Black, white or other - mixed-race people are not accounted for in the census - Column

Sometimes I check the box marked "other" just to mess with people. I did it on my application to Brown University, a college well known for its racially and culturally diverse, yet wealthy, student body, and another time on a job application that listed racial classification as optional. I was forced to justify my decision when the personnel director who knew my family called and asked me why I chose not to help the company fill its affirmative-action requirements.

Such is the fate of a mixed-race woman like me who must constantly second-guess the motives of census takers. And there are lots of us. In fact, it has been projected by some experts that, as a result of the doubling of interracial marriages between 1980 and 1990 and the subsequent increase of multiracial children, by the year 2001 lily-white communities will be almost obsolete in this country. By mid-century, if not sooner, the majority of the U.S. population will probably be nonwhite.

Yet the United States has denied the reality of racial mixing as fervently as it has upheld the myth of the "melting pot." Miscegenation laws in this country were not repealed until 1967--which makes me, born to a German-American mother and a Jamaican father in 1966, technically "illegal." Because American society adamantly upholds the false concept of racial purity and continues to see racial issues solely in terms of black and white (no pun intended), mixed-race Americans are still not officially represented on demographic information surveys. Put more simply, we have no box to check.

Many multicultural organizations, like the San Francisco--based Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA), however, are pushing for the inclusion of a "mixed-race" category in the official census by the year 2000. Founded in 1988 as a confederation of local multiethnic and interracial groups, the AMEA encourages individuals of mixed race to claim their whole identities. It also promotes an awareness of their issues on a societal level.

Not surprisingly, many African-American organizations have opposed the AMEA's census category initiative, arguing that it will dilute political unity among Black people. They fear that with the addition of a new racial category, mixed-race persons of the Black and white variety will "shed their skins" and abandon their darker-skinned sisters and brothers and reap the fruits of official differentiation.

A new mixed-race category on the census would instead officially expose the fallacious American notion of racial purity. After all, while the "one drop" definition has allowed Black people in this country to create a unified front against white supremacy and cultivate our cultural values and traditions, it has also enabled policies such as segregation to be enforced by perpetuating barriers between the races.

One of the most radical and meaningful changes we can make at this time is to force those in power to stop manipulating the bipolar racial system. The reduction of all social analysis to "Black" and "white" categories has unarguably obscured many of the real political, economic and cultural issues that face all oppressed people today--and that includes Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and poor whites.

The addition of a new census box will by no means eliminate racism in this country. It also begs the question of what is being mixed with what, or what races are being mixed with what. But at a time when so many Americans are hungry for self-determination, empowerment and liberation, it makes little sense that this country continues to see all of its problems in terms of race rather than class. With the absence of the current "convenient" categories, it is to be hoped that public officials will analyze the deeper issues that confront all of us instead of relying on the racial lip service that is all too prevalent. After all, races do mix. We are all mixed people: Racial purity is the fantasy of cavemen.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group