Government forms limit mixed race people

Government forms limit mixed race people

Daily Trojan
University of Southern California
2013-09-26

Ida Abhari

According to The New York Times, the current generation of college students is the largest group of mixed race people in America so far. The number of individuals who identified as mixed race is at 9 million. Increasingly more Americans find themselves in a gray area when it comes to defining their races. You might have heard of “Hapas” — people of partially Asian/Pacific Islander ancestry — or “Blasians,” people of mixed black and Asian ancestry. Though these types of self-identification are becoming more common in everyday language, a conflict arises when the standard “Check the box” race forms can’t properly identify a growing population of Americans. Most people do not cleanly fit into the four standard racial categories of black, white, American Indian or Pacific Islander.

The  problem with racial identification lies in faulty methods of collecting data about such groups. Questions of race in the United States have always been a particularly sensitive topic. With its peculiar mix of European colonists, American Indians and Spanish and French explorers, the U.S. has always struggled with race relations. In an effort to better resolve and address race questions in the modern era, the federal Office of Management and Budget has issued Directive No. 15. According to the official White House website, this directive “requires compilation of data for four racial categories (White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander), and an ethnic category to indicate Hispanic origin, or not of Hispanic origin.” And  here is the problem: A person is now forced to identify him or herself as one of only four races even though changing demographics show that there are more possibilities…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

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