Actually I should say I sprung a Walt Disney World planning video on Liz last night.

The sad part is that it was pretty hokey; even my own interest was waining, so I couldn’t fault Liz when I saw out of the corner of my eye that she had picked up her iPhone and started scrolling through something more interesting.

So I quickly turned it into a sociological experiment: I pointed out that one of the video’s hostesses spoke perfect English, with just a hint of a Mediterranean accent. Was she Greek? Turkish?

The iPhone went to the coffee table. Liz was back in the game.

We determined that her parents emigrated to Canada sometime around the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 when she was young, like say 6 years old.

Liz was hooked. We investigated each time they used African American actors. Asian American actors. Grandparents. Honeymooners.

It’s actually a pretty interesting experiment, because every actor’s casting was a clear choice, likely debated by a team of experts and executives and marketing people.

Did you know that in the United States right now one in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities?

Key quote:

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

Maybe this is hitting me more strongly because I’m half-way through The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann for a class at USM. It’s a terribly interesting book that I think every college student should have to read. I want to talk more about it here soon, but for now, just go read the Times article.