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"In an era of increased immigration and multi-racial marriage, more mixed-heritage Americans are coming of age than ever before. One in seven marriages between 2008 and 2009 was between spouses of differing races or ethnicities and colleges are seeing an influx of students with diverse backgrounds. What&amp;#039;s particularly unique, according to the NYTimes.com, is that these young mixed-race Americans are embracing their multi-ethnic backgrounds, unlike previous generations, instead of identifying with one race or the other. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,&amp;quot; says Laura Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland. &amp;quot;If someone tries to call me black I say, &amp;#039;yes \u2014 and white.&amp;#039; People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don&amp;#039;t do it because society tells you that you can&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; In fact, it wasn&amp;#039;t until the 2000 census that Americans were even allowed to mark more than one race. In that year, seven million people marked that they were more than one race, which was 2.4 percent of the American population. According to the Census Bureau, mixed-race Americans have grown to approximately 35 percent since then. America has always been a &amp;quot;melting pot,&amp;quot; in the sense that it was mixed with a lot of people from a lot of differing backgrounds, but when you think of &amp;quot;melting,&amp;quot; you think of things merging together to become one, and there really hasn&amp;#039;t been a lot of that. But as society loosens its sense of self-segregation, more and more melting is occurring, allowing for young people to identify with several backgrounds or simply as bi-racial. - Alexandra Gekas, Associate Editor "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/life/news/a45880/more-multi-racial-americans-are-coming-of-age-than-ever-before-761/>