America’s racial heritage destined to be a “deeply flavored, spicy stew.”
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.
Non-mixed members of multiracial families face their own special struggles. “When you’re in a biracial family, you have a choice to be white or not,” said Mary Semela, a white mom of two biracial sons who is married to a black immigrant from South Africa. Semela, who lives in Ellicott City, Md., said some members of multiracial families can grow so weary of stares and questions when they are with their relatives of different colors that they’ll intentionally go to public places alone at times. “You have that choice just to walk away from your family,” she said, adding that she would not do so herself.
While her husband and sons have faced the all-too-familiar trappings of white racism against blacks, Semela, 51, said her sons also are seen by some African-Americans as less than full members of that community because, with their father a recent immigrant, “they don’t have slave heritage.”
According to an exhaustive study by the National Policy Institute: “The big population story of the 21st Century is shaping up to be the status reversal of whites and blacks and the Indian baby boom. A side bar will be the single digit minority role that whites will assume. Of the 7 population groups studied, only whites are projected to sustain an absolute decline in numbers. In 1950 whites and blacks were respectively 27.98% and 8.97% of world population.
By 2060 these figures will almost reverse as blacks surge to 25.38% and whites shrink to 9.76%. From (the year) 2010 the white population will decline while blacks will add 1.2 billion to their numbers. In this time frame the Indian subcontinent will gain 1.2 billion people. These groups and their governments will be looking for elbow room, and the diminished presence of whites in Europe, and especially in the relatively wide open spaces North America, will provide such an opportunity. Specifically, countries like Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia can expect to be pressured to accept collectively hundreds of millions of refugees from India, and sub-Sahara Africa.”