If you’re interested in reading a summary of completely asinine insights, check out this August 21th post on the NY Times’ Freakanomics blog, The Plight of Mixed-Race Children.

Right off the bat, the whole premise of the paper is baffling to me. Plight? Really? A mixed race kid might become our next president. How ‘bout we turn this study on its head and call it “The Opportunities of Mixed Race Children.”

Two, the research completely oversimplifies the issue. Take, for example, their first finding:

To my mixed-race middle-class eyes, this finding seems really skewed. Where did they find the households surveyed? In only inner-city neighborhoods? Also, this study should have been broken down by the race and nationality of each parent. (White mom, Black dad / Black mom, White dad / country of origin of each parent). I’d love to see some takeaways from such research – and I’m sure they’d show some rich results. Or at least some believable results.

Three, they explain all the findings with Park’s marginal man theory – originally published in 1937. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but it seems race relations have changed just a tad since then. Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to explain the results based on current theories? Or maybe even put together a new theory based on our current racial landscape?

And finally, what in God’s name does this mean:

That’s the wackest finding in the whole entire world. Even if the rest of the paper had been incredibly insightful, this “point” debunks everything.

Related -
CheapThrills/HuffintonPost: Half Black and Half White - Obama’s Biracial Question
Racialicious: Freakonomics: “The Plight of Mixed-Race Children”