What are you?’ For multiracial students, declaring an identity can be complicated.
As Ms Rock puts it, “In my first few weeks at Princeton, I became accustomed to fielding questions: What’s your background? Where are your parents from? And the strikingly existential: What are you?”
In 2000, for the first time, the U.S. Census allowed respondents to check off multiple identities in the government population survey. Until then, people had to select from among five racial and ethnic groups: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, non-Hispanic black, or non-Hispanic white. The new form was an attempt to answer the concerns of multiracial people like her, who felt that they could not represent who they were when forced to choose a single identity. The census form now provides a total of 63 race options.
As Maya goes on to say, what the questioners really meant was, what race was she? The question said a lot to her about how important race was in America, even if direct discussion of the topic seemed reserved for special holidays or incendiary news stories. Her answer was, “I’m half black and half white” — a response that made her an anomaly. People were used to divvying one another up into five neat racial categories. After giving her response, she knew, white students would censor what they said about race in front of her, and black students would expect a certain solidarity. she often wished she did not respond at all; she didn’t want to be a spokeswoman for an experience many considered fascinating but which was, forher, completely normal.
More than 10.4 million people, or 3.4 percent of the population, identified themselves as being of two or more races. (For people under 18, the figure was 4 percent.) “By deciding what groups that Americans should be categorized by, including whether or not to add a multiracial category, the U.S. Census creates a standard for public or social understanding about how race should be understood,” says Princeton sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies models of race and ethnicity.
One sign of the growing awareness of multiracial identity is the Union of Multiracial and Multicultural Students (UMMS), a student group founded in 2006 by Hannibal Person ’08, who is half black and half white; and Sian OFaolain ’08, whose background is Irish, Hispanic, black, and Indian. Lindsey Leake ’10 is the group’s current president. She identifies strongly as multiracial — for which she credits, in part, her black father (her mother is white).
“He’d always tell me [that] people will ask you to define yourself — never feel pressure to choose one. My parents taught me to embrace both identities ... I thought it made me special, like a gift.” With that encouragement in mind, she joined UMMS. “I never felt excluded by whites or blacks,” Leake says, “but I feel I’m the most understood by other biracials.”
African-Americans, until relatively recently, had little opportunity to choose: People were identified as black because of a tradition known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a person with any amount of African ancestry was considered black. (The rule, based on the discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, was codified into law in many states by the 1920s.)
As Tyson and others have found, having the opportunity to check off multiple boxes may validate the multiracial experience, but those boxes don’t translate into an automatic space for multiracial people. Determining identity is not only a matter of forms and surveys, but also a lived experience, starting with the face reflected in the mirror every day and growing through the responses and reactions of others.
That’s something that President Obama surely understands. Has he changed the way the world views multiracial people? Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor in Princeton’s philosophy department and the Center for Human Values who has written widely on race and African-American intellectual history, thinks not. “The United States has lived for a very long time with the idea that you are either black or white or neither. If we hadn’t, we would presumably respond to Barack Obama with the thought — which would be natural in Ghana, where I grew up — that he was, as we say in Ghanaian English, ‘half-caste’” — biracial, says Appiah, who is biracial himself. Nonetheless, he says, many people view Obama as fully African-American, dismissing the side of his family that is white.
But that’s changing, Appiah notes. “There are, of course, people, many of them younger, who do think it’s obvious that the president is half black and half white. And I imagine that this may eventually come to be the standard view.”