Interracial Children Essay Research Paper Proposal Would

Interracial Children Essay, Research Paper

Proposal: Would there be a benefit for interracial children having a multiracial box on any application as means of identifying interracial children.

Abstract

Despite growing numbers, public images of interracial people – who have been part of the American landscape since the first Africans reached America’s shores. Confusion surrounding race stems from the illogic used to define it. Slavery laws and social practices set a precedent – which survives to this day.

Traditionally, “White America” as a whole has disenfranchised a people who appears or by definition has physical characteristics that challenge their hue as “White”, today, this challenge is more evident than ever as marriages of different races has climbed in the United States. According to the United States Census data, there are over one million interracial marriages. Marriages between white men and Asian women are highest, supporting almost 25 percent of all interracial covenants. It is estimated that one out of every four marriages is between blacks and whites.

This research proposal will designate its focus and energy toward the offspring of interracial couples. Until recently, conventional wisdom typically classified an interracial child as being of the same race as the minority parent. It is this limited and compartmentalized approach that has warranted a push for reclassification of interracial children. A child of an interracial partnership should have the right to choose which race identifies them. This analysis will examine the need for affirming the uniqueness of the child and why a full racial heritage will conceal a more settled, secure child.

Once a child has cultural security, this research will prove that interracial children will dissipate the belief of inferiority among the minority parent.

The basis of this analysis will contrast the studies that interracial children are inferior, abnormal, lack true identity, and challenge the classification of “The one drop rule” identification codes from American Minority Peoples a study in racial and cultural conflicts in the United States: by Donald Young.

Donald Young, American Minority People, 1932, believes, historically, the major contribution toward race mixture in the United States primarily resulted from exploration, immigration, excess of males among the mobile group. He adds, “The sex impulse is a constant factor in men whose home family relations have been broken or interrupted from a long journey of exploration.” These hardy adventures that first settled the eastern region of the United States began a mixture of white and Indian blood. With the introduction of slavery in the United States, the presence of slaves and minority women of inferior social status was a temptation to illicit relationships, for such women were property and were held cheap by the white men of the highest social class.

Women of an inferior group were considered prey to the white males causing an inferior mixture of interracial offspring.

The legal definition of the “inferior” race is any degree of mixture from one-half down to the slightest trace. This historical mindset is the real basis and justification for popular pressure against the mixture of peoples who may readily be distinguished from each other either because of racial features or because of cultural differences. Donald Young suggest “Children of mixed cultures are much more likely to be social liabilities than those whose parents accept a common culture.” “The mixed blood is thus an unadjusted person. His immediate presence has no respected place in society.

The significance of all this in the problems of race mixture lies in the fact that the attendant group break down social as well as political barriers separating or mixing cultural groups leaving percentages of more than one culture thus creating “inferior races.” Politics have been the forum for defining race and the hierarchy of racial privilege in the country since the first African slaves were brought here in 1619.

Since then, individuals and groups have sought redress in matters of race through the powers of law, political office, and the interpretation of our government underpinning: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Measurements of progress and regress are marked by legislative acts (including Dred Scott verse. Sandford [1857], the Emancipation Proclamation or Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution [1865], Brown verses Board of Education [1954], the voting Rights Act of 1964, and Loving verse Virginia). It wasn’t until 1967, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loving verse Virginia decision, that remaining anti-miscegenation laws (still on the books in seventeen states at the time) were overruled. Richard and Mildred Loving were the appellants in the case. In 1958 the newlywed Loving were arrested in their Virginia hometown for being married to each other. She was black he was white. Rather than face incarceration, they moved back in with their respective parents, then moved together to Washington, D.C., where they lived for several years. The Virginia judges ruling also ordered that they never visit Virginia together. (Funderburg p26)

For as long as interracial couples have chosen to settle down and marry in this country, they have confronted the question. “But what about the children.”

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