Columns: Racial lines no longer just black and white

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Latino Studies, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-02-23 02:09Z by Steven

Columns: Racial lines no longer just black and white

The Minnesota Daily
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul
2011-02-21

Lolla Mohammed Nur

Clear-cut racial categories restrict how multiracial Americans identify themselves.

Based on her appearance, you wouldn’t easily be able to guess University of Minnesota sophomore Mary Taylor‘s racial or ethnic heritage. But if you ask the communications studies major what her ethnicity is, she’d tell you she is three-quarters white, 12.5 percent black and 12.5 percent Native American—a heritage she makes sure to represent when filling out surveys.

The current generation of college students encompasses the largest group of mixed-race people to come of age in the U.S., according to a recent New York Times series on multiracial identity.

Although young Americans increasingly identify themselves as multiracial, they often feel that their fluid identities are restricted when asked to self-identify on paper.

Under new requirements set by the U.S. Department of Education, which will take effect this year, multiracial non-Hispanic students who choose multiple races on surveys will be placed in a “two or more races” category. The justification for this is to offer students of mixed heritage more options to self-identify, and some say it demonstrates the U.S.’s greater appreciation of the fluidity of racial identity.

However, many sociologists fear it will lump all multiracial groups into one category, ignoring the different life experiences and the varying levels of discrimination that members of various multiracial subgroups face.

“It’s like the ‘other’ category or the ‘multiracial’ category because everyone get’s glommed together and you can’t even interpret it,” said sociology faculty member Carolyn Liebler. “It’s a battle whenever you’re trying to compile information about people’s race. On the one hand, institutions want to know who you are, they want you to self-identify … but on the other hand, the entities that want to create statistics would really prefer if you could give a simple answer.”…

Read the entire article here.

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