The following was a workshop submission to the 2019 National Conference On Race and Identity. The proposal was not accepted.
When the University of Maryland founded their Multiracial and Biracial Student Association (M.B.S.A.) in 2002, shortly after the 2000 census became the first in U.S. history to allow more than one race identification—the group saw instantaneous interest and membership. Nine years later M.B.S.A. was still going strong and landed a feature in The New York Times. “The crop of students moving through college right now,” emphasized the Times, “includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”
Over the last two decades, the multiracial population has expanded at lightning speed. From 2000 to 2010, those who reported they were multiple races grew by 32 percent (compared with those who reported they were a single race, which grew by 9.2 percent). On the 2010 census, 9 million people reported they were more than one race. A recent Brookings Institute projection estimated that mixed-race population will grow 176 percent over the next four decades, more than any group by far. And the multiracial demographic is strikingly young. In 2015, almost half (46 percent) of multiracial-identifying Americans were younger than 18 years old. Meaning we are seeing a growth of this group particularly in our schools, colleges and universities . . .
