EthnicMajority

(CNN) Each election cycle is dubbed “the year” — a time when Latinos will show up at the polls in droves and transform the political landscape.

President Obama’s renewed push last week for immigration reform has brought with it fresh expectations for the Latino vote in November’s midterm elections.

The issue is considered one of symbolic and substantive importance for the community. Four out of five undocumented immigrants are from Mexico or another part of Latin America, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

While voter turnout among the Latino community has risen in recent years, the adage that there’s “strength in numbers” has yet to manifest itself.

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(CNN) According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, one of every seven new marriages in 2008 was interracial or interethnic — the highest percentage in U.S. history. The media and blogosphere have been atwitter.

Finally, it seems, we have tangible evidence of America’s entry into a new post-racial society, proof of growing racial tolerance. Intermarriage trends are being celebrated as a positive sign that we have come to think of all Americans as, well, Americans.

But others have an entirely different take — a more ominous one. They see increasing interracial marriage rates as proof that the country is amalgamating racially.

To them, intermarriage is a putative threat to whites and America’s essential character. Their concerns are heightened by recent Census Bureau projections that the U.S. will become a majority-minority society by the middle of the century.

My research with Ken Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, indicates that for American’s youngest residents, that future is now. Nearly half of U.S. births today are to minority women.

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(Business Week) The U.S. risks a deteriorating workforce unless it rapidly improves educational achievement for minority groups who soon will become a majority in the nation, researchers say.

“If we just do a snapshot of minority performance today and project that 20 years out, we’re going to have a poorly skilled workforce,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Census Bureau data released yesterday show whites of European ancestry will soon bear less than half the nation’s new babies. Blacks, Asians, American Indians, Hispanics and other traditional minority groups had 2.07 million children in the 12 months ended July 1, or 48.6 percent of all births, an increase from 45 percent in 2005, the Census Bureau said.

For the period ending July 1, non-Hispanic whites had 2.19 million children, or 51.4 percent of all births compared with 55 percent four years earlier, Census figures showed.

While the educational performance of blacks and Hispanics has improved in recent decades, they continue on average to score about four grade levels below whites in the 12th grade, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington.

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(CNN) The first time Priya Merrill, who is Indian, brought her white boyfriend home for Thanksgiving in 2007, the dinner was uncomfortable and confusing. She still remembers her family asking if Andrew was the bartender or a family photographer.

The couple married last August, and her Indian family has warmed up to her husband despite their racial differences.

“I think we get the best of both cultures,” said Merrill, 27, of New York. She added, “Sometimes I just forget that we’re interracial. I don’t really think about it.”

Asian. White. Black. Hispanic. Do race and ethnicity matter when it comes to marriage?

Apparently, race is mattering less these days, say researchers at the Pew Research Center, who report that nearly one out of seven new marriages in the U.S. is interracial or interethnic. The report released Friday, which interviewed couples married for less than a year, found racial lines are blurring as more people choose to marry outside their race.

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(NY Times) It is a familiar lament of single African-American women: where are the “good” black men to marry?

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses.

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(AP) WASHINGTON — Melting pot or racial divide? The growth of interracial marriages is slowing among U.S.-born Hispanics and Asians. Still, blacks are substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.

The latest trend belies notions of the U.S. as a post-racial, assimilated society. Demographers cite a steady flow of recent immigration that has given Hispanics and Asians more ethnically similar partners to choose from while creating some social distance from whites due to cultural and language differences.

White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.

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(Sacramento Bee) Is the term “Asian American” fading into history, like “Oriental” before it?

As Sacramento’s growing Asian immigrant communities celebrated Sunday’s Pacific Rim Street Fest, a growing number note that Asian American isn’t a race and said they choose to identify by their ethnicity.

Robbie Mae Lopez and her family came downtown to enjoy more than 15 Asian cultures represented – but don’t call her Asian American.

“I’m full-blooded Filipino American,” said Mae Lopez, 27, of West Sacramento. “Asian American is kind of a loose term. I think being Filipino American is a full-blown identity crisis itself. We were were overrun by the Japanese, Spanish … .”

As the race question on the U.S. census form has expanded to 15 categories and write-in options – giving Americans the right to check as many boxes as they want – fewer are embracing the term Asian American.

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And it’s living in college football. According to the New York Times, only four out of 119 NCAA coaches in Division 1 football are African American. This amounts to 3.4% in a sport where 50% of the players are black.

The latest high-profile example occurred at Auburn, where the university chose a white coach who had failed miserably at his previous job over a black coach who had turned his college’s program around and made it highly successful. Clearly there are double standards. At perhaps the country’s most visible and prestigious college football program, Notre Dame made headlines by hiring Tyrone Willingham as its first black coach, but after one good season and one bad one, abruptly fired him. Their next coach, Charlie Weiss, had nearly the same results and was given a seven year contract extension and a big raise. He remains on the job in spite of just finishing another horrible season.

At least Willingham has been able to find head coaching jobs after being fired. While the NCAA coaching mill is full of re-treads, no other African American coach has been able to find a head coaching job after being terminated.

This is a disgrace and looks like white affirmative action. You would think that if the public is willing to vote overwhelmingly for an African American president, the athletic directors and college presidents at these colleges and universities could find some coaches who better reflect the demographics of their teams. According to the Times, only 9.2% of the athletic directors and 2.5% of the college presidents are African American. That might explain something.

More about affirmative action.