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More Columbine carnage
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[02/10/00]

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A former Army intelligence officer claims he knows what the CIA meant to hit when it hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
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[02/10/00]

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Since the 1960s, data on race and ethnicity have been used extensively in civil rights monitoring and enforcement, covering areas such as employment, voting rights, housing and mortgage lending, health care services, and educational opportunities. In the 1970s, the federal government standardized racial and ethnic categories in order to streamline civil rights monitoring. Henceforth, Americans would have to identify themselves as American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black or white. In the one adjoining category on ethnicity, they could also choose to select whether they were of Hispanic or non-Hispanic origin.

All mixed up A Salon special report on multiracial America The last taboo Why won't Hollywood let Denzel and Julia do what comes naturally? By Charles Taylor "The stakes are a bit higher for us" The NAACP's Washington bureau chief takes the Census Bureau to task for its new multiracial categories. By Daryl Lindsey Love strands A white mom on the powerful bonding ritual of braiding her mixed-race daughters' hair. By Susan Straight He loves me, loves me not Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love. By Eleanor Stacy Parker I was a guilty white liberal A failed interracial romance taught me that I wasn't part of the solution to America's racial strife, I was part of the problem. By Joan Walsh

But the logic and strength of the mutually exclusive racial categories were not destined to survive long in a diversifying nation. In the early 1990s, these standard classifications came under fire from a growing number of Americans who believed that the bare-bones options on the census questionnaire did not reflect the new demographic reality wrought by two decades of high immigration and increasing intermarriage rates.

On the 1990 census, a mixed-race American was forced to either identify himself with one ancestry or put an X by the ignoble and anonymous "other" category. As a result, advocacy groups for racially mixed Americans called for a "multiracial" category on the 2000 census, an idea uniformly opposed by traditional civil rights organizations that feared the new classification would diminish their constituencies as well as complicate the task of monitoring discrimination.

Caught in a political tug-of-war, the Clinton administration stumbled on a compromise in the fall of 1997. The Office of Management and Budget, which incidentally was headed at the time by Franklin Raines, an African-American with a white wife and mixed children, directed that federal forms, including the 2000 census questionnaire, must now tell respondents to "select one or more" racial categories to identify themselves. By choosing multiple categories, respondents could indicate a multiracial identity.

At the time, few could have predicted that this small, politically expedient yet significant change in the questionnaire's fine print would make much of a difference in this country's stagnant racial dialogue. But on the eve of the 2000 census, demographers, statisticians, and bureaucrats around the country are still not sure how they will process and present the data that is due on the president's desk by the end of the year.

While it is clear that the new multiple race option will give us a more accurate and complex view of America's racial landscape, it is also certain to create a great deal of confusion -- and perhaps conflict -- for years to come. The NAACP as well as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund are urging any of their constituents who may be part white to identify themselves as simply black or Asian on the census. Other civil rights organizations are already pressuring the government to "reassign" multiracial Americans back into the traditional racial categories, to resist dilution of any individual non-white racial group.

Although the census has never been able to formally count the multiracial, surveys and estimates do show that the number of racially mixed Americans has skyrocketed over the past quarter century. In 1970, there were an estimated 321,000 interracial unions in the United States. By 1990 that number had increased to 1.5 million. Surveys also indicate that the number of children in interracial families grew from less than one-half million in 1970 to roughly 2 million 20 years later. And these numbers don't include intermarriages involving Latinos, because Hispanic is an ethnic and not a racial category.

If Hispanics are taken into account, an estimated 7 percent of contemporary Americans could be considered multiracial/multiethnic. And a recent analysis of birth records by the Public Policy Institute of California indicated that 15 percent of all births in the Golden State are multiracial or multiethnic.

In the nation's most demographically diverse state, 53 percent of multiethnic births are to Latino/white couples. At 15 percent, Asian-white children are the second most common combination, followed by black-white (9 percent), Hispanic-black (7 percent), and Hispanic-Asian (6 percent) children.

Next page | New census reflects shifting racial terms