Does it matter if black plus white equals black or multiracial?
“Is Barack Obama Black or Biracial?” a recent CNN.com headline asks. Should such racial characterizations of people like Obama — who have one black parent and one white parent — really matter? According to a new Northwestern University study, they do matter. When study participants knew of a person’s black-white ancestry, in comparison to not knowing of the parentage, they quickly adhered to the simplistic characterization of biracial people as black.
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