The lecture illustrates how the meltpot culture is created in the US

1. Multiracial America
Diverse and Growing in Numbers

2. INTRODUCTION
 USA: The Melting Pot Country;
 Since the establishment of the 13 colonies, many waves of European settlers set foot and settled
in America;
 After Independence: America became diverse demographically.
 Multiracial Americans: Americans who have mixed ancestry of "two or more races“.
 In the 2010 US census, approximately 9 million individuals, or 2.9% of the population, self-
identified as multiracial.
 Historical reasons, including slavery creating a racial caste and the European-American
suppression of Native Americans, often led people to identify or be classified by only one
ethnicity, generally that of the culture in which they were raised.
 Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their multiracial heritage because of racial
discrimination against minorities.
 While many Americans may be biologically multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify
so culturally, any more than they maintain all the differing traditions of a variety of national
ancestries.

3.  Today, multiracial individuals are found in every
corner of the country.
 Multiracial groups in the United States include many
African Americans, Louisiana Creoles, Métis
Americans, Mestizo Americans, Hapas,
Melungeons, Lumbees, Houmas, and several
other communities found primarily in the Eastern US.

4.  The American people are mostly multi-ethnic descendants of
various culturally distinct immigrant groups, many of which
have now developed nations.
 The African- American Civil Rights Movement (1955–
1968) and other social movements since the mid-twentieth
century worked to achieve social justice and equal
enforcement of civil rights under the constitution for all
ethnicities.
 In the 2000s, less than 5% of the population identified as
multiracial.

5.  Interracial relationships have had a long history in North America and the US,
beginning with the intermixing of European explorers and soldiers, who took native
women as companions. After European settlement increased, traders and fur
trappers often married or had unions with women of native tribes.
 In the 17th century, faced with a continuing, critical labor shortage, colonists
primarily in the Chesapeake Bay Colony, imported Africans as laborers, sometimes
as indentured servants and, increasingly, as slaves. African slaves were also
imported into New York and other northern ports by the Dutch and later English.
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.
 Paul Heinegg ‘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.’

6.  1789: Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography was published. He advocated interracial
marriage between whites and blacks. By the late eighteenth century, a high
proportion of mixed-race slaves- evidence of miscegenation by white men.
 In 1790, the first federal population census was taken in the United States.
 Only the heads of households were identified by name.
 Native Americans were included among "Other;" "Free people of color".
 Slaves were counted separately.
 People of African descent were classified by appearance as mulatto.
 After the American Revolutionary War, the number and proportion of free people
of color increased markedly in the North and the South as slaves were freed.
 The Second Great Awakening: Quaker and Methodist preachers in the South
urged slaveholders to free their slaves. This led many men to free their slaves.
 1782 – 1810: the percentage of free people of color rose from less than one
percent to nearly 10 percent of blacks in the South.

7.  Anti-miscegenation laws were passed in most states
during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, but this
did not prevent white slaveholders, their sons, or other
powerful white men from taking slave women as
concubines and having multiracial children with them.
 In California and the western US, there were greater
numbers of Latino and Asian residents.
 These were prohibited from official relationships with
whites. White legislators passed laws prohibiting
marriage between European and Asian Americans until
the 1950s.

8.  Racial discrimination continued to be enacted in new laws in the 20th century.
 The one-drop rule was enacted in Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Law influenced by the
popularity of eugenics and ideas of racial purity. After regaining political power in Southern states
by disenfranchising blacks, white Democrats passed laws to impose racial segregation to restore
white supremacy. They maintained these until forced to change in the 1960s and enforcement of
federal legislation authorizing oversight of practices to protect the constitutional rights of African
Americans and other minority citizens.
 In 1967 the United States Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia ruled that anti-miscegenation
laws were unconstitutional.
 1997: Multiracial people who wanted to acknowledge their full heritage won a victory of sorts
when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) changed the federal regulation of racial
categories.
 This resulted in a change to the 2000 US 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."

9. US population is increasingly multiracial
 The current growth rate of biracial families is three times faster than that
of the rest of the population.
 6.9 % of the US population is of mixed race: a big jump from the past and
points to a population that is expected to grow.
 1970: among babies living with two parents, only 1 % had parents who
were different races from each other. By 2013, it has risen to 10 %.
 Kim Parker: "From 2000-2010, multiracial population grew three times as
fast as the overall population, and when we look at the number of babies
being born that are mixed race and the rise in interracial marriage, we can
see that not only is it continuing to grow but the growth could accelerate in
the future.“

10. White and Native American 50 %
White -Asian 16%
Black and Native American 12%
White and Black 11%
White and Latino 6%
Hispanic and Black 5%

11.  2012: 36 % of mixed race babies born were biracial white and black,
24 % were biracial white and Asia.
12 % were white and Native American.
 Rapid increases in mixed-race marriages have likely fueled much of the rise in
the share of multiracial babies.
 1980: the share of marriages between spouses of different races has almost
quadrupled up to 6%.
 Even with that sharp increase, however, black-white couplings represented only
about one-in-nine of the approximately 280,000 new interracial or interethnic
marriages in 2008.
 White-Hispanic couples accounted for 41% of such new marriages; white-Asian
couples made up 15%; and white-black couples made up 11%.

14.  The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians, and
whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it is almost certain
that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white.
 By 2050: there will have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian
last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic
European immigrants.
 Among all mixed- race adults who are married or living with a partner, about
12% say their spouse or partner is two or more races.
 Multiracial adults with a white background are significantly less likely than
single-race whites to have a white partner (67% vs. 92%).
 Multiracial adults with a black background are also less likely than single-race
blacks to have a spouse or partner who is black only (54% vs. 86%).

17.  Overall, the politics of multiracial Americans
resemble the country as a whole.
Democratic Party Republican Party
Multiracial adults 57% 37%
Black and American Indian adults 89% 11%
single-race blacks 92% 8%
single-race whites 41% 55%
White and Asian biracial adults 60% 38%

19. Future US Demographics