10-year-old Alison also appears in "Mixed." Her heritage is Japanese, black, Irish, English and French. Alison's father Hank is bi-racial himself -- African American and white. Unlike his daughter, though, he says he did not __________________________.
"When people asked me, I thought like they were trying to label me or they were trying to judge me, when I was a child growing up. When people ask us about our children's background, they are more interested. There is no judgment attached to it, which I think is a great thing. Now, my daughter is growing up in a new world. She's growing up where she is not different, she is just __________________________that we finally have in the United States, or that we've always had, but we're finally acknowledging and celebrating." And that, says photographer Kip Fulbeck, is what he wanted the portraits in his book to show.
"We're moving very, very slowly in the right direction. In the U.S., we have the census going on right now, and 10 years ago in the year 2000, that was the first census that actually allowed people to __________________________. Before that, you could only pick one. And so for me, who has a Chinese mother and an English-Irish father, when they say 'pick one box', that essentially was asking me to pick my mother or my father. That's not a very fair decision that a kid have to do. It's like, I think it's changing in that way and we are becoming much more aware of this right now."