Multiracial Americans

Barack Obama Mariah Carey Robert Scott Kamala Harris Halle Berry Vanessa Hudgens Della Reese John Ensign Tiger Woods
Total population
(2010 Census) Multiracial Americans 9,000,000[1] (2.9% of the U.S. population)
Regions with significant populations
Western US 2.4 million (3.4%) Southern US 1.8 million (1.6%) Midwestern US 1.1 million (1.6%) Northeastern US 0.8 million (1.6%) (2006 American Community Survey)

Multiracial Americans are Americans who identify themselves as of "two or more races", as well as mono-racial identified Americans of mixed race ancestry. They were numbered at around 9 million, or 2.9% of the population, in the census of 2010.^[2][3] However there is considerable evidence that the real number is far higher.^[4] Prior to the mid-20th century many people hid their multiracial heritage.^[4] Consequently many Americans today are multi-racial without necessarily knowing it.^[4]

Since the 1967 Supreme Court decision that deemed anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, there has been a considerable increase in the number of interracial couples and mixed-race children. Until 1989, children continued to be classified as belonging to the race of the non-white parent, reflecting historical hypodescent laws. Since the 1980s, the United States has had a growing multiracial identity movement.^[5] The 2000 census for the first time allowed residents to identify as multiracial by checking more than one ethnicity. In 2008 Barack Obama was elected as the first President of the United States with an acknowledged multiracial background; he identifies as African American.^[6]

History[link]

The American people are mostly multi-ethnic descendants of various culturally distinct immigrant nationalities. Some consider themselves multiracial, acknowledging race as a social construct. Creolization, assimilation and integration have been continuing processes, with racial integration enhanced by the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) and other social movements since the mid-twentieth century. A multiracial identity, on the other hand, is claimed by less than 5% of the population, in the 2000s.

Olaudah Equiano

Interracial marriage in the United States, most notably between whites and blacks, was deemed illegal by anti-miscegenation laws, within most states, in parts of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, but such relationships and common-law marriages had been taking place since the earliest colonial years. In addition, numerous white slaveholders took sexual advantage of slave women, leading to generations of mixed-race children. California and the western US had similar laws prohibiting marriage between European and Asian Americans until the 1950s.

Early United States history[link]

Interracial relationships have had a long history in North America and the United States,, beginning with the intermixing of the native population and European settlers. In the 17th century, colonists primarily in the Chesapeake Bay Colony, imported Africans as laborers, sometimes as indentured servants and, increasingly, as slaves. Slaves were also imported into New York and other ports. Some African slaves were freed by their masters during these early years.

In the colonial years, while conditions were more fluid, white women, indentured servant or free, and African men, servant, slave or free, made unions. Because the women were free, their mixed-race children were born free; they and their descendants formed most of the families of free people of color during the colonial period in Virginia. The scholar Paul Heinegg found that eighty percent of the free people of color in North Carolina in censuses from 1790-1810 could be traced to families free in Virginia in colonial years.^[7]

Of relationships between slaveholders and slaves, most historians now believe that the widower Thomas Jefferson had six children of record with his slave Sally Hemings, his late wife's half-sister and his concubine. Four of their children survived into adulthood, and he freed all of them. Two were allowed to "escape" in 1822, and two were granted freedom upon their father's death. They each eventually moved to northern states; three of the four entered the white community as adults; they were seven-eighths white. Although born into slavery, they were legally white at the time under Virginia law.

In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, a former slave from Nigeria who was enslaved in North America, published his autobiography. He advocated interracial marriage between whites and blacks.^[8] (To what purpose? He must have said more.)

In 1790, the first federal population census was taken in the United States. Enumerators were instructed to classify free residents as white or "other." Only the heads of households were identified by name until 1850. Native Americans were included among "Other;" in other yearsm they were included as "Free people of color" if they were not living on reservations. Slaves were counted separately; in later censuses, they were classified as mulatto or black.

20th century[link]

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It was not until 1967 that miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional, most famously in the Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia.^[9]

Until a change in policy in 1989, biracial babies with a white parents were assigned the racial status of the nonwhite parent... Before 1989 biracial children faced hypodescent laws that positioned them in the non-white racial group, thus barring their entrance into the white race, though they may not necessarily have been welcomed within the other racial/ethnic group with open arms.^[10]

The National Association of Black Social Workers has influenced the American court system by arguing that biracial children should be treated as completely black. Consistent with this view, courts and adoption agencies usually categorize biracial children as black when considering placement. The primary justification for this treatment is that, in the eyes of American society, a biracial child is black and, therefore, must identify positively with being black and must be able to cope with discrimination toward her as a black person. ... As a result, the NABSW concludes that when an adoption or custody proceeding concerns a biracial child, a court or adoption agency should favor placing the child with Black parents.^[11]

By 1990, there were more than a dozen more ethnic/racial categories on the census, reflecting not only changing social ideas about ethnicity, but the expanded regions of the world from which immigrants were arriving after changes to immigration laws in the 1960s. In a United States in which racial mixing has been increasingly acknowledged and society is becoming more diverse, citizens have demanded being able to indicate their full heritage. The Census Bureau changed its data collection by allowing people to check off more than one classification when identifying their ancestry.

The proportion of multiracial children in the United States is growing. Interracial partnerships are on the rise, as are transracial adoptions. In 1990, about 14% of 18- to 19-year-olds, 12% of 20- to 21-year-olds and 7% of 34- to 35-year-olds were involved in interracial relationships (Joyner and Kao, 2005).^[12]

Demographics[link]

To many mainline civil rights groups, the new census is part of a multiracial nightmare. After decades of framing racial issues in stark black and white terms, they fear that the multiracial movement will break down longstanding alliances, weakening people of color by splintering them into new subgroups.^[13]

Some multiracial individuals feel marginalized by U.S. society. For example, when applying to schools or for a job, or when taking standardized tests, Americans are sometimes asked to check boxes corresponding to race or ethnicity. Typically, about five race choices are given with the instruction to "check only one." Many other such surveys include an additional "other" box, but this unfortunately groups together individuals of many different multiracial types (ex: European Americans/African-Americans are grouped with Asian/Native American Indians).

The 2000 U.S. Census in the write-in response category had a code listing which standardizes the placement of various write-in responses for automatic placement within the framework of the U.S. Census's enumerated races. Whereas most responses can be distinguished as falling into one of the five enumerated races, there remains some write-in responses which fall into the "Mixture" heading which can't be racially categorized. These include "Bi Racial, Combination, Everything, Many, Mixed, Multi National, Multiple, Several and Various".^[14]

In 1997, Greg Mayeda, a Board of Directors person for the Hapa Issues Forum, attended a meeting regarding the new racial classifications for the 2000 U.S. Census. He was arguing against a multiracial category and for multiracial people being counted as all of their races. He argued that a "separate Multiracial Box does not allow a person who identifies as mixed race the opportunity to be counted accurately. After all, we are not just mixed race. We are representatives of all racial groups and should be counted as such. A stand alone Multiracial Box reveals very little about the person's background checking it."^[15]

There remain many circumstances in which biracial individuals are left with no real response when asked for demographic data. But multiracial people won a victory of sorts after years of effort when in 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) changed the federal regulation of racial categories to permit multiple responses, resulting in a new format for the 2000 United States Census, which allowed participants to select more than one of the six available categories, which were, in brief: "White," "Black or African American," "Asian," "American Indian or Alaskan Native," "Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander," and "Other." Further details are given in the article: Race (U.S. census). The OMB made its directive mandatory for all government forms by 2003.

According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, by some calculations in the 2000 Census the actual multiracial population that is part white, by far the largest percentage of the multiracial population, is as follows: the largest part of the white bi-racial population, is white/Native American and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017, followed by white/black at 737,492, then white/Asian at 727,197, and finally white/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 125,628.^[16] In 2010, 1.6 million Americans checked both "black" and "white" on their census forms, a figure 134 percent higher than the number a decade earlier.^[17]

The number of mixed-race families in America is steadily increasing, due to a rise in interracial marriages and relationships, as well as an increase in transracial and international adoptions.^[18]

Identity[link]

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Given the variety of the familial and general social environments in which multiracial children are raised, along with the diversity of their appearance (vis-a-vis their component races and their family members), generalizations about multiracial children's challenges or opportunities are weak. They are too diverse to be explained by simple overviews.

Multi-racial identity[link]

The racial social identity of children and that of their parents in the same multiracial family may vary or be the same.^[19] Some multiracial children feel pressure from various sources to "choose" or to assimilate into a single racial identity, while others whose identity or lifestyle is perceived to be closer to some of their component races than others may feel pressure not to abandon one or more of their ethnicities. Many others have chosen to create a new type of racial category. For instance, the athlete Tiger Woods has claimed this he is not just an African American but "Cablinasian," a mixture of Caucasian, African American, Native American, and Asian.^[20]

Some children grow up without race being a significant issue in their lives.

[B]eing multiracial can still be problematic. Most constructions of race in America revolve around a peculiar institution known as the 'one-drop rule' ... The one-drop conceit shapes both racism—creating an arbitrary 'caste'—and the collective response against it. To identify as multiracial is to challenge this logic, and consequently, to fall outside both camps.^[21]

[M]any monoracials do view a multiracial identity as a choice that denies loyalty to the oppressed racial group. We can see this issue enacted currently over the debate of the U.S. census to include a multiracial category— some oppressed monoracial groups believe this category would decrease their numbers and 'benefits.'^[10]

Many students who called themselves 'half-Asian/Black/etc.' came to college in search of cultural knowledge but found themselves unwelcome in groups of peers that were 'whole' ethnicities.' (Renn, 1998) She found that as a result of this exclusion, many multiracial students expressed the need to create and maintain a self-identified multiracial community on campus. Multiracial people may identify more with each other, because "they share the experience of navigating campus life as multiracial people," (Renn, 1998) than with their component ethnic groups. Multiracial students of different ancestries have their own experiences in common. ^[22]

African Americans[link]

Americans with Sub-Saharan African ancestry for historical reasons (slavery and partus sequitur ventrem, one-eighth law, one-drop rule) have both been classified and more recently have identified as African American, even if they have significant European American or Native American ancestry. Some simply assimilated by majority ancestry and appearance into white society. As slavery became a racial caste, those who were enslaved and who shared their ancestry were classified in what is termed "hypodescent", according to the lower status ethnic group.

Sometimes people of mixed African-American and Native American descent report having had elder family members withholding pertinent genealogical information.^[40] Tracing the genealogy of African Americans can be a very difficult process, as censuses did not identify slaves by name when the institution was legal; thus, most people of ethnic African descent in the South were not identified by name until the 1870 census. As slaves were generally forbidden to learn to read and write, black families passed along oral histories. Similarly, Native Americans did not generally learn to read and write English, although some did in the nineteenth century. ^[40] Until 1930, the terms free people of color and mulatto were used in censuses to classify people as being of apparent mixed race (what the census enumerator could see.) When those terms were dropped, society was split into binary classifications of black or white. With the expansion of research in the colonial and antebellum years, genealogists have begun to find plantation records, court records, land deeds and other sources to trace African-American families and individuals before 1870.

In the 1980s, parents of mixed-race children began to organize and lobby for the addition of a more inclusive term of racial designation that would reflect the heritage of their children. When the U.S. government proposed the addition of the category of "bi-racial" or "multiracial" in 1988, the response from the public was mostly negative. Some African-American organizations, and African-American leaders such as Congresswoman Diane Watson and Congressman Augustus Hawkins, were particularly vocal in their rejection of the category, as they feared the loss of political power if African Americans reduced their numbers in self identification, which would ultimately result in losses for ethnic Africans.^[41]

During the 1990s and 2000s, the terms mixed-race, biracial, and multiracial have been used more frequently, although it is most common in the United States (unlike other countries) for people with visible African features to identify as or be identified solely as blacks or African Americans, regardless of other also obvious ancestry.

President Barack Obama is of East African and European American ancestry and self-identifies as African American,^[42] In a 2007 poll, when he was a presidential candidate, when told that his mother was white, Americans differed in how they classified him: a majority of White and Hispanics classified him as biracial, but a majority of African Americans considered him black.^[43]

A 2003 study found an average of 18.6% (±1.5%) European admixture in a population sample of 416 African Americans from Washington, DC.^[44] Studies of other populations have found differing percentages of ethnicity.

One study classified African Americans into two groups for genetic purposes, based on ancestry: those who are "mostly African" (less than 25% European) and those who are "mostly mixed" ("over 25% European"). (Note: This is not scientific, as clearly "mostly mixed" should consist of more than 50% European, not 25.) According to this 2006 study, African Americans fall primarily into the first group with 80% of the population having less than 25% European ancestry.^[45] 20% has more than 25% European ancestry, reflecting long history of unions between the groups. The "mostly African" group is substantially African, as 70% of African Americans in this group have less than 15% European ancestry. The 20% of African Americans in the "mostly mixed" group (2.7% of US population) are almost entirely between 25% and 50% European.^[46] If the "mostly mixed" African Americans are included in the count, the demographic segment of US residents of mixed-race ancestry would rise to some 15 million, or 5% of population.

Sherrel W. Stewart says that most African Americans have significant Native American heritage,^[47] but genetics experts who have done extensive population mapping say this is a myth, as discussed on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s TV series about African American ancestry. (reference is coming)

Genetic testing of direct male and female ancestry only evaluates part of a person's ancestry. ^[48] Troy Duster thought the short series African American Lives should have told people more about the limitations of genetic SNP testing. He says that not all ancestry may show up in the tests, especially for those who claim part-Native American descent.^[48][49] Other experts disagree.^[50] If only direct lines are tested, an individual may not learn of some ancestry. ^[49] It is possible that while some Native American groups sampled did not share the pattern of markers being searched for, others might, since these genetic markers do not exclusively belong to any one group of our existing racial, ethnic, linguistic, or tribal typologies.^[49] In addition, not all Native Americans have been tested, so scientists do not know for sure that Native Americans have only the genetic markers they have identified.^[48][49]

Admixture[link]

Main Admixture in the US, One-drop rule and Who is African American

On census forms, the government depends on individuals' self-identification. Due in part to a centuries-old history within the United States, historical experiences pre- and post-slavery, and migrations throughout North America, contemporary African Americans possess varying degrees of admixture with European ancestry. A percentage also have various degrees of Native American ancestry.^[63][64]

Free African American families descended from unions between white women and African men in colonial Virginia. Their free descendants migrated to the frontier of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina in the 18th and 19th centuries. There were also similar free families in Delaware and Maryland, as documented by Paul Heinegg.^[65] In addition, many Native American women turned to African American men due to the decline in the number of Native American men due to disease and warfare.^[66] Some Native American women bought African slaves but, unknown to European sellers, the women freed the African men and married them into their respective tribes.^[66] If an African American man had children by a Native American woman, their children were free because of the status of the mother.^[66]

In their attempt to ensure white supremacy, in the early 20th century, most southern states created laws defining as black person with any known African ancestry. This was a stricter interpretation than what had prevailed in the nineteenth century; it ignored the many mixed families in the state and went against commonly accepted social rules of judging a person by appearance and association. It became known as the one-drop rule, meaning that a single drop of "black blood" made a person "black". Some courts called it "the traceable amount rule." Anthropologists called it hypodescent, meaning that racially mixed persons were assigned the status of the socially subordinate group.

Prior to the one-drop rule, different states had different laws regarding color. More importantly, social acceptance often played a bigger role in how a person was perceived and how identity was construed than any law. In frontier areas there were fewer questions about origins. The community looked at how people performed, whether they served in the militia and voted, which were the responsibilities and signs of free citizens. When questions about racial identity arose because of inheritance issues, for instance, litigation outcomes often were based on how people were accepted by neighbors.^[67]

In Virginia prior to 1920, for example, a person was legally black if he or she had at least one-eighth black ancestry. The one-drop rule originated in some Southern United States in the late 19th century, likely in response to whites' attempt to limit black political power following the Democrats' regaining control of state legislatures in the late 1870s.^[68][69] The first year in which the U.S. Census did not count mulattoes separately was 1920; people were classified as white or black.^[69]

Racial segregation forced African Americans to share more of a common lot in society than they might have after the Civil War, given widely varying ancestry, educational and economic levels. The binary division altered the separate status of the traditionally free people of color in Louisiana, for instance, although they maintained a strong Louisiana Créole culture related to French culture and language, and practice of Catholicism. African Americans began to create common cause—regardless of their multiracial admixture or social and economic stratification. In further changes, during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the African American community increased its own pressure for people of any portion of African descent to be claimed by the black community.

By the 1980s, parents of mixed-race children (and adults of mixed-race ancestry) began to organize and lobby for the ability to show more than one ethnic category on Census and other legal forms. They refused to be put into just one category. When the U.S. government proposed the addition of the category of "bi-racial" or "multiracial" in 1988, the response from the general public was mostly negative. Some African American organizations and political leaders, such as Senator Diane Watson and Representative Augustus Hawkins, were particularly vocal in their rejection of the category. They feared a loss in political and economic power if African Americans abandoned their one category.

This reaction is characterized as "historical irony" by Daniel (2002). The African American self-designation had been a response to the one-drop rule, but then people resisted the chance to claim their multiple heritages. At the bottom was a desire not to lose political power of the larger group. Whereas before people resisted being characterized as one group regardless of ranges of ancestry, now some of their own were trying to keep them in the same group.^[41]

Definition of African American[link]

Since the late twentieth century, the number of African and Caribbean ethnic African immigrants have increased in the United States. Together with publicity about the ancestry of President Barack Obama, whose father was from Kenya, some black writers have argued that new terms are needed for recent immigrants. They suggest that the term "African-American" should refer strictly to the descendants of African slaves and free people of color who survived the slavery era in the United States.^[78] They argue that grouping together all ethnic Africans regardless of their unique ancestral circumstances would deny the lingering effects of slavery within the American slave descendant community.^[78] They say recent ethnic African immigrants need to recognize their own unique ancestral backgrounds.^[78]

Stanley Crouch wrote in a New York Daily News piece "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," in a column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me." During the 2008 campaign, the African-American columnist David Ehrenstein of the LA Times accused white liberals of flocking to Obama because he was a "Magic Negro", a term that refers to a black person with no past who simply appears to assist the mainstream white (as cultural protagonists/drivers) agenda.^[79] Ehrenstein went on to say "He's there to assuage white 'guilt' they feel over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history." ^[79]

Reacting to media criticism of Michelle Obama during the 2008 presidential election, Charles Kenzie Steele, Jr., CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said, “Why are they attacking Michelle Obama, and not really attacking, to that degree, her husband? Because he has no slave blood in him."^[80] He later claimed his comment was intended to be "provocative" but declined to expand on the subject.^[80] Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was famously mistaken for a "recent American immigrant" by French President Nicolas Sarkozy^[81]), said "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that." She has also rejected an immigrant designation for African Americans and instead prefers the term "black" or "white" to denote the African and European U.S. founding populations.^[82]

Native Americans[link]

Interracial relations among Native Americans and Europeans did occur, beginning with the French and Spanish explorers and trappers. Even though Europeans considered both Africans and Native Americans inferior and made efforts to make both of them enemies, European impact was immediate, widespread, and profound—more than any other race that had contact with Native Americans during the early years of colonization and nationhood.^[66][83]

White Native Americans[link]

Europeans living among Native Americans were often called "white indians". They "lived in native communities for years, learned native languages fluently, attended native councils, and often fought alongside their native companions."^[83]

Some early male settlers married Native American women. Early contact between Native Americans and Europeans was often charged with tension and emotion, but also had moments of friendship, cooperation, and intimacy.^[94] Marriages took place in both English and French colonies between European men and Native women. Multiple hypothesis suggest that one of the first populations resulting from procreation between Europeans and Indigenous Americans existed during the 1500s in present day Roanoke Island, North Carolina. On April 5, 1614, Pocahontas married Englishman John Rolfe, and they had a child called Thomas Rolfe.

In the early 19th century, the Native American woman Sacagawea, who would help translate for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was forced to marry French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau. A Native American man had to get consent of the European parents in order to marry a white woman, and when such marriages were approved, it was with the stipulation that "he can prove to support her as a white woman in a good home".^[95] In the late 19th century, three European-American middle-class female staff members married Native American men they had met during the years when Hampton Institute ran its Indian program.^[96] Charles Eastman married his European-American wife Elaine Goodale whom he had met in Dakota Territory when Goodale was a social worker and the superintendent of Indian education for the reservations.

Black Native Americans[link]

Interracial relations between Native Americans and African Americans has been a part of American history that has been neglected.^[40] The earliest record of African and Native American relations occurred in April 1502, when the first Africans kidnapped were brought to Hispaniola to serve as slaves. Some escaped, and somewhere inland on Santo Domingo, the first Black Indians were born.^[97] In addition, an example of African slaves' escaping from European colonists and being absorbed by Native Americans occurred as far back as 1526. In June of that year, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon established a Spanish colony near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in what is now eastern South Carolina. The Spanish settlement was named San Miquel de Guadalupe. Amongst the settlement were 100 enslaved Africans. In 1526, the first African slaves fled the colony and took refuge with local Native Americans.^[98]

European colonists created treaties with Native American tribes requesting the return of any runaway slaves. For example, in 1726, the British governor of New York exacted a promise from the Iroquois to return all runaway slaves who had joined them. This same promise was extracted from the Huron Nation in 1764, and from the Delaware Nation in 1765, though there is no record of slaves ever being returned.^[114] Numerous advertisements requested the return of African Americans who had married Native Americans or who spoke a Native American language. The primary exposure that Africans and Native Americans had to each other came through the institution of slavery.^[115] Native Americans learned that Africans had what Native Americans considered 'Great Medicine' in their bodies because Africans were virtually immune to the Old-World diseases that were decimating most native populations.^[116] Because of this many tribes encouraged marriage between the two groups, to create stronger, healthier children from the unions.^[116]

For African Americans, the one-drop rule was a significant factor in ethnic solidarity. African Americans generally shared a common cause in society regardless of their multiracial admixture, or social/economic stratification. Additionally, African Americans found it, near, impossible to learn aboutt their Native American heritage as many family elders withheld pertinent genealogical information.^[40] Tracing the genealogy of African Americans can be a very difficult process, especially for descendants of Native Americans, because African Americans who were slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write, and a majority of Native Americans neither spoke English, nor read or wrote it.^[40]

American Pacific Islanders[link]

During the 1800s Christian missionaries caused Hawaiian royal women to become self-conscious about their Hawaiian looks. They were uncomfortable with their dark skin and large bodies which had been considered signs of nobility for centuries. No matter how Westernized their manners, they were seen as a "Hawaiian squaw." By the last half of the 19th century, Hawaiian women were going in two different directions. Many European men married Hawaiian women they found exotic, favoring those who were thin and had pale complexions.^[117]

While American Pacific Islanders continue maintaining traditional cultural endogamy, many within this population have mixed racial ancestry with partial genetic Indigenous American Pacific Islander roots. This region, or Native Hawaiian, specific miscegenation was initially defined by the Hawaiian term hapa. However, the term has evolved to encompass all people of mixed Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry.

Amerasian[link]

In its original meaning, an Amerasian is a person born in Asia, to a U.S. military father and an Asian mother. Colloquially, the term has sometimes been considered synonymous with Asian American, to describe any person of mixed Asian and American parentage, regardless of the circumstances.

Eurasian Americans[link]

According to the United States Census Bureau, concerning multi-racial families in 1990, the number of children in interracial families grew from less than one-half million in 1970 to about two million in 1990. In 1990, for interracial families with one White partner, the other parent ... was Asian for 45 percent [of all children.]^[130]

According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, by some calculations the largest part white bi-racial population is white/American Indian and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017, followed by white/black at 737,492, then white/Asian at 727,197, and finally white/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 125,628.^[16]

The US Census categorizes Eurasian responses in the "Some other race" section as part of the Asian race.^[14] The Eurasian responses the US Census officially recognizes are Indo-European, Amerasian, and Eurasian.^[14]

Afro-Asian Americans[link]

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and Chinese workers who chose to stay in the U.S. could no longer be with their wives who stayed behind in China. Because European Americans looked at Chinese labor workers as stealing employment, they were harassed and discriminated against. Many Chinese men settled in African American communities and in turn married black women.^[146]

As of the census of 2000, there were 106,782 Afro-Asian individuals in the United States.^[147]

Hispanic and Latino Americans[link]

The majority of Hispanic and Latino Americans are multiracial with varying degrees of mixture from the different ethnic groups mentioned above: mestizo (mixed white and Native American), mulatto, (mixed white and African), and/or triracial (mixed white, African, and Native American), as well as zambo (Black Native American); a minority of multiracial Hispanic and Latino Americans are part-Asian, including Eurasian, Afro-Asian, Asian-Native American, and mixed white-black-Asian-Native American. A typical Hispanic and Latino American family may have members with a wide range of racial phenotypes, meaning a Hispanic couple have children who look white and African and/or Native American and/or Asian.^[156] Hispanic and Latino Americans have several self-identifications; most Hispanic and Latino Americans self-identify as white as their race while others self-identify as black and/or Native American and/or Asian as their race, a number of Hispanic and Latino Americans who don't want to identify with those races self-identify as Hispanic and/or some other race as their race.

This has often been the reason for the stereotype of White Anglo-American prejudices (in U.S. mass media and general American social perceptions) that Spanish-speakers within the U.S. are all of one specific race (usually mixed race), due to many past and present Latin American migrants being of mestizo, Amerindian, or other mixed race.^[157] Non-white-identified Hispanic and Latino Americans have limited media visibility. The U.S. Hispanic media was accused of overlooking the brown-skinned indigenous and mixed-race Hispanic and black Hispanic populations and over-representation of white, largely blond and blue-eyed/green-eyed Hispanic and Latino Americans through the telenovelas who resemble Scandinavians and other northern Europeans more than they resemble the typical white Hispanics mostly of Southern European descent.^{[158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166]}

Passing[link]

"Passing" is a term for a person whose ancestry is in part that of the dominant group with some ancestry of a subordinate group, but who is seen as only, or mistaken as, being part of the majority group.

The phenomenon known as "passing as white" is difficult to explain in other countries or to foreign students. Typical questions are: "Shouldn't Americans say that a person who is passing as white is white, or nearly all white, and has previously been passing as black?" or "To be consistent, shouldn't you say that someone who is one-eighth white is passing as black?" ... A person who is one-fourth or less American Indian or Korean or Filipino is not regarded as passing if he or she intermarries with and joins fully the life of the dominant community, so the minority ancestry need not be hidden. ... It is often suggested that the key reason for this is that the physical differences between these other groups and whites are less pronounced than the physical differences between African blacks and whites, and therefore are less threatening to whites. ... [W]hen ancestry in one of these racial minority groups does not exceed one-fourth, a person is not defined solely as a member of that group.^[178]

Laws dating from the 17th century colonial America that defined excluded children of at least one black parent from the status of being white. Early legal standards did so by defining the race of a child based on a mother's race while banning interracial marriage, while later laws defined all people of some African ancestry as black, under the principle of hypodescent. These laws ensured that the children of slaves were available as labor to their parent's master and furthered racist standards of white women's "purity" under threat from black sexual "contamination." Some 19th century categorization schemes defined people with one black parent (the other white) as mulatto, with one black grandparent as quadroon and with one black great grandparent as octoroon. The latter categories remained within an overall black or African-American category. Some members of these categories passed temporarily or permanently as white.^[189] Until the Civil War, racial identity depended on the combination of appearance, African blood fraction, and social circle.^[190]

However, since several thousand blacks have been crossing the color line each year millions of White Americans have recent African ancestors. A statistical analysis done in 1958 estimated that 21 percent of the white population had African ancestors. The study concluded that the majority of Americans of African descent were actually White and not Black.^[191]

Multiracial families[link]

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A 2004 California wedding between a Filipina bride and a Nigerian groom.

In an article about mixed-race children having identity problems, Charlotte Nitary states:

Wardle (1989) says that today, parents assume one of three positions as to the identity of their interracial children. Some insist that their child is 'human above all else' and that race or ethnicity is irrelevant, while others choose to raise their children with the identity of the parent of color. Another growing group of parents is insisting that the child have the ethnic, racial, cultural and genetic heritage of both parents.^[11]

In her book Love's Revolution: Interracial Marriage, Maria P. P. Root writes:

Women with children, especially biracial children, have fewer chances for remarriage than childless women. And because the children of divorce tend to remain with mothers, becoming incorporated into new families when their mothers remarry, interracial children are more threatening markers of race and racial authenticity for families in which race matters.^[200]

In 2009, Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Robert, Louisiana, refused to officiate a wedding for an interracial couple and was summarily sued in federal court. See refusal of interracial marriage in Louisiana.

About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%).^[201]

In fiction[link]

Charles W. Chesnutt was one of the authors who explored the stereotypes in the depiction of multiracial characters as portrayed in fiction and early films.

Multiracial characters have often been depicted as 'Wild Half-Castes', sexually destructive antagonists explicitly or implicitly perceived as unable to control the instinctive urges of their non-white heritage." Media which portrays multiracials as the "'half-breed' predator... [and] 'halfbreed' temptress perpetuates the association of multiraciality with sexual aberration and violence. Another recurring stereotype is the 'Tragic Mulatto', a typically female character who tries to pass for white but finds disaster when her non-white heritage is revealed... [T]he 'Half Breed Hero' provides a more 'empowering' stereotype... the 'Half Breed Hero' seemingly inspires identification as he actively resists white racism.^[202]

The figure of the "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a light-brown-skinned woman raised as if a white woman in her father's household, until his bankrupty or death has her reduced to a menial position^[203] She may even be unaware of her status before being reduced to victimization.^[204] The first character of this type was the heroine of Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons".^[204] This character allowed abolitionists to draw attention to the sexual exploitation in slavery, and unlike the suffering of the field hands, did not allow slaveholders to retort that the sufferings of Northern mill hands were no easier, since the Northern mill owner would not sell his own children into slavery.^[205]

Mulattos, as with abducted white people, were often used to arouse sentiments against slavery by showing Northerners slaves who were visually indistinguishable from them.^[206]

See also[link]

• Race in the United States
• Racial and ethnic demographics of the United States
• Colored
• Race of the Future
• Loving v. Virginia
• Dreams from My Father
• British Mixed-Race

References[link]