When Barack Obama first became the President of the U.S., many newspapers began devoting their ink to the multiracial identity. Many media outlets pondered the significance of Obama’s mixed heritage. His father was a black Kenyan while his mother was a white Kansan. Mixed race people have been making news headlines for a long time and all thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that the country’s multiracial population is exploding. But now mixed-race people being in the spotlight, what could be the most common misconceptions about the multiracial identity? Here in this article, we have covered five of the misconceptions.
According to the latest surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, the fastest-growing group in the U.S. is of multiracial youths. Today the U.S. includes more than 4.2 million children that are identified as multiracial. This jump is nearly 50 percent since the 2000 census. The people identified as multiracial were spiked by 9 million or by 32 percent in total. This groundbreaking statistic makes it easy to conclude that multiracial people are new phenomena who are now growing in rank. The reality is, multiracial people have been a part of the country’s fabric for centuries.
Multiracial is equal to novelties in America
A major reason for the multiracial population to soar for years is that Americans were not allowed to identify as more than one race on federal documents such as the census. American with a fraction of African ancestry was deemed black, and it was all due to the “one-drop rule.” This rule anyhow became beneficial to the slave owners who routinely fathered children with slave women. Now the mixed-race offspring would be considered neither black, not white, and thereby served to increase the highly profitable slave population.
In the year 2000, when it became the first time in ages, multiracial individuals had an identity on the census. However, it is uncertain if the number of multiracials will soar or, after ten years, they were first permitted to identify as mixed race, finally acknowledging their diverse ancestry.
Brainwashed multiracials are identified as black
It was in the year 2010 census when Barack Obama identified himself as solely black for which he gained criticism and still is. As per Gregory Rodriguez, a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote that when Obama marked only black on the census form, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country that he leads. He also adds that Americans historically haven’t publicly acknowledged their multiracial heritage due to taboos, social pressure against miscegenation, and one-drop rule.
Identification as “mixed” are sellouts
It was during ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in 1997 when Tiger Woods declared that he did not see himself as black but as Cablinasian. This term that Woods coined to describe himself made it controversial on a large scale and was seen as a race-traitor.
On the contrary, a biracial student Laura Wood at the University of Maryland, mentions that it’s really important to acknowledge who you are. If someone calls her black, she says, ‘Yes and white.’ According to her, people have the right not to acknowledge everything, and not to do just because society tells you that you can’t.
No race of mixed people
It is a popular discourse that multiracial people are most often characterized as raceless. It was seen when President Obama’s mixed-race heritage was often questioned. They asked if Barack Obama is Black or Biracial, and some believe that the different racial groups in one’s heritage and you being biracial cancel each other out like it happens in negative and positive figures in a math equation.
The mix of the race will end racism
Now some people are positively thrilled that the number of mixed-race Americans appears to soar. Some of these individuals even have the idealistic notion that race-mixing will lead to bigotry’s end. Even after ethnic groups in the U.S. have been mixing for centuries, racism hasn’t vanished yet. The discrimination based on skin color, facial features, or hair textures is on a large scale.
Even after so many protests around, there has been one incident in America recently. People of all races are on streets on protests for “Black lives matters.” We hope this racism to end soon, and we could see an ideological shift in which people would be valued without being judged on their looks.
