Interracial Marriages Breed Changes More Americans Are From Mixed-Race Families

Ezra Garrett has no problem dealing with the fact that he is part Native American, part Irish, part Filipino and part Hawaiian. What Garrett does have a problem with are forms.

“I look first to see if it says to check one box only,” said the 22-year-old senior at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is the boxes on all these forms that are the problem.”

Like millions of other Americans of mixed race, Garrett confronts a sort of identity crisis when forced to fill out forms that require information about racial and ethnic background. For years, Garrett and others have been forced to check “other” when faced with the choices offered on forms ranging from school admissions applications to the U.S. Census.

After the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down state laws against interracial marriages and the surge of immigrants from nonEuropean countries, the number of interracial marriages has doubled each decade. As a consequence, the number of mixed-race children born in America has risen more than fourfold since the court ruling.

Driven by the situation of people like Garrett, who is part of what sociologists refer to as the “biracial baby boom,” there is increased awareness of the frequently painful choices faced by mixed-race Americans in a society that seems increasingly focused on and polarized by racial identity.

While the issues involved go far deeper than filling out forms, part of the effort to resolve the crisis faced by people of mixed race has resulted in a well-organized effort to change the way in which questions of race are dealt with in the U.S. Census for the year 2000.

“The face of this country is changing whether people like it or not,” said Ramona Douglass, president of the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans and a member of the 2000 Census Committee, a group formed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the census.

With a shift away from immigration policies that heavily favored Europeans, the number of mixed-race Americans has grown quickly. Demographic experts estimate that nearly 200,000 such babies were born last year. With such changes in the makeup of America’s population accelerating, organizations like Douglass’ are determined to find ways to eliminate the need for such people to choose one part of their heritage over another.

The goal, fiercely opposed by some government agencies and by such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is to create a multiracial category on the 2000 census form and subcategories that would allow individuals to precisely record their backgrounds.

Douglass, herself part Italian and part African American, said the issue is vastly complex and frequently oversimplified.

“There seems to be a preconception that this is a black-white issue,” she said. “It is not.”

The complexities of the problem can be seen quite clearly in the face of Ezra Garrett. At times, Garrett’s features seem strikingly Asian. At times, his Native American heritage seems to prevail. Sometimes he appears Hispanic, a reflection of the complexities of Philippine history.

But for Garrett and others of mixed race, the issues go far beyond superficialities.

“I didn’t feel as if I could commit myself to one group or another,” he said of his experiences at Berkeley, a campus, where racial and ethnic identity plays a huge, and some say balkanizing, role.

While he has had some contact with Filipino and Native American groups during his five years at Berkeley, he has devoted most of his time and energy to his fraternity. He was even elected president of the fraternity, which he said had members from an assortment of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

“It seemed more natural,” said Garrett, adding that race had never been an issue in his life until he came to Berkeley.

“The student groups of color pull a lot harder. They are much more concerned with strength in numbers. A lot of my friends think it is a survival strategy.”

One of the groups most stridently opposed to the change in the census categories is blacks.

“This would disaggregate African Americans,” said Ed Hailes, general counsel for the Washington bureau of the NAACP. “This would be the group that would lose the greatest numbers if there was a multiracial category.”

He said he believed that adding a new multirace category was a meaningless gesture in a country like the United States.

“There are very few Americans who don’t share a multiracial or a multiethnic background anyway,” he said.

Hailes said such a move could have serious consequences for African Americans in such areas as government funding for social programs and in the redrawing of electoral districts based on demographic information.

He also said that it would create unnecessary confusion for people of mixed race.

“People who have identified themselves as African Americans would have to choose,” he said.