foil this essentialist approach. And that's a good thing, Pauker's research shows.

She found that just being exposed to a more diverse population—as often happens, say, when students move from the continental U.S. to Hawaii for college—leads to a reduction in race essentialism. It also softens the sharp edges of the in-group and out-group divide, leading to more egalitarian attitudes and an openness to people who might otherwise have been considered part of the out-group.

The students whose views evolved the most, however, were those who'd gone beyond just being exposed to diversity and had built diverse acquaintance networks as well. "We're not necessarily talking about their close friends—but people they've started to get to know," she says. What does that show us? "To change racial attitudes, it's not only being in a diverse environment and soaking things up that makes the difference: You have to formulate relationships with out-group members."

The Averageness Advantage

The cognitive benefits of being biracial may stem from navigating multiple identities, but some researchers argue that multiracial people enjoy innate benefits as well—most notably, and perhaps controversially, the tendency to be perceived as better looking on average than their monoracial peers.

In a 2005 study, Japanese and white Australians found the faces of half-Japanese, half-white people the most attractive, compared with those of either their own race or other single races. White college students in the U.K., meanwhile, were shown more than 1,200 Facebook photos of black, white, and mixed-race faces in a 2009 study and rated the mixed-race faces the most attractive. Only 40 percent of the images used in the study were of mixed-race faces, but they represented nearly three-quarters of those that made it into the top 5 percent by attractiveness rating.

More recently, a 2018 study by psychologists Elena Stepanova at the University of Southern Mississippi and Michael Strube at Washington University in St. Louis found that a group of white, black, Asian, and Latino college students rated mixed-race faces the most attractive, followed by single-race black faces.

Stepanova wanted to know which of two prevailing theories could better explain this finding: the "averageness" hypothesis, which holds that humans prefer a composite of all faces to any specific face, or the "hybrid vigor" theory, that parents from different genetic backgrounds produce healthier—and possibly more attractive—children.

In the study, Stepanova adjusted the features and skin tones of computer-generated faces to create a range of blends, and found that the highest attractiveness ratings went to those that were closest to a 50-50 blend of white and black. These faces had "almost perfectly equal Afrocentric and Eurocentric physiognomy," she says, along with a medium skin tone. Both darker- and lighter-than-average complexions were seen as less attractive.

These results seem to support the theory that we prefer average faces because they correspond most closely to the prototype we carry in our minds: the aggregated memory of what a face should look like. That would help explain why we favor a 50-50 mix of features and skin tones—especially since that doesn't always correspond to a 50-50 mix of genes, Stepanova says. "The genes that are actually expressed can vary," she says.

A 2005 study led by psychologist Craig Roberts at Scotland's University of Stirling, however, supports the hybrid vigor hypothesis—that genetic diversity makes people more attractive by virtue of their "apparent healthiness." The study didn't focus on multiracial people per se, but on people who'd inherited a different gene variant from each parent in a section of DNA that plays a key role in regulating the immune system—as opposed to two copies of the same variant. Men who were heterozygous, with two different versions of these genes, proved to be more attractive to women than those who were homozygous. And while being heterozygous doesn't necessarily mean you're multiracial, having parents of different races makes you much more likely to fall into this category, Roberts says.

Whether these good-looking heterozygotes are actually healthier or just appear so is debatable. Studies have shown that heterozygotes are indeed more resistant to infectious diseases, including Hepatitis B and HIV, and have a lower risk of developing the skin disease psoriasis—significant because healthy skin plays a clear role in attractiveness. But other researchers have been unable to find a correlation between attractiveness and actual health, which may be a testament to the power of modern medicine—especially vaccinations and antibiotics—in helping the less heterozygous among us overcome any genetic susceptibility to illness, Roberts says.

Research vs. Real World

Some researchers have extrapolated even further, suggesting that, along with possible good looks and good health, multiracial people might be genetically gifted in other ways.

Cardiff University psychologist Michael B. Lewis, who led the 2009 U.K. study on attractiveness, argues that the genetic diversity that comes with being mixed race may in fact lead to improved performance in a number of areas. As evidence, he points to the seemingly high representation of multiracial people in the top tiers of professions that require skill, such as Tiger Woods in golf, Halle Berry in acting, Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1 racing, and Barack Obama in politics .

Other researchers argue that this conclusion is an overreach. They counter that genetics doesn't make multiracial people better at golf—or even necessarily better looking. Some studies have found no difference in perceived attractiveness between mixed-race and single-race faces; others have confirmed that a preference for mixed-race faces exists, but have concluded it has more to do with prevailing cultural standards than any genetic predisposition to beauty.

A 2012 study by Jennifer Patrice Sims, a sociologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, found that in general, mixed-race people were perceived as more attractive than people of one race—but not all racial mixes, as would be the case if the cause was genetic diversity alone. (In her research, mixed black-Native Americans and black-Asians were rated the most attractive of all.) The hybrid vigor theory, Sims argues, is based on the false presumption of biologically distinct races. She points instead to evidence that attractiveness is a social construct, heavily dependent on time and place. In the U.S. right now, she says, the biracial beauty stereotype is a dominant narrative.

"Whereas in the past, particularly for women, the stereotypical northern European phenotype of blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin was considered the most attractive (think Marilyn Monroe) contemporary beauty standards now value 'tan' skin and wavy-curly hair also (think Beyonce)," she says.

But saying biracial people are inherently beautiful isn't a harmless compliment—it can contribute to exotification and objectification. For many biracial people, these reports of heightened attractiveness are an unwelcome distraction, obscuring and delegitimizing the true challenges they face. "Even though studies say we're seen as more beautiful, my lived experience negates that," says Ben O'Keefe, a political consultant who has a black father and a white mother. "We're trying to frame it as if we've become a more accepting society, but we haven't. There are still many people who wouldn't be comfortable dating outside their race."

O'Keefe's father wasn't present when he was growing up. Apart from his brother and sister, he was surrounded by white people. His mother raised him to embrace the principle of "color blindness." Since race doesn't matter, she argued, why acknowledge it at all? O'Keefe thought of himself, essentially, as white. When people asked what he was, he said Italian, which is true. He's Italian, Irish, and African American.

But other people's perceptions didn't match his self-image . A store clerk once followed him from aisle to aisle and accused him of shoplifting. While walking one night in his upper-class, predominantly white Florida community, O'Keefe was stopped by police who pulled their guns on him because residents had reported a "suspicious" black teen . When Trayvon Martin was killed nearby under similar circumstances, it triggered an awakening in O'Keefe: "I had always felt more white, but the world didn't see me that way."

The Path Forward

As much as O'Keefe wishes that milestones such as Obama's presidency signaled the dawn of a post-racial America, he encounters daily reminders that racism endures. One boy he dated in high school didn't want to bring O'Keefe home to meet his parents. "Oh, they don't know you're gay?" O'Keefe asked. "No, they do," the boy responded. "They'd just freak out if they knew I was dating a black guy."

O'Keefe has encountered discrimination in the black community as well, where others have told him, "You're not really black."

"They see me with light skin and a white family, and that has given me advantages—I recognize that. Their experience, being seen as nothing but black, influences that perception." While he understands the reasoning, it still hurts. "It's saying, 'You're not black enough to be a real black man, but you're black enough to be held up at gunpoint by police,' " he says.

These days, he doesn't get asked, "What are you?" as much as he once did, which could be a sign of progress—or simply a byproduct of moving in more "woke" circles as an adult, he says. But when he does get asked, he identifies as black. "I'm a black man who is multiracial, but it doesn't diminish my identity as a black man."

His mother, too, has abandoned her color-blind approach after coming to see it as unrealistic—and ultimately unhelpful. "We've had some really hard conversations about race," O'Keefe says. "She's embraced that it matters and we need to talk about it, and we can't fix problems if we pretend they don't exist."

The path toward a more egalitarian America will be paved with hard conversations about race, says Gaither, who is multiracial herself. Her research shows that just being around biracial people makes white people less likely to endorse a color-blind ideology—and that color blindness, although well-intentioned, is ultimately harmful to race relations.

In a series of studies published in 2018, Gaither found that the more contact white people had with biracial people, the less they considered themselves color-blind, and the more comfortable they were discussing issues around race that they would otherwise have avoided. This suggests that a growing multiracial population will help shift racial attitudes. But it doesn't mean the transition will be easy.

"If you're in a primarily white environment and multiracial populations are growing, you may find that threatening and look for ways to reaffirm your place in the hierarchy," says the University of Hawaii's Pauker. "As minority populations grow, that's going to be a hard adjustment on both sides."

While there's no population threshold that, once reached, will signal the end of racism in America, being around more multiracial people can at least nudge monoracials to start thinking and talking more about what race really means.

"We are not the solution to race relations, but we cause people to rethink what race may or may not mean to them, which I hope will lead to more open and honest discussions," says Gaither. "The good news is that our attitudes and identities are malleable. Exposing people to those who are different is the best way to promote inclusion—and the side effect is that we can benefit cognitively as well. If we start acknowledging that we all have multiple identities, we can all be more flexible and creative."

The Multiethnic Elite

People of mixed race are well represented at the top of many fields

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Growing Up Mixed and Grappling With the Question 'What Are You?': Listeners Weigh In

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This post is part of a  series of stories on The California Report Magazine about the experience of being mixed race.

This story originally published in November of 2021. The "Mixed!" series will include new interviews through March and April of 2023. 

Identity is always complicated, and for multiracial folks who straddle many identities, it can be isolating. It can also be invigorating and rich to belong to multiple communities and celebrate that complexity.

The latest census shows we mixed-race people are a demographic to pay attention to: 2020 data reflects a 276% increase in people who identify as multiracial compared to 2010. Yet mixed-race folks are only beginning to find space for our stories.

This week,  The California Report Magazine's host, Sasha Khokha and guest host Marisa Lagos delve into the mixed-race experience, grounded in their own backgrounds. They talk with trailblazing artist Kip Fulbeck, whose photo projects are a platform for mixed-race folks to answer the question "What Are You?" in their own voices.  We also listen in on a conversation between two listeners who share a similar background (Black/Filipina), but straddle different generations, which informs how they understand their identities.

To bring you, our audience, into this series, The California Report and KQED has been reaching out to listeners to ask, “What's something only fellow mixed folks understand about growing up mixed?”

Here are some of those responses:

Dianna K. Bautista, Berkeley

I'm Filipino on my mom's side, and my dad is mixed like me. He is Filipino, African American, Native American, French and Spanish. My dad would tell me how it was like for my grandmother as a Black woman of color growing up in Arkansas. We would dive back [into our family history] and see how my Native American ancestors were sold in slavery.

If I just check one box, I feel like it doesn't fully represent who I am. But when I check multiple boxes, I'm always questioning if I have enough of that heritage, enough of that ethnicity to check that box. And you're in the middle of having a mini-identity crisis because you're not sure which box to check.

I was reading about this mixed Iranian journalist who is saying how her mixed experience was like floating. It's kind of cool because, yeah, ambiguous skin means that you’re accepted in different groups and different ethnicities and you get to experience that diversity. But there's also negatives to that because you're ambiguous. People are going to assign stereotypes based on what they think you are and you don't have control over that.

Dylan Morimoto, San Francisco

My father is from Auburn, California, and he's Japanese, and my mom was born in Germany. She's Jewish. My father was incarcerated during World War II. My [dad's whole] family was incarcerated or interned during World War II. And then my mom, you know, left Nazi Germany. You know, I don't look Jewish. I don't really think I look kind of Asian-ish.

Under the Trump administration, [it was] really upsetting, given my family’s history. It’s nice to see, for me personally, I was happy to see Kamala Harris get elected, and seeing her, you know an African American and Asian woman, was really, really cool. And a Jewish husband, and a mixed family. I am in the same situation. I have two stepkids, so it’s nice to see that diversity.

Sharon Ng, San Francisco

Our family is kind of China-Latina mashed up. I am Chinese Malaysian and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. My American husband's family is Argentinian but he grew up in France. We met in New York. When people ask my daughter what her heritage is, she says, "I am half Chinese and half Brooklyn!"

While I am Chinese by blood, culturally I struggled as a child to understand my “Chineseness” because I did not grow up speaking Mandarin at home, nor did I have the benefit of an extended family of aunties and grandparents to provide context about how to be Chinese. With limited Chinese affirmation and sense of place, it was quite confusing because Vancouver was really white in the '70s.

[My husband] Ian's story is similar. He didn't grow up speaking Spanish, because the U.S. was all about assimilation back then. We feel that learning Spanish will help anchor our kids in part of their roots, which we don't feel we really had (we know our parents tried their very best). Together we are creating new traditions of what is beautiful and delicious: turkey stuffed with sticky rice, with empanadas and chimichurri on the side.

That said, we dream that our girls have a sense of belonging and experience affirmation of their multifaceted identities and cultural ways of being a “hyphenated” American. We feel really blessed to live in San Francisco, where we have lots of other friends who are raising mixed-race families. It really normalizes things for them.

Adrien Colón, Oakland

So my mom is white and my dad is Puerto Rican. And I think growing up as a kid, I never really questioned it. And it's not until I got a little older that I heard this story about my dad not being allowed in my great-grandparents’ home. They were very much against my mom marrying my dad and they wouldn't allow him in their home because of the way that he looked, because of the color of his skin, the Afro that he wore.

I continue to piece together my family tree, and seeing these people who come from all of these different places, and knowing that ... if something had happened to any one of them, that I wouldn't be here, which is a wild thought.

Stephen Zendejas, Tracy

My dad is a third-generation Mexican American and my mom is an immigrant from the Philippines who is half Chinese. I would describe growing up as mixed race [as] kind of confusing and complex.

I think the concept of racial identity is sometimes still foreign and confusing to me because it's more social than it is scientific. But it's also not something that we can just completely ignore either.

David Risher, San Francisco

[There are ] so many stories from my childhood in the '70s. I can't count the number of times someone cocked his or her head at me, paused, and asked, "I've got a question for you. What are you?” It was so uncomfortable. My answer at the time: "My mother is white, my father is Black. So I'm both.” Today, I just say I’m biracial.

Here’s a story that sticks with me, from my time attending summer camp as a kid. One day, just before parents’ weekend, I overheard a fellow camper say, "I don't know about you, but I'd be ashamed if I were you about having a Black dad and a white mom.” In fact, I wasn’t the least ashamed. But hearing that made me wonder, “Should I be?"

And [there’s] another story from my undergraduate years at Princeton. One evening, my well-meaning Black dorm-mate brought me into her room and said, "David, at some point you're going to have to choose. If you don't, others will for you, and they’ll make their decision based on who your girlfriend is.” I was shocked, but I got it. People are detectives, looking for clues.

Today, after years working at Microsoft and then as an executive at Amazon, I run a Bay Area nonprofit called Worldreader. We use technology and local books from all around the world to help children discover the joy of reading. We’ve helped 19 million children so far, and we’re just getting started. One thing that sets us apart: No matter where we operate — in Africa, India, South America, or the U.S. — we lead with books from local publishers, full of stories of doctors, astronauts, scientists and writers who look like our readers. I bet you see the connection: If you can’t see it, you can’t be it!

Ruben Villareal Halprin, San Francisco

My mom, a Jewish girl from Boston, met my father, a Black Cuban, while at medical school in Cuba in the late '80s. They got married a couple of years later and I showed up shortly after that. I was the “white boy.” I was “Ruben the Cuban.” I was “blanquito.” It just depends on where I was.

I wonder sometimes if I looked a little more like my mom or a little more like my dad, how different my life would be. Mind you, that's not if my life would be different, but just how different. I love being mixed. I love dancing between the lines of the binaries that this society has built up ... . In a way, I represent the breaking of cultural and institutional barriers that exist or existed. But breaking down barriers may just be a poetic way of saying you're being slammed into a wall. And that's certainly what it sometimes felt like growing up mixed.

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Growing Up Biracial: How I Learned To Embrace Diversity

Jennifer Jones - July 16, 2019

Topic: Culture , Family , Parenting , Relationships

I want to begin by pointing out that my experience is just one of many.

Our mother married our father during a time when interracial marriage was unacceptable, in 1969, two years after interracial marriage was legalized, and most of her family disowned her. Growing up, she told us, "You're Black because your father is Black," and I never understood why she didn't urge us to identify as both White and Black, or biracial. I know she did the right thing, and she did what she knew was best, based on her encounters of racial discrimination.

We don't know anyone from her family. Our mother’s family on both sides were from Russia, with her parents being first-generation Americans; she was raised Jewish. My siblings and I desire to find her family one day with the hope that someone in the family line has challenged and changed that part of their story. Our father passed away when I was 9 years old. We only know a handful of people from our father's family, and the extended family resides in Texas. On his side, we are told there is also Cherokee Indian in our bloodline. I think of the pain my mother must have carried raising Black children in this world. I think of what it may have been like for her being raised up in a family plagued with racist beliefs. Yet, she chose love, and encouraged us to embrace our Blackness. People will always see me as a woman of color, and I am proud of that.

My racial identity has developed through a lifetime of relationships with family, friends, teachers and mentors. I attended schools abundantly black and brown. Nevertheless, amongst my childhood peers, I felt a sense of not being enough — not Black enough, and certainly not White. My Whiteness was either disproportionately valued, or frankly rejected. Common statements I heard in my childhood pertained to prettiness, or having “good” hair, or being intelligent, which was attributed to the fact that I am mixed with White. If I was interested in this music as opposed to that music, I was White. At times, Black girls of a deeper skin tone assumed I was arrogant. 

 "I attended schools abundantly black and brown. Nevertheless, amongst my childhood peers, I felt a sense of not being enough..."

Some Black people have been shocked to find out I comb my daughters' hair well because it is of a different texture than mine. There have been times when I’ve had to correct my mom’s thinking errors around race and identity (i.e. her mentioning “good” hair).

I understand the painful history that created such divisions within Black communities. I think this all speaks to how susceptible we are as humans to learn and then become entrenched in hurtful ideology. It’s difficult to hear my White friends express discomfort discussing issues of race, even to the point of avoidance, but it’s also an opportunity to meet them where they are and pray for time and space to continue the conversation. In a way, my biracial identity allows for a bridging of gaps. 

Systematic narratives can only be changed if we each, in our own communities, have the conversations. That starts in our homes. In my home, my children and I are blessed and grateful to have a front row seat witnessing a present Black father every day. My father was present, as well. In our home, there is living proof that dismantles the message that Black fathers are absent. We strive to educate our children on history in an age-appropriate, expand-as-they-grow, honest and inclusive way. We highlight the beauty, richness and strengths of our people. Reading is fundamental to helping children embrace their culture and heritage. A few children’s books we have in our home are: I’m a Pretty Little Black Girl by Betty K. Bynum, I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont, Daddy Calls Me Man by Angela Johnson, and Bright Eyes, Brown Skin by Cheryl Hudson. When we go to children’s birthday parties and books are requested over toys, we aim to purchase culturally uplifting books. We have playdates with other families, attend museums and community events, and family gatherings — food, music and shared stories are powerful agents of cultural connection. 

"Systematic narratives can only be changed if we each, in our own communities, have the conversations. That starts in our homes."

Connection through community is critical in raising culturally attuned children. Through relationship, we learn about who we are and gain a sense of belonging. As parents, we cannot control everything our children are exposed to, but as their first and primary teachers, we are actively teaching them about racism. We also learn about differences. Love and hate are learned. 

These are some practical action steps for parents of biracial children and parents of White children who want to instill cultural awareness and sensitivity:

1. Examine your own cultural biases. We all have them. Literature, documentaries and films are a good starting point, but in vivo experiences (i.e. community events, museums, small groups at church) have the most impact, and can easily be a family affair. Christian authors John Hambrick and Teesha Hadra wrote a book, Black and White: Disrupting Racism One Friendship at a Time , that may lend additional insight.

2. Talk about differences explicitly and intentionally, being mindful of the language you use. Use language that is color-conscious as opposed to color-blind, or racist. Celebrate your biracial identity. Acknowledge your privilege and use it for good. Ask and don’t assume you know someone else’s experience. 

3. Notice who your child’s peers are in school, at church and on social media —  and get curious! By asking questions about who their friends are, what makes for a good friend, and how they handle challenges amongst their peers, a dialogue about differences can begin. This can also be an opportunity to help transform the language they use around diversity. 

Repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 until this lifelong class is dismissed. We are all made in his image. He died on the cross for all sinners. In Revelation 7:9–10, there’s a vivid picture of what we have to look forward to: 

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” 

With that as our glimpse into heaven and eternity, we should be moved to embrace diversity on earth, here and now.

Jennifer Jones

Jennifer Jones is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Born and raised in Southern California, she received her Sociology and Black Studies degrees from the University of California Santa Barbara and her Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, Santa Barbara. Jennifer is a busy and blessed wife to Marquel Jones and mother to three young children. Her family attends and serves at Inglewood Southside Christian Church. One of Jennifer’s passions is encouraging people, through her writing, to shush their shame; she is currently developing the God-breathed vision for SHHH: Silent Hearts Heal Here. Jennifer is passionate about mental health. In her day job, she supervises a team serving children and teenagers with high acuity symptoms and behaviors. She has served as a therapist during the Biola CMR Marriage Conference for the past few years, as well.

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Shapeshifting: Discovering the “We” in Mixed-Race Experiences

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve been longing for your whole life until you experience it. As a mixed-race woman, I never knew how much it would mean for me to finally sit in a room full of other multiracial women until, at age 45, I taught a creative writing class called  Shapeshifting: Reading and Writing the Mixed-Race Experience . I was nervous because I’d never attended something like this myself. And yet, sometimes when it becomes clear that you need something that doesn’t already exist, you have to create it yourself.

I once considered myself to be a shy person, afraid to speak in public. However, my close friends knew me differently, and at my core I knew myself differently too. While I remained quiet in high school, college, and beyond, in intimate spaces I could be bold and funny. When I was younger, I used to think that my insecurities came from my youth or my gender. But the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve also come to question how much of my conditioning— to feel quiet, silent, and invisible—has come from my mixed-race heritage?

I am an Asian American woman. I am also mixed race—my father is White and my mother is Chinese. And I have many questions. 

What does it feel like to grow up and never see reflections of yourself or your family in the shows you watch or the books you read, or to rarely see yourself in positions of power? 

For mixed-race people, especially those of us who have one White parent, the answers to questions of identity can be confusing to sort out.

What does it feel like to sense you don’t exist in the outside world, or to never have been given a language—a book of history, a collection of stories, the perspective of an elder—to help name the lineage you are a part of, who you are in relationship to America’s history of racism, or who you are within the rules about who is Black or Asian or Native American or Latinx or White? 

How much blood does one need to be able to claim an identity? One half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, one drop?

Learning more about the history of our nation’s formation has taught me that the answers to questions of identity depends on how much White people have wanted to leverage their control over others’ bodies or lands, and how beneficial it was to claim you as their own. Each racial and ethnic community has a unique relationship to history’s shaping of mixed-race identities, and our absorption into or exclusion from Whiteness depends on the shifting of the White supremacy culture’s needs. Asian Americans, for example, were held up as “model minorities” to prove America’s great myth of meritocracy and used as a wedge against Black people: ‘see, anyone can succeed here if they just try.’ But we have also been expelled from this country, put in concentration camps, perpetually seen as foreign, or dangerous, and most recently, blamed for the spread of a deadly virus.

For mixed-race people, especially those of us who have one White parent, the answers to questions of identity can be confusing to sort out. Many of us who grew up in majority-White communities, have unconsciously been taught to aspire to Whiteness. Conversely, others have been encouraged to deny all ties to Whiteness—or we choose to lean in that direction ourselves once we realize how much we’ve been conditioned to see ourselves as inferior or lacking by the standards of White supremacy culture. But whether we are denying our “color” or denying our “Whiteness,” these false binaries can in turn lead us to internalize the notion that part of us is damaged, inferior, or too shameful to be spoken about. They can make us feel like we have to be shapeshifters to be accepted or belong.

I grew up attending an integrated—yet also highly segregated—high school in Seattle, during the era of  Rodney King , and in an environment that taught me to see conversations around race through the binary of Black and White. As a mixed-race Asian girl, I had already learned by then to assimilate and identify with my White peers. It wasn’t until I started college that I realized how much I needed to reclaim my mother tongue of Chinese, a language I grew up speaking with my mother and grandmother as a young child but grew distanced from as an adult. Leaving college, then traveling and living in China for more than three years helped me to reclaim that part of me—as much as it also taught me that the Chinese saw me as a Westerner, as well as how American I truly was. 

Most mixed-race people never know what it means to be part of a community where we can feel relaxed or have a sense of belonging when it comes to race.

Back in the U.S., I continued to interrogate my racial identity, but now, once again through an American lens. Here, I am seen by most people as Asian. Here, the terms of how many saw me had changed again—my “otherness” set up against Whiteness, as opposed to against “Chineseness.” Here, it became increasingly crucial for me to drill deeper into my own silence and complicity when it comes to anti-Blackness, implicit bias, and inherited wealth. Attending racial equity trainings, I grew familiar with the practice of dividing the room into two caucusing groups—one for people of color, and one for White people. 

By now, I clearly knew I was not White, but I still did not feel comfortable taking up space discussing my identity issues or light-skinned privilege in a group dedicated to people of color. And yet, I also knew that I too had experienced racial pain. I realized that to overcome my own silence around others’ oppression, I needed to give voice to mine too. 

Ever since college, I have written privately about my racial in-betweenness, but after returning from China and eventually attending trainings, I developed more of a contextual lens; I learned to see where my struggles aligned with other people of color, and where they diverged. Recently, as a creative writing teacher, I have begun to offer spaces for other mixed-race folks to write about their experiences. I needed to express things privately  and  I needed share in community, because I realized that shame can only live in silence. Once we voice something in a safe space and we feel witnessed and heard, shame can start to dissipate. 

Most mixed-race people never know what it means to be part of a community where we can feel relaxed or have a sense of belonging when it comes to race. Even in our own families, we often look different from our parents or relatives. We perch at the edge of other communities who may tentatively welcome us, but deep down we suspect we don’t fully belong. We have grown up with so many reminders of how our experiences mark us as outsiders, that we have started to distrust ourselves too. 

I’m here to tell you, after 25 years of writing and interrogating my own roots and identity, that it doesn’t have to be this way. But where do we begin, especially if we barely know any other mixed-race people? 

We can start by reading others’ stories. There aren’t enough of them out there, but that is changing. And we can also begin, at any stage of life, to write our own accounts. In this way, we can begin to name how our experiences are similar to others, for example, how certain traits that we have internalized as our own private maladies may actually stem from larger systemic structures. Furthermore, we can name where our experiences diverge, where our intersectional identities and relative privileges result in our unique stories. We can join affinity groups online, we can find therapists who mirror our origins, we can open up about our deepest vulnerabilities and fears. We can learn to recognize how sometimes shapeshifting harms us, and other times it opens pathways to new conversations. We can begin, one small step at a time, to claim our voice and story as important, and an essential part of contributing to the conversation as we name the dual myth and reality of race. 

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Mixed Race Studies

Growing Up in a Family With Multiple Ethnicities Was Both Lonely and Beautiful

Parents 2022-04-19

Mieko Gavia

I always felt like an outsider, but being mixed is filled with beauty and complexity.

Growing up I always felt like an outsider. My name, my skin, my hair all tells the story of where my parents and my parent’s parents come from. It all marks me as a bit different. I’m mixed Okinawan, Black, and Mexican, and there aren’t a lot of people out there like me. I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a household with mixed parents and siblings because my parents made sure to teach us about our heritage, and about cultures all over the world.

This gave me respect for all sorts of different types of people, and instilled pride in my identity. I am also grateful that they encouraged curiosity about the world, and created an atmosphere where we all “got” each other…

Read the entire article here .

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Growing up as a Black male student in White suburbia: What I learned

Subscribe to how we rise, tim herd tim herd phd student - university of california, los angeles, founder - rising black men @timjherd.

November 24, 2021

Every parent wants their child to receive the best education so that they can become productive members of society. However, for Black students, this hard-prized goal often remains far out of reach. This was my experience growing up as a Black male in a small, wealthy pocket of suburbia close to the Detroit neighborhood and majority Black city in which I had previously lived. Feelings of isolation and exclusion, similar for many other Black students, were all too common. And while living in a quiet and wealthy suburb has been a privilege, it’s silence was deafening as a young 12-year-old Black male entering a predominantly white space – attempting to find a community similar to the one I had just left.

This long-standing gap to reach the premium placed on education: defined as “ the average amount of wages a college-educated person would make in comparison to a non-college educated person ” , looms the widest across racial lines.  Research has well documented the upside that attending college and universities provides to career earnings and financial outcomes and for historically marginalized communities, as seen through a 2018 report by the National Center for Education Statistics , the benefits on college enrollment rates are clear. This is further exemplified by Black American families moving their children from urban school districts to better resourced and higher funded private schools and suburban districts. A 2019 Bloomberg report found that city school districts mainly serving students of color receive significantly less money than those of majority white suburban and rural school districts.  Parents of color who have the means to provide the better opportunities for their children move their families to these majority white suburban schools and neighborhoods.

Culture Shock, Racism and Microaggression

However, while students of color can potentially be afforded better opportunities in these spaces, there are educational and social ramifications that can have an adverse effect on that child’s socio-emotional development and academic progression. And while these students can sometimes thrive in these spaces, there can still be feelings of isolation and culture shock that arise as they adapt to new environments and battle challenges such as microaggressions and racism.

I witnessed this personally when President Obama was elected and throughout middle school, where many of my peers would come to school repeating their parent’s remarks, and that of their own, questioning the president’s birthright and wishing an untimely end not only to his presidency, but to his life. Being within an eardrop of these conversations was not an uncommon situation to be in, along with other conversations involving microaggressions and overt racism. Growing up in Grosse Pointe I felt invisible, and athletics were the only times in which I found myself being seen. I was always the only Black male and usually the only Black person in my classes from fifth to twelfth grade – balancing different thoughts in my head about what people thought about me and attempting to carry myself in a way that made white people feel comfortable. As other kids were focused on going on vacations and having conversations about who liked who, I was focused on the slivers of grey hair that were growing because of how extremely stressed I was as a 12 to 14-year-old attempting to be perfect in the face of racism, culture shock, and feelings of isolation. A report in the Democrat & Chronicle finds similar experiences about Black students navigating suburban schooling.

• Creating Space and Achieving Success

Even so, while such experiences were instrumental in my upbringing, to say that my suburban schooling and neighborhood made me would be giving it far too much credit. However, in a rather caustic manner, I can unequivocally say that my experiences living in Grosse Pointe brought out a layer of resiliency in which I never thought I had. From developing a mentoring organization in my undergraduate education titled Rising Black Men to pursuing my PhD in higher education, it provided the initial spark that led me to the path on which I am currently on. Additionally, I learned the value of affinity groups as they provide students who share identities, particularly marginalized identities, to gather together to engage in conversation, community, and support. As a 2015 report from Learning for Justice remarked, “they allow students who share an identity—usually a marginalized identity—to gather, talk in a safe space about issues related to that identity, and transfer that discussion into action that makes for a more equitable experience at school.” These spaces, along with more equitable practices as described below, are important in creating more inclusive and enriching educational spaces.  

• Addressing Racial & Financial Disparities in K-12 School Districts

While there have been efforts and initiatives to highlight the benefits of diverse school districts, there are still significant financial disparities and racial inequities within many K-12 school districts nationwide .

A 2019 report by Education Week concluded that majority of the nations’ K-12 students within public schools currently attend suburban schools. Furthermore, another recent 2021 report by Education Week stated that of the 25 largest metropolitan areas between 2006-2018, the majority of students within the open zone suburban schools were majority non-white. However, for suburban schools in white suburban areas with closed zone districts such as my own, the diversity rates skewed disproportionately white. What’s more, a recent 2017 report by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) highlighted that of the 7.7 million Black students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, only 7% of these students attend low poverty schools.

While there needs to be a continued explicit conversation on the important distinctions between open and closed school districts, it should be noted that even closed districts are becoming less homogenous. This is due to factors such as diverse families moving to these closed districts and making school districts such as mine more diverse with regards to race, ethnicity, and gender.

• Creating Equitable and Sustainable Change in the Suburban School Districts

School districts need to place value on hiring teachers that reflect the demographics of the students that they are teaching .

There are not only feelings of increased belonging, but also feelings of stronger identity development for teachers that share one or more identities with the students whom they are teaching as reported in a 2019 report by One Day. For teachers that do not reflect the changing demographics of the students that they teach, it is important to monitor their own applications of empathy, which can be valuable in connecting with students.  A 2015 report from the George Lucas Educational Foundation found that some of the benefits of empathy within education include, “…building positive classroom culture, strengthening community, and preparing students to be leaders in their own communities.”

Suburban school districts need to also be mindful of the disproportionate amount of disciplinary actions that their students of color are subject to in comparison to their white counterparts, as addressed in a previous Brookings report titled, Disproportionality in student discipline: Connecting policy to research . Policies that are more racially conscious and restorative-justice focused in their approach can be beneficial in creating a more inviting academic and social culture for students of color who feel that they are being unfairly targeted by the school administration.

As for administration and even school boards within these districts, there needs to be more representation of people of color that reflect the student makeup just as there needs to be regarding the teaching workforce . In my own district, my father recently became the School Board President, making him the first Black person on the school board and now the first Black president. While this is an important step, these roles should not just be symbolic in gesture but rather have real implications through policy and culture to create more inclusive and equitable spaces. Culture that can be established through after school programs and affinity spaces that affirm the multiple identities of students of color can also serve to battle feelings of isolation, culture, and identity development.

Furthermore, it should be noted that while these strategies do not fully address all the challenges that students of color, especially Black students in suburbia, face, they are of importance and need to be at the forefront of the national conversation as we continue to make K-12 education more equitable.

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A Place in the World: Growing Up Mixed-Race in a White Family

Georgina lawton on learning the truth about her biological lineage.

“The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful. You have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”   –Zadie Smith, On Beauty * Article continues below (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=546998bb-b9c0-4480-8c91-3e307220efff&cid=86b7c382-5e20-4129-84db-dea768f4d688'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "546998bb-b9c0-4480-8c91-3e307220efff" }).render("9b7a21a47fb44523b011db6d4f4cad23"); });

On a brilliantly hot Caribbean morning in March 2017, as the first of the day’s sunshine poured through the shutters of my tiny beachfront apartment and spread across the floorboards like warm golden syrup, I received the results of my third DNA test in a year. I looked out of the window at a sparkling sea moments from my building. I was seconds away from giant palm trees, crystalline waters, and powdery white sands on Nicaragua’s Corn Islands, more than 5,000 miles away from my old life on the outskirts of London. But that morning I had to confront my past and everything I’d left behind. And I had to tell my mum of my genetic news. I didn’t know how she’d react.

Down a surprisingly clear FaceTime link to London, I said, “I’ve got the test results back.”

What followed was a long stretch of silence. Then, finally, a response. “Oh. So, what did it say?”

“Well … I’m Nigerian.” Another pause.

“Forty-three percent, actually. And the rest of me comes from Ireland, which we know since that’s from you… ” I trailed off.

“Right … ” Everything went quiet once again. “Well, you’re still more white than anything, aren’t you?”

I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly. Parrots chirped outside my window.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I’m just saying the percentages … ” My mum stopped, sensing that she had said the wrong thing. “Oh, don’t worry.”

I decided to ask the question that was on the tip of my tongue, but which I knew would obliterate the conversation in a matter of seconds, to toss the verbal grenade I had in my pocket.

“So, do you think my biological father could be Nigerian?” I asked flatly. “Is this maybe jogging your memory at all?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Boom . Detonation complete. “Mum, we need to—”

“I don’t have anything else to say, Georgina.”

The rage came quickly; I was somewhat surprised at its potency, and even though I was so far from my mother’s physical presence, I could feel it practically radiating off my body, vibrating through the phone. How could she not understand? How could she not tell me?

“Well, you need to try harder because this issue isn’t going away,” I hissed. “I want answers . I think I deserve them at this stage.”

Another pause. “I’ve got nothing else to say.”

It’s safe to say this was not the reaction I’d been hoping for. I’d only waited my whole life to put a name to the country responsible for my appearance; I’d only been trying to piece together my identity on my own for over two decades, straddling the borders of a racialized existence outside my family and a nonracialized one in their presence, all the while dealing with projected ideas from strangers about what I looked like, who I resembled, what I was. I’d just found another piece of the puzzle, I’d worked it out on my own, but there was no support from the one person I needed it most from. My mum refused to hear me, to understand why this was so desperately important.

Our conversation ended after another pregnant pause, which morphed into a frustrating silence before I was forced to hang up. This was a practice that was now totally routine for the long-distance conversations we’d had since I left home months earlier. I’d learned that if my mum didn’t want to talk—about the cataclysmic series of events that had left us separated by thousands of miles less than two years after Dad’s death—then she would simply become mute. I’d lost track of the number of conversations that had been stifled by silence.

Who my biological father was, how I was brought into the world, my ancestry—all of it was off-limits. In those moments, the emotional chasm between us far exceeded the physical distance.

I was starting to realize that this absence of discussion had been something of a recurring theme throughout my childhood. And so when I felt the nothingness creeping into our call again that morning, I chose to leave before the fury took hold of me again. It was only 9 am. I couldn’t fight—I hadn’t even had breakfast.

That morning I’d been woken up by a heat so heavy it felt like I was wearing it, a second skin. A dampness coated my back and my throat was dry as I had processed my DNA test results and called my mum to discuss the truth about the heritage of the daughter she had raised.

It felt all the more surreal calling from Nicaragua, a chaotic, colorful country that couldn’t be more different from the smallness and safeness of my hometown basically. It was a mad phone call, a mad time, but this inanity was far more bearable than the one that had defined so much of my life before. I realized that I couldn’t escape who I was; the compulsion to uncover the truth had followed me halfway around the world. But, I thought to myself as I looked out of the window again, there were definitely worse places to be in the throes of an early-life identity crisis.

Before everything changed, all I’d known was life with my mum, dad, and younger brother, with visits to family in Shropshire and annual summer vacations to County Clare, Ireland, which is home to my mum. I saw Clare in sprawling landscape photographs on the DNA-testing homepage that morning, a smorgasbord of gray and green cliffs jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean and glossy fields like the ones I had run through on my childhood summer vacations.

I remembered wet and windy family memories built on annual summer pilgrimages to the tiny town of Doonbeg, close to where Mum was born and where Donald Trump now has a golf course. I could smell salty sea and stale alcohol, the silage in the fields, and the lingering whiff of smoky turf in the evening air. I could feel the hay beneath my heels as I leaped from bale to bale. I could see my parents getting ready for a night out, me and my brother tucked up in the bedroom my granny slept in, watching wistfully as my mother applied lipstick and my father chastised her for taking too long. I could hear my mother singing “The Fields of Athenry” as I ate a bag of Tayto chips in the cracked, red leather booth of a smoke-filled bar, as a red-faced man with an indecipherable accent slipped me a euro. I knew Ireland almost like I knew Britain, and these were my only two cultural identities, despite what my outward appearance might have suggested.

And then everything changed. In 2015, a series of destabilizing events uprooted us all: My dad died of cancer, aged 55. And a year after his death, when a callus had not yet formed over our grief, a series of DNA tests proved what I had always wondered, and what I had always feared the most: that one of my parents was not my own. My Irish mum and English father could not have produced me, a brown-skinned, curly-haired baby.

Finding this out without my dad around turned my home into a hellish matrix of what it once was, a parody of everything I used to love. The aftermath propelled me from the familiar spaces I knew as home with jet force. I left in the hope that I could peel off all my layers and find who I was really meant to be, at the very center. That third DNA test which told me of my ancestry, in Nicaragua, followed on from two family DNA tests (one paternity, one sibling). Navigating the confusing results from all the tests (more on this later) shattered my segments of self, built up over two decades, into nothingness. I left home to escape, to rebuild, to breathe.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong . Used with the permission of the publisher, Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2021 by Georgina Lawton.

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Matthew R. Morris writes about growing up Black and navigating race and identity in book Black Boys Like Me

The toronto writer spoke with the next chapter’s ryan b. patrick about his personal essay collection.

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Matthew R. Morris was influenced by the prominent Black male figures he saw in sports, TV shows and music while growing up in Scarborough, Ont. Morris is the son of a white mother and immigrant Black father, and grew up striving for academic success whilst confronting Black stereotypes and exploring hip hop culture in the 1990s. In his collection of eight personal essays, Black Boys Like Me , he examines his own experiences with race and identity throughout childhood into his current work as an educator in Toronto. 

Calling all writers! The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is now open

Morris is a writer, advocate and educator currently based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Black Boys Like Me is his first book.

Morris spoke with The Next Chapter 's Ryan B. Patrick about Black Boys Like Me .

The title of the book is Black Boys Like Me . You grew up in Scarborough —  who was a Black boy like Matthew Morris?

Ironically, there wasn't too many Black boys around me other than my contemporary friends and things like that, right? So it was more of looking up to Black men that we saw on TV through rap videos or on TSN at the time, watching sporting events, basketball and football. It was the men that we looked up to and through some of these other situations, like schooling. We were almost forced to be Black men before we could even go through our youthful trials and tribulations and just be Black boys. The "Black boys like me" that I looked up to was in real time, just comparing myself to friends that lived in the same area of Scarborough and seeing how they lived compared to how I lived and what they were interested in. It was a contemporary comparison in real time. 

You mentioned in the book that you're not an expert in anything but your own experience. What do you mean by that?

When it comes to literature around Blackness, there is somewhat of a higher educational gate, a white picket, ivory tower gate that exists where people speak on Blackness, and in particular, Black masculinity, from a position of authority where they claim to have a full grasp and understanding of the Black experience. I think that is erroneous and I also think it's somewhat irresponsible because Blackness exists in a continuum outside of one's personal experience. It's very hard to claim an expertise in understanding what it means to exist as a Black man. So for me, I'm merely speaking, not from the inside looking out or from the outside looking in — I'm taking my position in the dead centre and just looking around.

Blackness exists in a continuum and outside of one's personal experience. - Matthew R. Morris

Speaking of your experience, you're fiercely proud of your heritage and your family. You characterize your parents as being a white Canadian mother and a Black immigrant father. Tell me about your parents.  

Both my parents came from hardscrabble beginnings. My mother was a first-generation Canadian, her parents came over from Poland during World War One and my father immigrated here when he was 18 or 19 years old from Jamaica. He worked in a factory, my mother worked in a low blue-collared job. My mother's experience of raising two young Black boys was something that I speak to in the book. I think it's somewhat of a throughline in the book. I tried to arrive at the end of this idea of race and racism and belonging in terms of, not necessarily a remedy for what we can do as a culture, but how to perhaps look at race and belonging in a way that transcends identity.

One of the essays in the book you talk about going to high school in Scarborough, Ont., and you actually loved reading and learning. But school was often a difficult time, in terms of getting good grades and being a "model student." What was your high school experience like?

My high school experience was nuanced. On the one hand, I leaned into this idea that because I was Black and had somewhat of an athletic tendency that I would pursue that avenue in life into adulthood. Because my sport of significance was football, even till this day, you still needed to try to pursue a college entry to play NCAA football or play football at the next level. There was always that piece of understanding that I still had to do decent enough to get into college if I wanted to play football. But as I reflect back, there's this complicated identity politics that existed within me and I know that it existed within other Black males. On the one hand, of course you prioritize and want to succeed academically in school. But on the other hand, there's all these nuances and implicit, subtle racism that occurs once you do succeed academically as a Black male. It almost is as if you succeeding as a Black male strips parts of your Blackness away. That's largely because of public discourse of what academic success looks like in contrast to what Blackness is supposed to be and supposed to look like. So this gets internalized from an early age. I felt that if I was to succeed academically, for some reason I had to hide it from my friends. 

There's all these nuances and implicit, subtle racism that occurs once you do succeed academically as a Black male. - Matthew R. Morris

The title of that chapter is The Fresh Prince Syndrome  and it's because I have this vivid image of an episode where Will is reminiscing with one of his old friends from back in Philadelphia and they're talking about Will walking home, hiding his books in a pizza box. To me, that symbolizes the plight and the nuanced reality that Black males sometimes experience in academic settings where they want to succeed academically but there are so many roadblocks that are set up for them to not be able to or have to diminish or or lower their their inclinations academically.

In the essay collection you talk about becoming a middle school teacher and how [in your approach to education] you bring your whole self to it. You went to picture day and you dressed up how you wanted to dress up. How were you dressed for picture day?

Picture day was a balmy September day. It was probably 30 degrees Celsius already at 8:45 in the morning so I wore a T-shirt and shorts. I thought it was appropriate enough for a picture as a middle school teacher in the middle of the city. I had a situation that I wrote about in the chapter on clothing and aesthetics where my principal questioned me about the clothes that I was wearing. For me, it implied a little bit of racism in the questioning because, as I noticed later, there was a colleague who was pretty much wearing what I was wearing in the morning. He had cargo pants on, he was wearing sandals and a T-shirt but he was an older white guy. Reflecting on that situation — where I was just dressed as I would normally dress — I thought there was nothing wrong with the way I was dressed in terms of being an educator. So that situation is just one piece in the book where I highlight some of the ways in which Black males are surveilled and policed to a certain extent. 

I know that it is important for young Black students, particularly young Black males, to see representations of themselves - Matthew R. Morris

When it comes to my career in education I am intentional about the way that I show up in educational spaces because I know that it is important for young Black students, particularly young Black males, to see representations of themselves that exist in ways that embody the culture that they're familiar with and that is endearing to them, but at the same time exist in a space that shows them that academic excellence is something to strive towards as well. They should be able to see men that they aspire to be like on whatever level, whether it's just aesthetic level, that work in spaces like education.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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The Surge of Young Americans from Minority-White Mixed Families & Its Significance for the Future

The number of youth from mixed majority-minority families, in which one parent is White and the other minority, is surging in the early twenty-first century. This development is challenging both our statistical schemes for measuring ethnicity and race as well as our thinking about their demographic evolution in the near future. This essay summarizes briefly what we know about mixed minority-White Americans and includes data about their growing numbers as well as key social characteristics of children and adults from mixed backgrounds. The essay concludes that this phenomenon highlights weaknesses in our demographic data system as well as in the majority-minority narrative about how American society is changing.

Richard Alba , a Fellow of the American Academy since 2017, is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. His publications include The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (2020), The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (coedited with Mary Waters, 2011), Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (2009), and Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (with Victor Nee, 2003). 

A largely unheralded demographic development holds the potential to reshape the ethnoracial contours of American society in the coming decades. That development is the surge of young people coming from ethnoracially mixed families, and especially from those in which one parent is non-Hispanic White (“White” in what follows) and the other minority, either non-White or Hispanic.

To be sure, mixing across ethnic and racial lines has been a feature of the American experience since the earliest days of European colonization. Mixing between different European origins was celebrated as early as the eighteenth century by Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in Letters from an American Farmer . In the post–World War II period, the rise of marriage on a large scale across ethnic and religious lines among Whites played a leading role in the story of mass assimilation, which forged a White mainstream that included the descendants of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe. 1 Throughout American history, Whites’ dominant status has been expressed in sexual encounters across racial divisions, particularly between White men and minority women, that have produced children. When these children were mixed White and Black, they were mostly consigned to the African American population by virtue of the so-called one-drop rule. When the children were mixed White and American Indian, they had a greater chance of being absorbed into the White population. 2

The mixing across the major boundaries–of race and of Hispanic ethnicity–appears to hold a new significance in the early twenty-first century. The current situation seems novel in the degree of social recognition accorded mixed ethnoracial parentage as an independent status, rather than one that must be amalgamated into one group or another (as in the one-drop rule). The Census Bureau’s important decision to allow multiple-race reporting starting in 2000 is an acknowledgment of this new reality but also has contributed to it by creating statistical data concerning racial mixture that permeate into public consciousness. 3

However, the extent and long-run significance of this mixing still elude the stylized demographic “facts” of which Americans are most aware, epitomized in the majority-minority society anticipated by midcentury. In truth, mixing between Whites and minorities presents major challenges to common conceptions of, and census classification schemes for, ethnicity and race. For this reason, the degree of mixing and our ability to discern its societal significance are not reflected clearly in publicly available demographic data.

In this essay, I assess ethnoracial mixing, presenting estimates of its current extent and trend. I also summarize, if all too briefly, what we know about the characteristics of individuals from mixed minority-White family backgrounds, in order to gauge where they appear to locate within American social structures. 4 Though the details of this picture are complex, its broad outlines seem apparent. For the most part, individuals from these origins seem to be integrating into what can be described as the “mainstream” of American society, where most Whites are also found. The important exception involves individuals with Black and White parentage, who suffer from the severe racism that still impedes Americans of visible African descent. In the conclusion, I point out the implications of mixing for our demographic understanding of the American near future.

E thnoracial mixing in families has risen steadily since the late 1960s. Critical to this trend was the wonderfully named 1967 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court Loving v. Virginia , which invalidated the remaining antimiscegenation laws. To be sure, marriages are only a measure of the trend: they do not encompass the entirety of mixing since family connections, such as coparenting, form outside of marriage. But we have good data for marriage. The Pew Research Center has tracked marriages involving partners from two different major ethnoracial categories. 5 In 1967, about 3 percent of newlyweds were in intermarriages; by 2015, this rate had risen to 17 percent. It seems highly likely that the rate of mixing in families formed without marriage is at least as high, since one reason that couples do not marry is family opposition, which is usually greater when a partner belongs to a different ethnoracial group. Eighty percent of the mixed marriages of 2015 united a White partner with a minority partner, the largest grouping among them constituted by Hispanic-White couples. 6

A consequence of rising mixing in families is, quite obviously, an increase in the fraction of youth who are growing up with parents, as well as numerous other close relatives, from two different ethnoracial groups. We can think of kinship connections that by virtue of birth span major societal boundaries as the sociological essential of a mixed family background. Birth certificates provide the best data about mixed backgrounds in this sense, since they include the children of noncohabiting parents, who may still provide kinship connections for them. In 2018, fathers’ and mothers’ ethnoracial backgrounds were indicated on 87 percent of birth certificates. Birth certificates missing a parent’s information–invariably the father’s–are unlikely to represent mixed parentage since the missing data probably indicate a broken parental connection, so they can be counted among the unmixed. On this basis, 10.8 percent of all the births in 2018 were to mixed minority-White couples. The parents of an additional 3.7 percent of births came from different minority backgrounds.

Figure 1 shows the breakdown of the mixed infants of 2018 in terms of the ethnoracial origins of the parents. 7 The largest single category by far–almost 40 percent of all mixed births, and more than half of all those in which one parent is White–is for infants with one Hispanic parent and one White, non-Hispanic parent (a group I will refer to as “Anglo-Hispanic” or “Hispanic-White”). It is fairly evenly divided between families in which the Hispanic parent is the father and those in which it is the mother. Other large categories of mixed infants with one White parent include: those whose minority parent is Black (and usually the father), amounting to 13.3 percent of all mixed births; those whose minority parent is Asian (and usually the mother), 9.4 percent of all mixed births; and those with a mixed-race parent, 10.4 percent of mixed births. Most of the racially mixed parents have some White (that is, European) ancestry. As we will see, there is a strong tendency for individuals from mixed minority-White backgrounds to choose White partners.

Infants with a White parent are three-quarters of all mixed infants. In the quarter of mixed births involving minority parents only, Hispanics are again central. Infants with one Black parent, usually the father, and one Hispanic parent are 8.5 percent of all mixed births. Infants with one Hispanic parent and one non-Hispanic parent of mixed race are 3.6 percent; and those with one Hispanic parent and one Asian parent are 3.2 percent. Infants with a Black parent, usually the father, and a racially mixed parent are also appreciable in number at 3.9 percent of mixed births. The remaining 6.1 percent are scattered among various combinations of mixed minority origins.

To put the mixing between Whites and minorities into perspective, infants born to a minority-White parent combination are more numerous than those born to two Black parents (9.1 percent of all births). However, when births to Black mothers who are solo parents (that is, no information for fathers is given) are counted in the unmixed Black group, then the unmixed Black group, at 13.6 percent, eclipses the mixed minority-White group. The latter is also smaller than the unmixed Hispanic group, at 19.5 percent of all births. However, no other group of minority babies approaches the mixed minority-White one in size.

Another way of thinking about numerical impact is in terms of the share of births to minority parents that also involve White parents. Consider the Hispanic population in this regard, since it is the largest minority in the United States and projected to increase substantially in size by midcentury. In 2018, 29.1 percent of all births involving Hispanic parents also involved a non-Hispanic parent, and 20.7 percent–one of every five–involved a White parent. Of course, many contemporary Hispanic parents are immigrants, and the rates of mixing are moderately higher when parents are U.S. born. The story is more or less the same for other minority populations. Even for Whites, still the largest ethnoracial population in the United States, the rate of mixing is appreciable: 19.0 percent, or one out of five.

Like the rate of intermarriage, the percentage of all infants with mixed parentage has been rising over time. The best measure we have of this trend comes from census data and must for this reason be limited to infants in households containing both parents. In 1980, just 5 percent of these infants had mixed parentage, and this mixing incidentally was dominated by Anglo-Hispanic couples. In 2017, the equivalent percentage was 16.1 percent, a threefold rise in less than forty years.

It seems certain that the rate of mixing will continue to rise, although it is impossible to say how high it will go. Key demographic features of the immigrant-origin minority populations point in different directions. On the one hand, their rising size over time is likely to dampen somewhat family mixing because larger groups offer more opportunity for in-group partnering. (By the same logic, the declining size of Whites among young adults is consistent with greater mixing for them.) On the other hand, the generational shift away from the immigrants–and especially to the third generation–is strongly associated with family mixing. And, in the case of Hispanics, increasing educational attainment is, too. The population projections of the Census Bureau indicate much greater future mixing between Whites and minorities. 8

O ne great truism of social science is that where we start in life is a very good predictor of where we wind up. And for many children from mixed minority-White backgrounds, their start in life is better than where those with the same minority family origins start, though it is typically not equivalent to where White children begin. The one great exception involves children with one White and one Black parent, who suffer at the start from systemic racism that accompanies them as they grow up.

Consider the education of parents, a strong predictor of education in the new generation (see Figure 2). There is a gradient in the parental education of mixed minority-White infants that runs from the children of Asian-White parentage, the most advantaged, to those with a Black father and a White mother, who are dominant among Black-White infants but also the least advantaged mixed group. In the case of the former, the majority of infants have two parents who are college graduates, and for more than half of the rest, one parent graduated from college. In this respect, Asian-White infants enjoy a more favorable start in life than do infants with two White parents, among whom one-third have two college-graduate parents. However, the children of a Black father and a White mother are on average only slightly better off than the children of two Black parents; about 30 percent have at least one parent who completed college. The children of a White father and a Black mother are better off–about 40 percent have a college-educated parent–though their parents average less than the educational level of two White parents.

Two other major categories of minority-White infants are also positioned more favorably than the average infant with minority parents only. About 40 percent of Hispanic-White infants have at least one parent with a college degree; the figure is higher when the White parent is the father. More than 40 percent of infants with a White parent and a racially mixed one have a college-educated parent, and once again the figure is higher when the father is White.

Another revealing aspect of the situation of infants of mixed parentage is where their families reside. Residential disparities in a highly segregated society like the United States are a primary mechanism of transmitting inequality across the generations. School quality, to take an obvious instance, is highly variable, in part because of the predominant role of local and state funding, and tends to correspond with the ethnoracial and socioeconomic composition of local areas. 9 To examine the situation of the families of infants included in American Community Survey data, the spatial divisions of the country can be fit into a serviceable, if rough, scheme that takes account of how urban a space is and whether a residence is owned or rented. 10 The combination of these two factors maps out socially very different residential spaces in the United States.

Minorities are more likely than Whites to live in urban and inner-suburban areas (abbreviated as “urban” subsequently) that are dominated by rental housing. For instance, nearly half of the families of Black infants live in rental spaces in cities or inner suburbs, but only one-quarter are in owner-occupied homes in suburban areas. The families of White infants are more likely to live in suburban or city-edge areas (abbreviated subsequently as “suburban”) dominated by owner-occupied homes. Nearly half are in homeowner suburban areas, while only 15 percent are urban renters. Another quarter are located in rural areas and small towns, mostly in homes they own.

The families of some categories of mixed minority-White infants are at least as concentrated in homeowner suburban areas as White infants and their families are. This is true, for example, of families in which one parent is White and the other parent is of mixed race. Like Whites, they are also represented in rural areas and small towns. Asian-White families with infants are even more concentrated in homeowner suburban spaces than the families of White infants; however, unlike Whites but like Asian-only families, they are infrequently found outside, or on the edge of, metropolitan regions.

The families of Hispanic-White infants are more likely to reside in homeowner suburban areas than in rental urban ones, but their residential distribution does not favor the former as much as that of White families does. Nevertheless, they are much less located in urban rental spaces than are Black or Hispanic families. In other words, they are closer to White families in terms of residence than they are to the main minority ones. Also in between, but this time closer to a residential distribution like minorities, are Black-White families with infants.

An implication of these patterns is that mixed minority-White children often are located in places that, while they may be diverse, include many White children. Thus, many have White playmates and learn how to relate amicably to Whites, as some Whites do to them. This childhood integration potentially has major implications for adult life, where pathways to socioeconomic success often run through largely White institutions and social worlds. Is the implication corroborated by other data?

We have both qualitative and quantitative evidence to support it. In an analysis of friendship patterns of adolescents, found in the Adolescent Health Survey (Add Health), a rigorously conducted, nationally representative study, sociologist Grace Kao and her colleagues found that some groups of mixed youth frequently chose White best friends. Asian-White adolescents are an example: about 70 percent chose White best friends, and only 11 percent chose Asian ones. The tendency of mixed Asian-White youth to befriend Whites is partly the result of the racial mix of the high schools they attend, which are majority White on average. Hispanic-Whites also seem to have many White best friends, although an inferential step is required to reach this conclusion. The study examined the friendship of racially White Hispanics, among whom most mixed Hispanic-White youth are likely found. The majority of these youth (57 percent) chose White best friends, and another 13 percent chose Hispanic friends who are described as racially White. In this case, the choice pattern mirrors the compositions of the schools attended. 11

The pattern looks very different for mixed youth of African descent. Black-White adolescents are much more likely than Asian-White and Hispanic-White youth to choose friends of the same minority origin: about half did so in the Add Health study, though this tendency is markedly lower than that of Black-only adolescents. Only 20 percent chose White best friends. These choices are more concentrated among minority friends than would be expected from the composition of the schools Black-White adolescents attend, which are almost half White.

A qualitative study of young adults by sociologist Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl gives insight into the experiences that lie behind the different friendship patterns of Asian- and Black-Whites. 12 The Asian-White interviewees mostly grew up around Whites, and seem to feel that their childhoods were not unusual. They were exposed to forms of microaggression during childhood–jokes about any distinctiveness in their physical appearance or the food they ate–but were generally able to shrug them off. In Strmic-Pawl’s apt characterization, they felt “White enough.” For Black-White young adults, the weight of childhood experience was not so benign. Their interviews convey a sense that managing racism and race-inflected encounters is a major theme throughout their life experience. Strmic-Pawl characterizes this theme as “salient Blackness,” and presumably its development began during childhood.

T he surge of individuals from ethnoracially mixed families is mostly a twenty-first-century phenomenon, and, moreover, mixed backgrounds seem to have attained a new social recognition since 2000. These facts imply that our data about adults with mixed backgrounds are less reliable as guides to the near future than are our data about today’s children. Mixed family backgrounds are more unusual among adults, and hence the adults from them may have grown up encouraged by the “one-drop” views of others to think of themselves in terms of a single origin.

There is another problem. In our main demographic data sets, like the American Community Survey, the reporting of mixed ethnoracial origins is selective : that is, the reporting is not consistent, even for the same individual over time; many individuals from mixed backgrounds appear at any one moment in unmixed categories. We have very convincing evidence of this. 13 Therefore, in examining the characteristics of those who report mixed backgrounds at any one moment, we are missing many with the same origins who classify themselves in a different ethnoracial category. Moreover, we do not know yet how those we can see in the data differ from those we cannot. A solution to this problem is ancestry tracing : that is, gathering data separately about the mother’s and father’s family origins. However, only a few surveys, especially those by the Pew Research Center, do this, and their samples are not large.

One way of counteracting selectivity in reporting of origins is to expand the range of information we consider. For instance, the American Community Survey has a question about ancestry that is usually not taken into account in ethnoracial classifications. However, it allows us to identify a substantial portion of the otherwise hidden mixed individuals, such as Hispanics who report having ancestry like German or Irish. These are, in other words, persons with mixed Hispanic-White family backgrounds, and the following analysis considers them as such.

For investigating the adult socioeconomic status associated with mixed family backgrounds, the best indicator is educational attainment. That is because, as adults, mixed individuals skew young, and therefore they are concentrated in the early stages of work careers. Educational attainment, especially when it involves college graduation or postbaccalaureate education, is surely predictive of eventual labor-market position.

The key finding is that the educational attainment of the major mixed minority- White groups lies in-between that of Whites, whom we can use as a measure of the mainstream pattern, and that of the minority. But it is, on the whole, closer to the White level than the minority one. This pattern can be seen in Figure 3, which presents the educational attainment of major ethnoracially mixed and unmixed categories for U.S.-born men and women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine.

This conclusion is exemplified by the Anglo-Hispanic group. Unmixed Hispanic men (only the U.S. born are considered) have a relatively low rate of baccalaureate attainment, only 16 percent, well behind that of White, or Anglo, men, 37 percent of whom have the credential. Since 30 percent of Anglo-Hispanic men also have graduated from college, they are notably closer to the White percentage than to the Hispanic one. Anglo-Hispanic women are similarly positioned between the White and Hispanic rates, although all the rates of baccalaureate attainment are higher for women.

Individuals who come from Black-White backgrounds occupy a more intermediate position. One-quarter (26 percent) of the men have a college degree, clearly higher than the 17 percent of Black-only men but substantially lower than the 37 percent of White-only men. The educational attainment of Black-White women is similarly situated: 37 percent with baccalaureates or more versus 47 percent for White women and 26 percent for Black women.

Since the expansion of the mixed categories with data from the ancestry question is unlikely to overcome entirely the problem of selectivity, some corroborative evidence would be valuable. It comes from the annual CIRP (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) Freshman Survey, conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute ( HERI ). In several of the early years of this century (2001–2003), this survey of the nation’s entering college class asked not only about the ethnoracial backgrounds of the students but also about those of their parents, making it possible to identify students with mixed parentage without ambiguity. 14

These data demonstrate that, among students with Hispanic ancestry, those with a White parent were more likely to enter a four-year college and much more likely to enter the selective tier of higher education. (A similar pattern, but on a more modest scale, appears for Black students.) The advantage in beginning college becomes apparent when the ratio of Hispanic-only to Anglo-Hispanic students among freshmen at four-year colleges is compared with its equivalent in an appropriate birth cohort. The closest birth cohort is that in the 1980 census, when there were 2.5 Hispanic-only infants for every Anglo-Hispanic infant. Some twenty-plus years later, among first-year college students, there were 1.8 Hispanic-only freshmen for every Anglo-Hispanic freshman–the smaller ratio indicates a disadvantage at that time for Hispanic-only youth in attending college.

More strikingly, students from mixed Hispanic-White families were distributed across the tiers of the four-year college universe similarly to White students. In the early 2000s, more than half (54 percent) of students with two White parents attended colleges that HERI views as more selective, compared with one-quarter (27 percent) of students with two Black parents and one-third (31 percent) of students with two Hispanic parents. However, for students with one White and one Hispanic parent, the fraction in the more selective tier was, at 53 percent, no different from that of Whites. It made no difference whether the Hispanic parent was the father or the mother. Moreover, a White parent was a huge advantage for a student with Hispanic ancestry in gaining access to elite schools, the public and private universities classified by HERI as very selective. About 9 percent of the White-only freshmen attended elite schools in the early 2000s, compared with 5 percent of Black-only students and 6 percent of Hispanic-only students. However, 11 percent of mixed White-Hispanic students attended elite schools. Having a White parent was also an asset in this respect for students with a Black parent.

To understand the social location of mixed Americans, we also need to know about the social milieus with which they typically affiliate: the kinds of friends they have, the neighborhoods where they reside, and the families they form. The Pew Surveys of Multiracial Americans and on Hispanic Identity, which avoid the selectivity problem by ancestry tracing, are informative in this respect. 15

One indicator is feeling accepted by Whites, the dominant majority. Sixty-two percent of Asian-Whites feel “very” accepted by Whites, compared with 47 percent who say they feel very accepted by Asians; and 72 percent of Anglo-Hispanics feel very accepted by the White majority, compared with 49 percent by Hispanics. The perceptions of Black-White adults are very different. Only one-quarter of them feel very accepted by Whites, but nearly 60 percent feel very accepted by Blacks. 16

Most individuals from mixed minority-White backgrounds, with the prominent exception of those of Black-White parentage, appear to be involved in social milieus that, while varying in their diversity, contain numerous Whites. Nearly half of Asian-Whites say that most or all of their friends are Whites, compared with just 7 percent who say this about Asians. Near two-thirds say that all or most of their neighbors are Whites. The social milieus of Anglo-Hispanics also tilt White, but not as much: half say that all or most of their friends are Whites, while one-quarter say this of Hispanics; and the figures are very similar concerning their neighbors. Individuals who are White and Black are located in quite different social spaces. Half of them say that all or most of their friends are Black. However, just one-third claim to live in mostly Black neighborhoods; this group is outnumbered by the more than 40 percent who live in mostly White neighborhoods. 17

Most tellingly, individuals from mixed minority and White family backgrounds appear mostly to marry Whites, on the one hand supporting the notion that Whites make up disproportionate shares of their social milieus and, on the other, ensuring that the next generation, their children, will grow up in heavily White, if still mixed, family contexts. Romantic partners typically are chosen from the people encountered in everyday social environments, such as school or work. High probabilities of marrying Whites indicate that these milieus are preponderantly White, although we cannot discount the possibility that some mixed individuals seek out a White partner because of Whites’ status at the top of the ethnoracial hierarchy.

Based on the expanded definitions of mixed minority-White categories, tabulations from the 2017 American Community Survey, restricted to individuals under the age of forty to capture recent marriage patterns, reveal the tendency to choose White partners. More than 70 percent of Asian-White women are married to White men, and few, only 10 percent, chose Asian-only or Asian-White men. The figures are a bit different for Asian-White men, but not greatly so: 64 percent of them have White partners and less than 20 percent have partners with some Asian parentage. The tendency to marry Whites is not as strong for Anglo-Hispanics, but the majority have White spouses: 60 percent of women and 57 percent of men. About 30 percent in each case are married to someone of whole or part Hispanic heritage.

For those of Black and White parentage, marriage to Whites is–unsurprisingly –less common. But it is much more frequent than is true for individuals from Black-only backgrounds. More than 40 percent of Black-White men have White partners; this figure is higher than the percentage with spouses who are Black only or Black-White. Somewhat more than one-third of Black-White women are married to Whites, a percentage about equal to the fraction with Black-only partners. The expansion of the category through the ancestry data substantially lowers the intermarriage percentage because it brings in many individuals who classify themselves as only Black on the race question. These are individuals who, it appears, are in heavily African American social milieus.

In addition to socioeconomic advancement, as reflected in improved educational life chances, and frequent integration into social milieus containing many Whites, as indicated by high rates of marriage to Whites, one other characteristic of Americans from mixed minority-White backgrounds stands out: the fluidity of their ethnoracial identities. This fluidity, which entails presenting oneself sometimes as mixed and at other times in terms of a single part of one’s background, may also imply contingency: that is, identifying oneself in a way that fits the situation of the moment. But we do not have sufficient evidence at this point to confirm this.

The evidence we have of fluidity is compelling and shows that mixed individuals do not present consistently in terms of the broad ethnoracial categories of the census. One study, based on a match of individuals between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, provides a powerful demonstration. 18 Overall, 6 percent of individuals presented inconsistent ethnoracial reports, but for those who indicated mixed origins on one or both censuses, the rate was much higher. Of those who are Asian and White by race on one of the censuses, for instance, barely more than one-third (34.5 percent) are consistent on the other. Of the nearly two-thirds who are inconsistent, the great majority report as single-race Asian or White on the other census, with White responses outnumbering Asian ones by 60 percent. The inconsistency pattern among individuals who are Black and White on one census is rather similar, except that Black-only responses outnumber White-only ones on the other census by a two-to-one margin.

Another study that makes use of matched census data (over three time points) reveals fluidity in the identities of individuals who are part Hispanic and part something else. 19 This analysis found that 14 percent of individuals with discernable Hispanic ancestry did not report consistently as Hispanic. This figure is deceptively low because the base for the percentage includes the large population of Latin American immigrants, for whom the rate of inconsistency is very low. Among those who appear consistently as Hispanic, the percentage having some non-Hispanic ancestry is small, about 5 percent. Among those who are inconsistent, the percentage is roughly ten times higher.

For Hispanics, we have additional evidence that mixed family backgrounds are connected to a weakening of Hispanic identity. Confirmation comes from the Pew Survey of Hispanic Identity, which found that 11 percent of individuals with Hispanic ancestry did not identify as Hispanic; almost all of them came from mixed family backgrounds. Among those from mixed backgrounds who did identify as Hispanic, more than 40 percent said that they most often described themselves as “American,” a figure that was more than three times higher than that for unmixed Hispanics. 20

A widely believed narrative about the American future, anchored in demographic data and projections, holds that, within a few decades, Whites will become a minority of the American population, outnumbered by the aggregate of minority groups. This narrative has been dubbed the “majority-minority society,” and it is generally presumed that this future demographic shift will have profound consequences for the distribution of cultural, economic, and political power among the nation’s ethnoracial groups.

But the surge of young Americans from mixed minority-White backgrounds complicates this narrative, if it does not overturn it. One reason is that the publicly disseminated demographic data, which serve to justify the majority-minority narrative, inadequately reflect mixed backgrounds. This inadequacy has to do with problems in conventional ethnoracial classifications. For one thing, in publicly presented data, the Census Bureau usually classifies all individuals who report themselves as mixed on the race question in a separate “mixed race” category. The members of this category are treated as non-Whites in interpretations of the data, although the great majority of them have a White parent. For another, the measurement of ethnoracial origins in the current two-question format–one for race, the other for Hispanic origin–leads to the classification of anyone who indicates a Hispanic identity as non-White (because “Hispanics may be of any race,” according to the standard demographic formulation). However, we can now be sure that a substantial minority of Hispanics comes from mixed Anglo-Hispanic families; these individuals are lost from view in conventional demographic ethnoracial categories.

The problems with the majority-minority narrative are not just a matter of data–they are also conceptual. The narrative envisions American society as fractured into two separate, competing ethnoracial blocs, one of which is declining while the other is ascending. These blocs are presumed to be distinct in numerous ways having to do with the average social locations of their members, their typical experiences, their views, and above all their sense of relative status. It is widely believed that the ascent of the minority bloc to majority status, which is supposedly driven by inevitable demographic processes, will overturn an established social order in which Whites represent the dominant social group.

The rise of mixing in families between Whites and minorities and the surge of young Americans from mixed minority-White backgrounds calls for new ways of thinking about the social changes taking place as a result of increasing societal diversity. This mixing is not at all acknowledged in the majority-minority narrative, a sign of the problematic conceptualization it entails. At the most fundamental level, mixing is reducing the separateness of the ethnoracial blocs: the share of the White bloc with a sense of membership in the minority bloc, along with deep connections to minority individuals, will continue to grow in the near future; and the same will be true for the shares of minority groups with a degree of membership in and close relationships to individuals in the White bloc. For many, what is viewed today as a bright divide in the majority-minority narrative will increasingly blur.

The limitations of the majority-minority narrative betray problems in social-science theorizing about American society. In recent decades, thinking about race and ethnicity has been dominated by critical race theory, at whose core is a vision of society as organized in terms of a rigid ethnoracial hierarchy, which is maintained for the benefit of the dominant group, Whites. Critical race theory has, without question, generated many important insights into ethnoracial inequalities. But the surge of young Americans with mixed family backgrounds, many of whom appear to be integrating into the mainstream, where most Whites are also located, demonstrates that current developments in the United States cannot be understood solely on the basis of critical race theory.

We need another kind of idea, one that has been salient at various points in American history and at whose core is the notion of assimilation. Assimilation theorizing, like critical race theory, envisions society in terms of an ethnoracial hierarchy, but with more fluidity. Its most important insights are focused on the ways that individuals and even groups can improve their position in this hierarchy, even reaching parity and integrating with the dominant group. We have undeniable evidence that assimilation was the paramount process among the descendants of early-twentieth-century immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The evidence about twenty-first-century mixing across the majority-minority divide indicates that it is relevant to at least some descendants of post-1965 immigrants. It is time for assimilation thinking to make a comeback.

• 1 Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
• 2 Carolyn Liebler, “Counting America’s First Peoples,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 677 (1) (2018): 180–190.
• 3 Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters, eds., The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).
• 4 For the argument in much greater depth, see Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020).
• 5 Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown, Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years after Loving v. Virginia (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2017).
• 6 The Pew study does not include same-sex marriages.
• 7 Because of the brevity of this essay, I do not discuss or present all of the official ethnoracial categories. Figure 1 does not include the very small Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander group. In the text, I do not discuss American Indians, but concentrate on the major minority populations: Blacks and Hispanics.
• 8 Richard Alba, “ What Majority-Minority Society? A Critical Analysis of the Census Bureau’s Population Projections ,” Socius 4 (2018).
• 9 Sean Reardon and Ann Owens, “60 Years after Brown : Trends and Consequences of School Segregation,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014): 199–218.
• 10 These spatial divisions make use of geographic classifications developed by IPUMS based on PUMA designations. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, et al., IPUMS USA : Version 9.0 [dataset] (Minneapolis: IPUMS , 2019) .
• 11 Grace Kao, Kara Joyner, and Kelly Balistreri, Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2019).
• 12 Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl, Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016).
• 13 Carolyn Liebler, Sonya Porter, Leticia Fernandez, et al., “America’s Churning Races: Race and Ethnicity Response Changes between Census 2000 and the 2010 Census,” Demography 54 (2017): 259–284; and Leticia Fernández, Sonya Porter, Sharon Ennis, and Renuka Bhaskar, “Factors that Influence Change in Hispanic Identification: Evidence from Linked Decennial Census and American Community Survey Data,” report CES 18-45 (Suitland, Md.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2018).
• 14 The analysis reported here is mine. I am grateful to Nathaniel Kang of UCLA ’s HERI for sharing the parental data, not available in the online survey file, with me.
• 15 Pew Research Center, Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2015); and Mark Hugo Lopez, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, and Gustavo López, Latino Identity Fades across Generations as Immigrant Connections Fall Away (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2017).
• 16 Pew Research Center, Multiracial in America , 14. The Anglo-Hispanic figures are my calculations from the database used for the report.
• 17 Ibid., chap. 5.
• 18 Liebler et al., “America’s Churning Races.”
• 19 Fernández et al., “Factors that Influence a Change in Hispanic Identification.”
• 20 Lopez et al., Latino Identity Fades across Generations . I am grateful to Mark Hugo Lopez for additional data in this paragraph.

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Here’s What It’s Like Being a Teen of Mixed Race in America

In this week's 'Teen Talk' column, a teen explains her experience growing up in a biracial family.

In my eighteen years growing up as mixed race , I've only had one biracial friend. She was a year younger than me and endlessly realistic—the one friend everyone needs who really tells it like it is.

"Being mixed isn't some great injustice," she said to me one morning after I brought up some of the discomforts I had about feeling "othered" by our friends. Growing up, my school district was predominantly white, and my identity had developed around that of my peers. Now, being in an art school where it's much more diverse, I've had to acclimate to the many ways blackness presents itself around me. "Talent scouts, modeling agencies, casting directors...they all love racial ambiguity—it sells better," she added.

I'd never thought of my mixed skin tone like this before. My mom is white and my dad is Black. Although I don't pass for white at all, with an Afro and dark skin, I am definitely light-skinned compared to others, which has its advantages. But my mixed look has definitely been complicated for me. I was 4 years old the first time I realized that my mother's hair was nothing like mine and never would be.

At age 12, I was referred to by the N-word for the first time and felt such rage and confusion that I didn't know how to react. My white friend later explained to me that it wasn't a big deal, her friends said it all the time.

Now 18, I have predominantly white friends, and a white partner. I'm finally at the age where I can recognize not only my privilege in being mixed, but my luck in finding both Black and white people that I love and identify with.

Colorism, or discrimination based on skin complexion, plays a huge role in the ways that modern society operates and picks the minorities it wants to show. There is also truth to the fact that being mixed can be incredibly difficult and confusing at times. There have always been a thousand little things that make me feel disconnected from my single-race family and friends. I want parents to understand the complexities that come with raising a mixed child, so they can help their children navigate the "in-betweeness" that I have felt and that never really leaves.

I Live Within Two Identities

Initially, I thought that there was something wrong with me. My brother and I bounce from being Black to white to Black to white again, depending on where we are, who we are with, what we're thinking about, and what we're talking about. We've both admitted to making friends through the practice of code-switching, or subconsciously adjusting your dialect depending on who you're with.

Everyone does it, but when you're mixed it's almost as if you switch your whole identity based on who you're around. I have learned that there are certain experiences I can't discuss with my white friends, like the emotional effects of watching police brutality, and certain ones that my Black friends wouldn't know how to take, like my difficulty acclimating to their lingo comfortably or fully relating to their experiences. It's confusing to grow up like this; constantly hiding an aspect of yourself and figuring out who you truly are when your identity is constantly shifting.

I Want My Feelings and Experiences Heard

As a mixed-race child , there were things about my parents helped me understand about their culture, history, and social perception that I would not have known naturally. Colorism plays a huge role in the ways in which mixed people are treated versus single-race people. I've also had the opportunity to teach my parents about my own experience, too.

Your biracial child may be dealing with things you may not understand, like feeling separated from their race. At its core, being biracial makes you a little bit different than your friends, parents, and extended family. I'm living two truths, functioning in two ways, learning two sets of rules.

I Needed Help Developing My Own Identity

There have been many ways in which I developed that my parents did not identify with. They still helped me navigate these experiences. There are so many resources available for mixed-race families. If your child faced racism in a place you never saw it before, you can meet with a therapist who specializes in working with mixed family dynamics. If you're not sure what to do with their hair, find a salon with a stylist who is also mixed.

The Bottom Line

All children are their own beings. Mixed children are in a unique position, independent from their parents in terms of race. They're a beautiful amalgamation, just like a kid should be. Help them. They have things to learn from you. You have things to learn from them.

Adiah Siler is an 18-year-old senior at a local arts school in Pennsylvania, where she studies writing. She's active in the political scene in her community.

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'Racial Impostor Syndrome': Here Are Your Stories

Leah Donnella

"Racial impostor syndrome" is definitely a thing for many people. We hear from biracial and multi-ethnic listeners who connect with feeling "fake" or inauthentic in some part of their racial or ethnic heritage. Kristen Uroda for NPR hide caption

"Racial impostor syndrome" is definitely a thing for many people. We hear from biracial and multi-ethnic listeners who connect with feeling "fake" or inauthentic in some part of their racial or ethnic heritage.

It's tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a "racial impostor." For one Code Switch follower, it's the feeling she gets from whipping out "broken but strangely colloquial Arabic" in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it's being treated like "just another tourist" when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, "Is this allowed?"

A Festival For Mixed-Race Storytellers — And Everyone Else, Too

In this week's podcast, we go deep into what we're calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that's, in some ways, all about this.

Here's how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to tell us that "living at the intersection of different identities and cultures" was like "stumbling around in a forest in the dark."

She asked, "Do you hear from other listeners who feel like fakes?"

Good question. So we took it to our audience, and what we heard back was a resounding "yes."

We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. (And yes, we read every single one.)

Here are excerpts drawn from a few of the many letters that made us laugh, cry and argue — and that guided this week's episode.

Let's start with Angie Yingst of Pennsylvania:

"My mother is a Panamanian immigrant and my father is a white guy from Pennsylvania. I've always felt liminal, like I drift between race and culture. When I was young (20s) and living in the city, I would get asked multiple times a day where I was from, where my people were from, because Allentown, Pennsylvania, clearly wasn't the answer they were looking for ... It always felt like the undercurrent of that question was, 'You aren't white, but you aren't black. What are you?' "But truthfully, I don't feel like I fit with Latinas either. My Spanish is atrocious and I grew up in rural PA. Even my cousin said a few weeks ago, 'Well, you aren't really Spanish, because your dad is white.' Which gutted me, truly. I identify as Latina. I identify with my mother's culture and country as well as American culture. In shops, I'm treated like every other Latina, followed around, then ignored at the counter. I married a white guy and had children who are blonde and blue eyed, and I'm frequently asked if I'm the nanny or babysitter. And white acquaintances often say, 'You are white. You act white.' And I saltily retort, 'Why? Because I'm not doing your lawn, or taking care of your kids? You need to broaden your idea of what Latina means.' "

Jen Boggs of Hawaii says she often feels like a racial impostor, but isn't quite sure which race she's faking:

"I was born in the Philippines and moved to Hawaii when I was three. ... I grew up thinking that I was half-Filipina and half-white, under the impression that my mom's first husband was my biological father. I embraced this 'hapa-haole' identity (as they say in Hawaii), and loved my ethnic ambiguity. My mom wanted me to speak perfect English, so never spoke anything but to me. After she divorced her first husband and re-married my stepdad from Michigan, my whiteness became cemented. "Except. As it turns out, my biological father was a Filipino man whom I've never met. I didn't find out until I tried to apply for a passport in my late twenties and the truth came out. So, at age 28 I learned that I was not half white but all Filipina. ... "This new knowledge was a huge blow to my identity and, admittedly, to my self esteem. 'But I'm white,' I remember thinking. 'I'm so so white.' After much therapy, I'm happy and comfortable in my brown skin, though I'm still working out how others perceive me as this Other, Asian person." Code Switch All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?

Indigo Goodson's mom is Jamaican and her dad is African-American. She wrote about the way people's perceptions of her change based on where she lives:

"Culturally we grew up as Jamaican as two California-born black American children could have in the Bay Area. ... We ate mostly Jamaican food (prepared by both our mother and father), our Jamaican family lived with us growing up, and it was my mother that told us Anansi stories and other tales or sayings popular in Jamaica. " ... Both my parents are black, so no one ever asked 'What are you?' ... But then when folks would meet my mum they would say things like, 'Oh I thought you were black!' or 'You do look Jamaican!' And I would tell people I'm still black and clearly Jamaicans look like black Americans because we are both the descendants of enslaved West Africans. Now that I live in New York City, where if you're black people assume you are first generation Caribbean, I often have to remind people that my dad is black American and so am I."

Helen Seely is originally from California. She told us what it's like for her to interact with different groups as a light-skinned biracial woman:

"White people like to believe I'm Caucasian like them; I think it makes their life less complicated. But I don't identify as 100% white, so there always comes a time in the conversation or relationship where I need to 'out' myself and tell them that I'm biracial. "It's a vulnerable experience, but it becomes even harder when I'm with black Americans. It may sound strange — and there are so many layers to this that are hard to unpack — but I think what it comes down to is: they have more of a claim to 'blackness' than I ever will and therefore have the power to tell me I don't belong, I'm not enough, that I should stay on the white side of the identity line. "You know that question we always get asked? 'What are you?' Well, I still don't know. I've never had an answer that I can say with confidence; I still don't know what I'm allowed to claim."

Natalia Romero echoes some of those feelings. Her family left Colombia for the U.S. when she was 9 years old, and she says that while she doesn't consider herself white, she gets treated like she's white all the time:

"My mother doesn't speak English and so when I am home all we speak is Spanish and act like a bunch of rowdy, tight knit Colombians ... I grew up experiencing what many poor young immigrants face — bad schools, hunger, poverty, a lack of resources — but eventually managed to pay my way through college and work now as a musician and teacher, often very white communities. " ... When people talk about the current political climate, they speak to me as if I were white, not someone who is terrified of the hatred of Latinx and Hispanic people, someone who walks around with my green card in my wallet, knowing that until I am a citizen (which I morally have a huge problem with) I am not safe. I exist and inhabit these white spaces, but my experience is not white. My experiences comes from being the sole English speaker in my house at age 9 and having to speak for my parents at the bank, at school, in apartments. My experience is from pretending my youngest sister wasn't part of our family because the apartment complex only allowed 4 people to a 1 bedroom apartment and we couldn't afford a 2 bedroom one. I come from a place where people speak poorly of Latinx people around me not realizing I am one ... "

Everyone's story is different, and as is discussed on the podcast, we're still learning how to talk about identities that fall outside of our traditional understandings of race in the United States. Luckily, for those who are confused, you're in good company.

A Prescription For "Racial Imposter Syndrome"

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities

Introduction, multiracial identity development.

• The Role of Phenotype and Social Classification in Multiracial Identity
• Demography of Multiraciality
• Shifting Multiraciality
• Multiraciality outside the Black-White Binary
• Non-US and Global Multiraciality
• Youth and Family Dynamics
• Multiraciality and Politics: The Politics of Multiraciality
• Multiracial Intersectionalities
• Multiraciality in Culture
• The Interactive Effects of Multiraciality and Racism
• Critical Mixed-Race Studies

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Multiracial, Mixed-Race, and Biracial Identities by David L. Brunsma , hephzibah v. strmic-pawl LAST REVIEWED: 22 April 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 22 April 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0249

Scholarship designed to ask questions about the meanings of, identities of, and experiences of the offspring of interracial unions has been around for almost a century but has only seriously and significantly developed since the 1990s. From the early days of theorizing such experience from the counselor’s chair, psychological models planted early seeds, yet the ground of multiracial experience was one fundamentally wrapped up with institutions, social structures, political movements, histories and stories, racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities. Multiracial scholarship developed early on from an interest in understanding how the offspring of interracial unions, whether white/black, black/Asian, Latinx/white, and so on, develop understandings of themselves, as well as how others influence that understanding; thus, identity was a crucial starting point. Appearances, phenotype, and the sociocultural models of racial classification and the role that these play in the complex process of multiracial identity formation, development, maintenance, and change have become staple research questions. The racial demographics of race and multiraciality, along with the politics of census categorization and the tracing of such demographic and policy shifts over time, have provided more-macro contexts that have played into the ways we both study and, therefore, understand multiraciality. In the 2010s, scholars really began to move outside the black-white binary, more intersectionally and transdisciplinarily, and across national and historical contexts to develop an even more nuanced and complex theoretical and empirical understanding of multiraciality. From early-21st-century developments in critical mixed-race theory to the political importance of multiraciality in social movements, and from the role of multiraciality in popular culture and marketing to the potential and pitfalls of multiraciality and its politics dismantling ideas of race, realities of racism, and the pursuit of racial and social justice, scholarship on multiraciality has given us deeply important understandings.

The core intellectual agenda in the scholarly study of multiraciality from the beginnings centered on multiracial identity—how it forms and develops, and how it is maintained and changed. Identity has always been at the heart of psychological and sociological research on multiraciality. The early work of Poston ( Poston 1990 ) raised key early questions from the counselor’s chair and set a research agenda regarding multiracial psycho-social navigation. Two edited collections, Root 1992 and Root 1996 , brought together the best and cutting-edge scholars whose work through the 1980s and 1990s added important social, cultural, political, temporal, and demographic dimensions to this central intellectual agenda. Scholars would begin creating empirically grounded models and taxonomies of multiracial identity that would be used by scholars in the first two decades of the 21st century, including key models in Rockquemore 1998 , Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002 , Rockquemore and Brunsma 2004–2008 , and Khanna 2011 . Others (such as Renn 2012 ) would eventually engage more fully with intersectional identity in institutional contexts, and Brunsma 2006 , an edited volume titled Mixed Messages , would bring together the second generation of scholars on multiracial identity whose work was in building theory, culminating in a theoretical agenda set in Rockquemore, et al. 2009 .

Brunsma, D. L., ed. 2006. Mixed messages: Multiracial identities in the “color-blind” era . Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

An interdisciplinary collection of original, critical scholarship on multiraciality. This volume was the first to bring together the burgeoning social-scientific scholarship conducted during the lead-up to the 2000 census change. These twenty chapters (plus a critical introduction) covered the broad areas of the sociocultural politics of (multi)racial identity, critical essays on the multiracial movement, early sociological work on racial socialization in interracial families, and continuing scholarship on racial-identity formation in multiracial individuals.

Khanna, N. 2011. Biracial in America: Forming and performing racial identity . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Using in-depth interviews, Khanna studies the processes shaping black-white (multi)racial identity and how biracials perform their race. Using a social-psychological approach, this book is particularly recognized for its analysis of biracials’ reflected appraisals, which is how biracials negotiate their identity in relationship to how they think others perceive them. Khanna finds that the one-drop rule still has a large influence in black-white biracials’ feeling that they are black.

Poston, W. S. C. 1990. The biracial identity development model: A needed addition. Journal of Counseling & Development 69.2: 152–155.

An early theoretical intervention from counseling psychology into the scholarship and theoretical assumptions of multiracial (biracial) identity development. The author attends to extant theories of racial-identity development and provides crucial critiques of their applicability to multiracial identity development. This article took us away from deficit/tragic models of identity development to more positive/agentic ones. Implications for both research and counseling are offered—many of which have been followed to this day.

Renn, K. A. 2012. Mixed race students in college: The ecology of race, identity, and community on campus . Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

A widely read study of multiracial identity within the context of higher education. Combining ethnography and interviews of fifty-six multiracial students at six colleges, this study focused on the role of context, peer cultures, and public/private negotiations of multiracial identity. Four identity themes—monoracial, multiple monoracial, extraracial, and situational—lead to further refinement of her influential developmental ecological framework for studying multiraciality in institutional context. Implications for policy and practice in higher education are discussed.

Rockquemore, K. A. 1998. Between black and white exploring the “biracial” experience. Race and Society 1.2: 197–212.

Considered one of the first critical, sociological engagements with multiracial identity formations and their social-structural locations. Using in-depth interviews with young adult black/white multiracials, the author develops the first sociological typology of multiracial identity where multiracials craft meaningful “Border” (biracial), “Protean” (contextually shifting), “Transcendent” (no racial identifiers), or “Traditional” (white or black), identities. The roles of appearance and social-structural location and its effects on these identity options are theorized here as well.

Rockquemore, K. A., and D. L. Brunsma. 2002. Socially embedded identities: Theories, typologies, and processes of racial identity among black/white biracials. Sociological Quarterly 43.3: 335–356.

This study extends the typology of black/white multiracial identities in Rockquemore 1998 . Using the typology to summarize extant empirical literature, this study tests hypotheses predicting each identity type, using a survey sample of 177 black/white multiracials. Results indicate the importance of racial composition of social networks, appearance, experiences of discrimination (from whites and blacks), and feelings of closeness (to whites or blacks). The idea of identity validation and invalidation is developed in this article.

Rockquemore, K. A., and D. L. Brunsma. 2004–2008. Beyond black: Biracial identity in America . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

A key book in the sociological scholarship on multiracial identity. Each edition of the book provides a historical overview of racial identity in the United States, summarizes and engages with the extant literature on multiracial identity, and critically plots the racial-political contours of the multiracial movement and the census. This work provides empirical evidence of the social structure of multiracial identity, theorizes the role of appearance in multiracial identities, and provides thoughts on future directions.

Rockquemore, K. A., D. L. Brunsma, and D. J. Delgado. 2009. Racing to theory or retheorizing race? Understanding the struggle to build a multiracial identity theory. Journal of Social Issues 65.1: 13–34.

Taking stock of some twenty years of scholarship on multiraciality in order to build theory, this piece considers researchers’ conceptualization of and assumptions underlying racial-identity development among mixed-race people, the challenges to current efforts at understanding the identity-category-identification matrix, and the implications of new identities emerging within the multiracial population. It ends by warning about multiraciality’s potential for reproducing of dominant ideologies, and that scholars should reckon with their own blinders.

Root, M. P. P., ed. 1992. Racially mixed people in America . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

A foundational book in the study of mixed-race communities, and one of the earliest edited volumes that take a late-20th-century evaluation of multiracialism. Issues addressed in this book include experiences of multiracials, factors affecting multiracial identity development, changing demographics, and methods used to study multiracialism.

Root, M. P. P., ed. 1996. The multiracial experience: Racial borders as the new frontier . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

The second foundational volume edited by pioneering multiracial scholar Maria P. Root, which continues to investigate the factors affecting multiracial identity. This volume examines difficult questions in areas such as adoption, border crossing, intersections with gender and sexuality, and the relationships among multiracial identity, racialization, and racism. This book also features Root’s famous chapter “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.”

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Growing Up Mixed Race: Biracial Child and Monoracial Parents Reflect

In her college application essay, host Anita Rao described herself as a colorful parrot living in a cultural jungle — with her English and Indian sides occupying different realms. Now, she reflects on her biracial experience with her parents.

When host Anita Rao’s parents got married in 1984, their interracial marriage made newspaper headlines in her mother’s small hometown. The novelty of their marriage made Sheila and Satish Rao determined to prove that race was not an obstacle to their relationship — nor to the raising of their children.

Three decades later, Anita reflects with Satish and Sheila on how they approached biracial children, their thoughts on the Embodied mixed race identity episode from July 14 and what questions it brought up for them about their daughter’s racial identity.

Experiencing Racism in the UK as a Mixed Race Person | Essay

As a mixed-race person, i didn't understand racism until i moved to the uk.

Racism was always a very foreign concept to me, until I moved to the UK. The privilege of being pretty by society's standards and being mixed race shielded me from a lot of the experiences that my deeper-skinned sisters struggled with since childhood. Now, I feel like I am being called into the front lines of a battle that's been raging for centuries, and I'm scared. I don't want to lose my softness — I'm the type of person to get teary eyed at small animals, children playing, and cute old couples holding hands — but my light-skinned privilege can no longer protect me, and I have no choice but to fight.

I grew up in Jamaica — a very proud Black country — where the closest thing to racism was colourism. I was always trying to validate my Blackness, and negotiate acceptance within my own community, who constantly told me that I wasn't Black enough. When I moved to the UK, the narrative switched, and all of a sudden I was the Black friend. Add the fact that I only started growing my natural hair when I moved to the UK, which made living in white society that much more difficult. I remember wearing my natural hair to journalism classes, and being asked if it was political. My professor asked why I always teased my hair — my hair that naturally grew out of my head in a vertical direction. Or a classmate, a white Belgian girl, who confidently told our majority white class that "people with locs don't wash their hair" — which can be easily dispelled with a quick Google search. I recall my first time partying in East London, and a white girl ran up to me, put her hands in my hair, and asked "OMG! Is it real?" — she had never seen a blonde afro before, I assumed. I was shocked that this was people's everyday reality. I didn't know how to respond, so I didn't. I was stunned, and then I was upset for not sticking up for myself. In the past three years of living in the UK, my introduction to racism has been hard and swift, but nothing could have prepared me for dating a white Welsh boy from Cheshire.

My parents are an interracial couple — Black mum, white dad — so I grew up very aware of the vitriol some people have for a couple of different ethnic backgrounds that look really happy together. But dating a white guy in the UK, especially one from a middle class, suburban background with no close friends who are people of colour, was a totally different ball game.

"I was 4,695 miles away from family, the world felt like it was falling apart, and despite being drained and exhausted, I was being forced to defend and protect Blackness in majority-white spaces — a Blackness that I was still understanding within myself."

A few months into being "official", I began to see the internalised pain of some Black people in the UK. One late night, my partner and I stopped into a Five Guys restaurant to grab a bite to eat. It was traumatising when a Black man saw us together, began targeting us, and tried to fight my boyfriend. "My d*ck is bigger than you, bro!" and "Oh, you think because you're with a Black girl you're bad?" Thankfully, my partner doesn't have the type of ego to engage in that kind of toxic masculinity, but for me, it was terrifying and eye-opening. I was worried this man's friends would be outside ready to stab my guy for stealing one of "their women," or maybe splash acid on my face for "selling out" to the other side. It was scary, but it got even worse when I became a fixture within my partner's white friend group.

It started with racial microaggressions — mimicking my Jamaican accent when it peaked out after a few drinks. Then, more subtle ignorance, like being proud to share with me that they love Jollof rice — a West African dish — that I had never even heard of until coming to the UK. Although they were trying to connect with me, it's offensive when Blackness is seen as a monolith. Experiencing these things for the first time, and being the only Black person in the room for the first time, while Black Lives Matter dominated the political landscape, meant that I could no longer hide from my own racial trauma. I was even further removed from any sense of community than I ever had been before. I was 4,695 miles away from family, the world felt like it was falling apart, and despite being drained and exhausted, I was being forced to defend and protect Blackness in majority-white spaces — a Blackness that I was still understanding within myself. And while some well-meaning friends of my partner followed me to BLM marches and apologised for tone-deaf comments, others made a point to make me feel even more estranged.

"I'm coming to realise that dismantling white supremacy is a long game, and it's only just beginning for me."

Meeting one of my partner's friends — we'll call her Karen—— is the first time I was being forced to directly confront a racist. From the first time we met, she began drilling me about my ethnic background. It was strange, but being an international student in both Canada and the UK, it's something I was used to from both white people and people of colour. While I explained my upbringing and that of my parents, she snidely said, "Oh, that's an interesting mix." When asking about her background, she became defensive, and got very short with me, "I'm not finished [drilling you about your ethnicity]!". The room became awkward and tense, people were embarrassed, but no one came to my defence. In that moment, I realised how the difference between being nonracist and antiracist can literally become a situation of life or death.

The next time I saw Karen, before she engaged in any small talk about what I'd been up to, she couldn't resist asking about my hair. "Your hair is different. How did you get it like that? Your hair is always changing". That was a strange opening considering the previous incident, but I understood that she's racist so I wasn't surprised. It was then confirmed when we all got a bit boozed, and Karen asked me without context, "Where are you going?" I was confused, so I stayed quiet and waited for her to clarify. She quickly added, "I don't mean you shouldn't be in this country or anything. I mean, are you planning a trip for when lockdown lifts?"

When people say that racism doesn't exist in the UK, it's extremely painful. And while I want to get angry and absolutely destroy the Karens of the world, that's not how revolution and healing happens. I'm coming to realise that dismantling white supremacy is a long game, and it's only just beginning for me. It takes strength and conviction to open people's hearts, force them to reflect, and actually want to change — but it also takes allyship. To be an ally is more than posting a Black square, going to a BLM protest, or dragging a campaign for lack of diversity. Unlearning systemic oppression begins in everyday exchanges, by using your voice to challenge prejudice — even when it's awkward, uncomfortable, and happening right before your eyes. It's a privilege to be antiracist without having to experience the heartbreak of being othered. It's becoming more frequent for me to exist in white spaces where I'm forced to defend Blackness with my last breath. And now that I'm being called to fight — and really wish I didn't have to — where will you stand?

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1000% me: growing up mixed, tv-g | documentaries | 1 hr 0 min | 2023.

With humor and sensitivity, filmmaker and comedian W. Kamau Bell tackles the joys and challenges of growing up mixed-race through conversations with kids and families in the San Francisco Bay Area, including his own. Recognizing that his children, born to a Black father and White mother, and growing up in a country still deeply divided by race, would have very different experiences in America than he and his wife did, embarks on a journey of discovery in his family’s Bay Area community. In a series of playful and impactful conversations, Bell explores how these young people navigate issues of identity in a world that can ask them to pick a side and thoughtful exchanges with families reveal the many joys and complexities of what it means to raise multiracial children.

In his trademark fashion, Bell maintains a serious focus while keeping the discussions lively and accessible, proving along the way that children are more than capable of understanding and furthering complex conversations about race, culture, and identity.

Featured Participants: 

• Sami (10) is Black and White and looks up to Alicia Keys and Juno, Sami’s sister (7), will tell you why it’s the best to be a middle child.
• Myles (11) is Black and Filipino-American, likes to play basketball, and helps his lola (grandmother) compete in a Filipino cook off. 
• Presley (10) is White and Filipino-American. She has her own punk band and occasionally rides around San Francisco with her dad belting tunes from his Karaoke motorcycle.
• Kanani (10) is White, Indigenous, and Latina. She and her parents spend every summer with her dad’s tribe in Costa Rica. 
• Anisa (11) is Black and Pakistani-British and she considers being Muslim as much a part of her “mix” as race. 
• Her friend Mila (10) is Chinese American and Black. She is deeply thoughtful and speaks in the measured tones of a future world leader while her parents discuss the deeper implications of wearing mismatching socks. 
• Sumaya (7) is Guinean and Punjabi and has strong opinions about mangoes, dogs, and llamas. 
• Carter (13) is Black and Latina and her best friend Nola (13) is Black and White. They both have two moms but very different birth stories.
• Kaylin (16) has two mixed-race parents. She’s part White, part Black, and part Korean. 
• Older family members also participate in the discussions including siblings, parents, grandparents, as well as other adults, and professionals invested in these issues. 

Directed by W. Kamau Bell; produced by Kelly Rafferty; executive produced by W. Kamau Bell, Geraldine L. Porras, and Amy Schatz. Presented by HBO Documentary Films in association with Get Lifted Film Company. For Get Lifted: executive producers, Mike Jackson, Ty Stiklorius, John Legend. For HBO: executive producers, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, and Sara Rodriguez.

Dive Deeper

Inspired by the film and want to learn more?

Read the official Discussion Guide for 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed .

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• Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

5. Gender identity, sexual orientation and the 2024 election

Table of contents.

• Voters’ views about race and society, the impact of the legacy of slavery
• Most voters, but not all, view the nation’s diversity as a strength
• How should the country handle undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S.?
• Attitudes toward hearing other languages in public places
• Biden and Trump supporters’ views about discussing America’s historical successes, failures
• How does the U.S. compare with other countries?
• Views of women’s progress
• How much of a priority should marriage and children be?
• Abortion, IVF access and birth control
• Views of gender identity
• Voters’ attitudes toward use of gender-neutral pronouns
• Societal impact of more social acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual people
• Religion and government policy
• How much influence should the Bible have on the nation’s laws, if any?
• Views on the federal government’s role in promoting Christian values
• Most voters say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral
• Is the justice system too tough on criminals, or not tough enough?
• Policing and law enforcement
• How Trump, Biden supporters view gun rights and ownership
• Views on the increasing number of guns in the U.S.
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Voters who support Joe Biden and Donald Trump have wide differences across a broad range of issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Trump supporters overwhelmingly say a person’s gender is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth. A majority of Biden supporters, by a less one-sided margin, say someone can be a man or woman even if that is different from their sex at birth.

Biden’s supporters also are far more comfortable than Trump supporters with people using the pronouns “they” or “them” to describe themselves.

And two decades after the first same-sex marriages were legally performed in the U.S., Biden supporters are roughly five times as likely as Trump supporters to say legalizing same-sex marriage has been good for society.

Nearly two-thirds of registered voters (65%) say whether a person is a man or woman is determined by the sex assigned to them at birth. About a third (34%) say whether someone is a man or woman can be different from the sex at birth.

Nine-in-ten Trump supporters and about four-in-ten Biden supporters (39%) say sex at birth determines if someone is a man or a woman.

About six-in-ten Biden supporters (59%) say a person’s gender can be different from their sex at birth. Only about one-in-ten Trump supporters (9%) say this.

There are wider demographic differences in opinions about gender identity among Biden supporters than among Trump supporters.

Among Biden supporters

Nearly two-thirds of Black voters who support Biden (64%) say gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth. That compares with 46% of Biden’s Hispanic supporters and smaller shares of his White (32%) and Asian supporters (27%).

Biden supporters without college degrees (47%) are more likely than those with college degrees or more education (30%) to say sex at birth determines someone’s gender.

Biden supporters under age 35 (29%) are less likely than older Biden supporters to say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth.

Among Trump supporters

Across demographic groups, wide majorities of Trump supporters say gender is determined by sex at birth.

However, there are some differences among these voters. Hispanic Trump supporters (79%) are less likely than White Trump supporters (92%) to say sex birth determines gender identity, and Trump supporters ages 18 to 34 (83%) are less likely to say this than older Trump supporters.

Changing views about gender identity

The share of voters who say that sex at birth determines whether someone is a man or a woman has increased since 2017, and this increase has occurred within both parties.

In 2017, 53% of voters said sex assigned at birth determines gender; 65% express this view today.

The share of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who say that sex at birth determines gender identity has grown from 79% in 2017 to 91% now.

In the same period, the share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who say this has increased, from 30% to 39%.

Over half of voters (56%) say they are not comfortable with someone using the pronouns “they” or “them” to describe themselves, rather than “he” or “she.” Roughly four-in-ten (43%) are comfortable with the use of these pronouns.

Biden supporters are more than three times as likely as Trump supporters to say they are comfortable with the use of “they/them” pronouns (66% to 20%).

• Black voters who support Biden (55%) are less comfortable with the use of they/them pronouns than Biden’s White (69%), Hispanic (68%) and Asian (72%) backers.
• Hispanic Trump supporters (33%) are somewhat more likely than the former president’s White supporters (16%) to say they are comfortable.

Voters under 50 are more comfortable than those 50 and older with people using gender-neutral pronouns. There is an age gap on this question among both candidates’ supporters, but it is particularly stark among Biden voters: 79% of Biden’s supporters ages 18 to 49 say they are comfortable, compared with 56% of his supporters who are 50 and older.

Voters are divided over the societal effects of more people being comfortable with identifying as gay, lesbian or bisexual and same-sex marriages being legal in the U.S.

Roughly a third say each trend has been very or somewhat good for society, while about as many say the changes have been bad for society. The remainder say they have been neither good nor bad.

As with opinions about gender identity, there are sizable differences between Biden and Trump supporters.

About half of Biden supporters (51%) say more people being comfortable identifying as gay, lesbian or bisexual is good for society. And a majority of Biden supporters (57%) say legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society.

About half of Trump supporters say both changes are bad for society: 53% say this about increased comfort with people identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and 51% say this about legalization of same-sex marriage.

There are age differences among both candidates’ supporters.

• Majorities of Biden supporters ages 18 to 49 view both trends positively: 63% say more people being comfortable identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual is good for society, while 67% say the same of the legalization of same-sex marriage. About half or fewer of Biden supporters 50 and older share these views. (This group is more likely to instead say that these trends are neither good nor bad.)
• Older Trump supporters are more likely than his younger supporters to have a negative view of the impact of legalizing same-sex marriage (57% of those 50 and older say it is bad for society, compared with 41% of those younger than 50). There are no meaningful age differences in how Trump supporters assess the impact of more people being comfortable with identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual.
• Black voters who support Biden are far less likely than Biden’s supporters in other racial and ethnic groups to say increased comfort with identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual and legalized same-sex marriage are good for society. About a quarter of Black Biden supporters say these things are good, compared with about half or more among his White, Hispanic and Asian backers.

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More than half of Americans are following election news closely, and many are already worn out

Americans have mixed views about how the news media cover biden’s, trump’s ages, an early look at black voters’ views on biden, trump and election 2024, voters’ views of trump and biden differ sharply by religion, in tight presidential race, voters are broadly critical of both biden and trump, most popular, report materials.

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