http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0605,pabst,71983,6.html

"The infamous "What are you?" question gets ample screen time in a new documentary film, Chasing Daybreak, put out by the MAVIN Foundation, an interracial-advocacy organization. The film, released on January 15, Martin Luther King's birthday, endeavors to increase awareness about "America's mixed- heritage baby boom" and foster dialogue about diversity and the ever changing demographic makeup of this country. Chasing Daybreak chronicles the "Generation MIX National Awareness Tour," which sent five variously mixed twenty-somethings on a 10,000-mile road trip across America in a 26-foot RV.

But what exactly is this so-called "Generation Mix" and this would-be "mixed-heritage baby boom"? Kelley suggests that while there have of course been mixed-race people for as long as different races have resided together, we now see the first critical mass of adamantly multiracial people in America—teens and twentysomethings like these. I agree that race mixing, and not just in the well-known crime of white-on-black rape, has been more prevalent than is generally acknowledged, and that at first glance mixing seems to be a common enough occurrence these days. It is true that intermixing is on the rise, especially in places like New England and more so on the West Coast. But once talk turns to population "booms" and "generations," we need to note that the numbers remain much smaller than one might think.

This is especially true for black and white mixing. Currently, approximately 5 percent of all American marriages are between people of different races. And since 1967, the year the Supreme Court legalized marriage between blacks and whites, rates of black-white intermarriage have jumped radically indeed, from 1 percent to around 5 percent of all marriages involving a black person. The relatively small numbers don't take away from the social significance of race mixing, but rather add to it. That the overwhelming majority of people still stick to "their own" makes the exceptions stand out and seem more common than they actually are, while also exacerbating the widespread fetishization of all things interracial.