Softkey Left softkey RightFast Facts about “Mixed†People
• Nearly 7 million of Americans described themselves as Multiracial in the 2000 U.S. Census.
• Census officials claim that the official number of interracial couples more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1995.
• Today, 1 in every 19 children born is of mixed race. In states like California and Washington, it’s closer to 1 in 10 children.
• The number of Asian men with European American women is about 1/8th of the number of Asian women with white men.
• The Berkeley (California) Unified School District has dropped the instruction "Choose One" on the "Student's Ethnicity" box on its enrollment forms for 1999, becoming one of the first agencies of government to come into compliance.
• Originally studies of mixed race people were a big topic for physicians and other biological fields due to the belief that different races were made of different biological make-up. Doctors once thought mixed kids would be born “degenerate†or “pathologicalâ€, and encouraged racial purity.
• The first Census in 1790 had a box for “number of slavesâ€.
• When the term “miscegenation†was introduced in 1863, race mixing between black and white people was widely taboo, and, in much of the U.S., was illegal. The British colony of Maryland was the first to pass an anti-miscegenation law (1664).
• At the time that anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving vs. Virginia, 16 states still had laws prohibiting interethnic marriage.
• There were 1,161,000 interracial marriages in 1992, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
• According to NPR, NBC claimed that "including minorities on the air is an issue that has been a top priority for some time." (2000) To date, there has never been a tv show about multi-racial individuals on any network.
The people that have fallen through the cracks of the system.
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“Checking ‘Other’ is like walking into a room full of strangers and introducing myself as Barney. Although the U.S. Census has gathered data on race since 1790, the 2000 Census was the first to allow people to check more than one box… that’s over 200 years! So, if the Census is to become the grandfather test of how many “multi-racials†there are in America, this little test is the alcoholic Uncle that no one in the family talks about. At least there wasn’t a box for ‘Slave’…â€
-Maya, a character from MIXED