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~ Chapter 10 ~ Conclusion: The Diversity Paradox and Beyond (Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose) We opened this book with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction, “The problem of the twentieth-century will be the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men” (Du Bois 1903/1997, 45). Since Du Bois made this forecast, in 1903, the United States has undertaken major national-level legal and legislative initiatives to reduce the harsh effects of the country’s black-white color line. These include landmark decisions such as Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia in 1967, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The removal of legal barriers to fair and equitable treatment was intended to eliminate the last vestiges of discrimination based on racial status, which would in turn, it was hoped, reduce the black-white gap in education, earnings, wealth accumulation, and residential segregation. In addition, the decriminalization of interracial marriage would, it was assumed, result in a rise in marital unions across the color line. These landmark decisions led to hopes in the late 1960s that old prejudices—as well as the institutional frameworks that supported them—would soon fade away. During the same era, in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, which opened America’s doors to a new wave of non-European immigrants. Well over 80 percent of America’s newcomers hail from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, and this influx has forever changed the face of the nation. Latinos and Asians together now make up about a fifth of the U.S. population and may by 2050 constitute one third (Bean and Bell-Rose 1999; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002; Waldinger and Lee 2001). Latino and Asian immigrants—neither black nor white—have ushered in a new era of diversity and changed the country from a largely black-white society to one consisting of multiple nonwhite ethnoracial groups. The rate of intermarriage has increased along with rises in immigration (Bean and Stevens 2003; Jacoby 2001; Lee and Edmonston 2005). In 2008, about 7 percent of marriages—8.8 percent in metropolitan areas—were interracial, a significant increase that cannot be attributed to population growth alone. The rise in intermarriage has resulted in a growing multiracial population whose members were able to mark “one or more races” on the most recent census form, thus acknowledging their multiracial heritage for the first time in the history of the U.S. census. This significant change reflected just how far the United States had come from the days of the legally enforced one-drop rule of hypodescent, which decreed that anyone with a “traceable amount” of black blood was racially black. All these changes—the legal eradication of discrimination, the new immigration from Latin America and Asia, the way that the U.S. census now measures race, the rising rates of intermarriage, and the growing multiracial population—lead to optimistic conclusions about the breakdown of America’s traditional black-white color line. These indicators appear to signal that the boundaries between all ethnoracial groups are loosening, paving the way for a new era of cosmopolitan diversity in the twenty-first century. Racial status seems to be declining in significance and loosening its grip as an organizing principle of opportunity in the United States, and the tenacious black-white color line that has long gripped the country appears to be fading. Moreover, not only is the United States becoming more ethnoracially diverse but the country’s new diversity also appears to be contributing to the breakdown of the color line for all groups. Based on the compositional shifts in the U.S. population and sociocultural changes among its people, it seems the country is moving in the postethnic direction that David A. Hollinger envisioned in Postethnic America (1995). Before accepting the validity of this conclusion, it is critical to study differences in the patterns of intermarriage and multiracial reporting, because both rates of intermarriage and levels of multiracial reporting (describing oneself as multiracial) reliably reflect the actual social distance or the lack thereof between groups. For instance, a high rate of intermarriage signifies that individuals of different ethnoracial backgrounds no longer perceive their social, cultural, and ethnoracial differences as significant enough to represent a barrier to a marital union (Alba 1995). As individuals who have chosen to cross group boundaries...

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