SOC6

Meet the New Optimists - Newsweek Generation 1, in this taxonomy, is the civil-rights generation—those (born before 1945) who participated in, or simply bore witness to, the defining 20th-century battle for racial equality. It is the generation of whites who, in large measure, saw blacks as alien beings and the generation of blacks who, for the most part, saw whites as irremediably prejudiced. Gen 2s (born between 1945 and 1969) were much less racially constrained—though they remained, in large measure, stuck in a tangle of racial stereotypes. Gen 3s (born between 1970 and 1995) saw race as less of a big deal. And that ability to see a person beyond color has cleared the way for a generation of Believers—blacks who fully accept that America means what it says when it promises to give them a shot. That new reality made itself clear when I compared black Gen 1 Harvard M.B.A.s with their Gen 3 counterparts. Seventy-five percent of Gen 1s said blacks faced “a lot” of discrimination, compar...

Multiracial Identity and the U.S. Census, ProQuest Discovery Guides In 1973 FICE produced a report on access to higher education among Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Native American students. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar Weinberger latched on to the part of the report that explained the absence of useful data on ethnic and racial groups because of a lack of common definitions. A year later an ad hoc committee was formed to solve this problem, which developed guidelines to make "compatible" and "nonduplicative" categories of race used by all federal agencies. One of the stipulations was that racial categories could not be combined or overlapped. In effect, this reinforced the system of mutually exclusive racial categories, and it led to the creation of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive No. 15: Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity. The standard issued in 1977 defined five main racial categories.