Linwood Carroll Sr., a Chesterfield County grandfather, thinks of his family as a rainbow.
Carroll, pastor of the multicultural Amazing Grace World Fellowship, and wife Brenda's three black sons are married to women of different races, and their grandchildren are all mixed-race "swirls," as their son Linwood Jr. calls them.
He and his Filipino wife, Glenda, have two half-Filipino, half-black daughters. Stephen and his wife, Ginny, have four half-black, half-white children. And Eric and Gina's daughter is half-Jamaican.
"We don't even look at each other like we're different," said Brenda Carroll. "It's just a family — a family with a lot of different complexions, a lot of different personalities."
This is the changing face of Virginia, where the mixed-race population grew by 63.1 percent between 2000 and 2010. Multiracial people number 233,400, or 2.9 percent of the state population. In Richmond, the population of mixed-race people increased by 60.9 percent to make up 2.3 percent of the population.
Susan Graham, executive director of the California-based Project RACE, which lobbied for the new multiracial classification on the census, said the growing numbers of multiracial people mean more acceptance.
"There was a time when it was a shock to see a black person and a white person together or an Asian person and a white person," she said. "It's not a shock anymore. It's part of our society."
Last year was the second time the U.S. Census allowed Americans to identify themselves as more than one race, and the mixed-race population grew faster than demographers expected, especially in the South.
Graham attributes the increase to several reasons. There was more awareness that people could identify with more than one race, there is more comfort in doing so, and there are simply more mixed-race people.
"Everyone knows someone or has a relative or has a friend or neighbor who's multiracial," Graham said. "It just ain't no big thing anymore."
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Ginny Carroll, who is white, became accustomed to people staring at her and Stephen when they started dating at Chesterfield's L.C. Bird High School in 1991.
But that's not an issue now. Their two sets of twins — 11-year-olds Grant and Cailin and 6-year-olds Greyson and Kinsley know plenty of other multiracial kids in Midlothian, and Ginny thinks maybe people are just more accustomed to seeing children who look like hers.
"People are coming up and talking about, 'Your kids are beautiful' instead of anything else," she said. "It doesn't seem like we're any different than any other couples."
Just 45 years ago, interracial marriages were banned in Virginia.
Virginia residents Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife, Mildred, who was black and Indian, challenged a state law forbidding their marriage. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state's anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case.
Across the U.S., interracial marriages are increasingly common, with one in seven new marriages between people of different races or ethnicities, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
A new analysis of census data by The Brookings Institution, a Washington-based nonprofit public policy organization, shows that the number of white children nationwide dropped by 4.3 million, or 10 percent, since the last census count.
According to the Census Bureau, more than 9 million Americans are mixed race, nearly three-quarters of whom were white and black, white and some other race, white and Asian, and white and American Indian/Alaska Native. In Virginia, more than half of the people who identify as mixed race are white and black or white and Asian.
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When Ana Edwards, a 50-year-old Richmond woman of Norwegian and African-American heritage, was growing up, she endured many challenges, including name-calling by classmates. The biggest issue was that adults rarely intervened to defend her, she said.
One of her clearest memories is being called the "n" word by some students in chorus when she was living in Manhattan Beach, Calif., with her white maternal grandparents. Her grandmother walked her back to the school's chorus room, confronted the staff and "laid them all out."
Edwards has kept an eye on the way her biracial children are treated. One has a white father, and one has a black father. While her sons have had distinctly different experiences because they have different personalities and they look different, they live with more acceptance than she got as a child, Edwards said.
"People used to call me exotic. For them, it's not exotic. There are a lot more mixed people around," she said. "They can pretty much go where they want and not let race determine what they have access to."
But Jonathan C. Zur, president of the Richmond-based Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, said many mixed-race children still feel ignored or not fully included in any community.
"A lot of times these students don't feel they have a voice or a connection with others who have similar experiences," Zur said.
He said more work still needs to be done to build connections with people with diverse racial backgrounds, such as helping schools create climates where mixed-race students aren't made to feel different.
Alexa Carroll, 17, the daughter of Eric and Gina, said that as a mixed person, it can occasionally be difficult to fit in. Once, a classmate said in front of her that black people got on her nerves, and Alexa made a face. The student responded, "You're mixed, I like half of you."
"When you're mixed, you kind of have your mixed friends who know what it's like to be mixed. Then you have your black friends, who you seem white to them, and you have your white friends who say you act really black," said Alexa, a senior at Richmond Christian School. "You're kind of stuck in the middle."
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Nhat Pham, who is Vietnamese, had reservations about marrying his white wife, Kelly, whom he met in 1999, because "it's just ingrained into our culture that races shouldn't be mixed." But the Midlothian resident also worried that if they had children, the kids wouldn't feel like they fit in anywhere.
"Sometimes you never get accepted by either culture, because you're not truly … white or truly Vietnamese," he said.
He said he regularly catches people staring at his three kids — Marilyn, 7, Christian, 6, and Danyelle, 4 — but there have been few other issues.
"You just kind of deal with it," he said.
Gina Coutlakis, an African-American woman who lives in Richmond's Fan District, said that when she and her white husband, James, were walking down Cary Street soon after their first son was born, an older black woman asked her, "Is that your white baby?" When she went to the playground with Manny, now 14, other parents asked if she was the boy's nanny.
But she doesn't feel as though her three sons, who also embrace their Greek heritage, are unusual in Richmond. When she moved here in 1993, she immediately befriended two interracial couples.
"Everywhere you turned, there was nothing but mixed kids everywhere," she said.
Her three sons are indifferent about their own racial makeup, she said. "It just doesn't faze them," she said.
When she talked with her middle son, Harrison, 9, about she and his father being different races, she asked him who he thought he looked like. "George Clooney," he deadpanned.
Having a multiracial president has brought attention to the issue of mixed-race people, as have multiracial celebrities such as Halle Berry, Shakira and Tiger Woods. Virginia Commonwealth University men's basketball coach Shaka Smart also shared the story of his biracial heritage — his mother is white and his father is a black Trinidadian — during his team's run to the Final Four.
Ginny Carroll said that if anyone has responded negatively about mixed-race children, it's a handful of older people who told her they worried about whether her and Stephen's kids would be accepted.
"You're not worried about my kids," she said she thought to herself. "You just don't want us together."
But her children didn't even realize their parents were different races until they started learning about segregation in school, she said.
"They just thought Daddy was a little darker than Mommy," Ginny said. "I didn't want them to think they were different than anybody else."
After studying Rosa Parks in class, Ginny's daughter Cailin came home from school and commented that she would have been able to sit anywhere on the bus.
Ginny's sister-in-law, Glenda Carroll, who is Filipina, said that when she runs errands with her daughters, people mistake one of her daughter's Asian friends as her child. But she has never experienced discrimination.
"If I were raising these two kids in the '60s, I think it'd be a different story," she said. "We get the benefits from people's suffering back then. It's more acceptable now."
Glenda, who moved to Richmond from the Philippines when she was 10, said she didn't know any mixed-race people growing up. But living in Glen Allen, her children attend a school where 33 languages are spoken at the students' homes, and they know plenty of kids like them.
She and her husband, Linwood Jr., refer to their girls, Tayloe, 12, and Tyler, 9, as "half-and-half," "swirl" or "hybrids." She said: "They know they're mixed, and they know they're special."
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Linwood Carroll Jr. said the acceptance of his mixed-race children is symbolic of the region's growing diversity.
"When I was in high school, if you saw an Asian person, that was amazing. Hispanics, wow, more amazing. But now, that's not the case anymore," he said. "Richmond has come a long, long way."
Residents have no choice but to accept mixed-race people, he said. "Honestly, what are people going to do?"
Glenda Carroll says it doesn't matter to her what race her daughters date and marry, as long as they're kind.
"They could end up marrying a black person or a white person or a Filipino person or an Indian person," she said. "Whether or not some people like it, this is the way it's going to be."
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