Like any self-respecting American interest group, they already have their own subculture. There are college campus groups: Prism at Harvard and Spectrum at Stanford. There are books: last year Lise Funderburg’s “Black, White, Other”; this year, two compilations of essays charting the future of interracial America. There are magazines: New People and Interrace. And support groups, too: the Biracial Family Network of Chicago and San Francisco’s I-Pride.
Fueling their movement is the bid to put a “multiracial” category on the next census, which is barely five years away. This sounds like a bureaucratic issue, but for some Americans it could not be more personal. At the moment, the census allows people to designate themselves as whites, blacks or “other,” among other things. But identities are seldom so simple. Nancy Brown is white and married to an African-American man. She cofounded Multiracial Americans of Southern California after her two children were born and she discovered that there was no racial designation for them. “It’s very hurtful to be told your child has to identify with one race when there are two participants in the union,” says Brown. “It can be psychologically damaging to kids not to be able to claim who they really are.”
But some multiracial adults doubt that a new category will solve their identity problems. Joanne Hagopian, the daughter of a black father and a white mother, is so fair-skinned that she says she is always assumed to be white. She counsels interracial families in Milwaukee, where she says that white people make racist comments about blacks to her all the time. Though she understands the push for a census change, she says, “The long-term consequences of a multiracial category are going to be negative. If we legislate an identity, then we won’t. have to talk about racism.”
Some blacks are critical of the way the multiracial movement has narrowly defined itself to exclude people whose mixed ancestry goes farther back. Singer Vanessa Williams, for instance, has hazel eyes and fair skin – but she isn’t considered multiracial because both of her parents are African-American. The more contentious issue: would the new category give lighter-skinned people a further leg up the American social ladder? “Skin color in the black community is still very much an issue. And to think that a group of people want to be further distinguished is really bullsh – ,” says Spike Lee, whose movie “School Daze” explored the issue. As the census decision nears – it’s due by 1997 – the debate will heat up. For now, this group is just happy not to be invisible anymore.
Interracial married couples IN THOUSANDS 1970 310 1980 651 1990 964 1993 1,195 1993 Interracial marriage breakdown 77% White/“other race” 20% Black/white 2% Black/“other race”
