Mixed Race Studies

In multiracial America, the census puts us in a box

Washington Post
2010-03-21

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

I received the census form in the mail last week, and I was ready. A vaguely admonitory letter from the Census Bureau had arrived the week before, urging me to fill out the form because the results would be used to “help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.” It ended with a warning: “Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.”

That’s a lot of fairness and sharing and community going on. But as my three daughters and I talked about the form — and in particular its racial and ethnic categories — we started wondering: How does the census really define our community, and how would that affect whatever our fair share would be?

The first time I got to check a census box for a child, it was 1990. I had an 8-month-old daughter with curly, brown-black hair, cinnamon-dark eyes and almond-colored skin. Her father is a mix of African, Irish and Native American; I am white; and since we could check only one box, the only option available for her was “Other,” as if she were from a different planet…

Read the entire article here.

Susan Straight’s new novel, “Take One Candle, Light a Room,” about a mixed-race family, will be published in October.

How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census

The American Thinker
2010-03-17

James Lewis

Not many people like to fill in the “race” category on the Census, because we know perfectly well that it comes from the Left, which has found another way to slice and dice the American people, to set us against each other, and to empower the Left. Which happens to be exactly what the National Socialists did under you-know-who. You had to carry papers identifying your race, and your parents’ and grandparents’ race. Under slavery and segregation the Dixiecrat South did the same thing. But the main point, of course, was to separate the blacks and the whites…

…But Mr. Science has an answer. If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world.  Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.)…

Read the entire article here.