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.â€
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.