Multiracial Americans surge in number, voice

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile

If you want a good glimpse of the multiracial experience in America, get inside Louie Gong’s skin.

“I’m Nooksack, I’m Chinese, I’m French and I’m Scottish,” Gong tells viewers of a multimedia piece he placed on YouTube to help spark discussion of multiracial issues. “... When I was a kid, I drank my Ovaltine with real milk, and my cousins and I liked our fried rice with salmon.”

At the same time that the nation’s growing diversity and changing social attitudes are helping to swell the ranks of multiracial Americans at 10 times the rate of the white population, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, son of a black man and a white woman, has brought new attention, curiosity and discussion to their experiences.

Obama has faced an endless barrage of questions anchored to issues of race and class, from his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to whether, in his own words, he is “too black” or “not black enough.” As Gut Check America engaged msnbc.com readers in this re-emerging national conversation on race, it became clear that multiracial Americans offered unique perspectives on the topic and that the nation is far from entering a “post-race” era. 

Gong, 33, is on the leading edge of what he calls the “modern multiracial movement.” A founder of the Mixed Heritage Center, a Web-based resource collection for multiracial Americans, Gong is also vice president and a key spokesman for the Mavin Foundation, a Seattle-based advocacy group for mixed-race people and families. As the educational resources director for the Muckleshoot Indian tribe’s college near Seattle, he is able to tailor programs to Native Americans of mixed heritage. He teaches classes and workshops on the topic and is helping prepare a museum exhibit on the mixed-race experience set to open in Seattle in the fall.

Obama candidacy drives new interest
As Gong’s schedule attests, it’s a busy, exciting time for folks who have worked for years to win understanding and acceptance of the unique path trod by multiracial Americans. “Barack Obama has stepped into the picture now and is shining a floodlight on these issues,” Gong told msnbc.com.

Multimedia Shades of experience Six multiracial families from around the country discuss their challenges, triumphs.

With interracial marriage illegal in 16 states until 1967 and racist sentiments against it remaining to this day in some places, the number of biracial and multiracial Americans is relatively small at less than 5 million. Although it includes a number of high-profile celebrities and athletes like Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, Derek Jeter, Vin Diesel and Halle Berry, it’s well under 2 percent of the nation’s current 302 million residents.

“There’s kind of a lot of hype that makes people think there’s more, but there aren’t,” said demographer William H. Frey, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.

Officially, the number was even a mystery until 2000, the first year the U.S. Census Bureau allowed Americans to say they were of mixed race.

Census counts vary
Even now, there is confusion over various tallies offered by the federal agency. Some surveys, including the 2000 Census, allow respondents to choose “some other race” in addition to every possible combination of all recognized races. That inflated the count of multiracial Americans to 6.8 million.

But the agency’s annual Population Estimate Program, considered its most current breakdown, does not include “some other race” and results in a count of Americans who claim to be of “two or more races.” Based on birth, death and tax records, the figure “really is our official estimate of total population and population by race,” said Census spokesman Robert Burnstein.

INTERACTIVE Snapshot of the melting pot See how racial and ethnic groups are dispersed throughout the United States.

The most recent data, released May 1, shows the number of Americans of “two or more races” was 4,856,136 as of last July. The headline, though, is growth. Up from 4,711,932 the previous year, the tally indicates a 3 percent gain, which is 10 times the 0.3 percent growth of the white population in the same period and three times the overall U.S. population growth of about 1 percent. It’s about the same as the growth rates of the Hispanic and Asian populations.

America’s mixed-race population is up 25 percent since it was first calculated in 2000, while the nation’s overall population has grown 7 percent in that time. Although still small in real numbers, the multiracial category is larger that the combined total of Native American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

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