ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120074
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BERKELEY, CALIF.
SOURCE: JANE GROSS LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Cynthia Nakashima came here in 1988 as a graduate student in ethnic studies, eager to explore her experience as the daughter of a Japanese-American father and a white mother, there was just one class on the subject of mixed-race descent, the first of its kind in the country.
Pulling together a course reading list was a chore. The research in the University of California, Berkeley library was piddling and there were no student organizations for the growing number of multiracial young people who wanted to band together and discuss their special concerns.
But with impressive swiftness, the campus has become the epicenter of America's burgeoning biracial baby boom. It is command central for a national movement dedicated to changing the way America measures its racial and ethnic complexity and also the way we think about who we are as a people.
At the heart of this emerging consciousness is the demand that a new ``multiracial'' category be added to the U.S. Census in the year 2000 and to all the other forms that classify America's swiftly changing population, which is thought to include 1 million to 2 million people of mixed-race descent.
The federal government, which promises to make a decision on the issue next year, has used the same four racial categories for nearly two decades: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black and White. It also has asked respondents if they are of Hispanic or non-Hispanic origin.
Federal officials now concede the system no longer reflects America's diversity.
``The numbers may be precise but they're precisely wrong,'' said Rep. Thomas C. Sawyer, D-Ohio, who chaired hearings on the subject two years ago.
Nakashima, a doctoral candidate who teaches ``Ethnic Studies 150: People of Mixed Race Descent,'' encourages her students to reject America's black-white, either-or view of race.
``There isn't anything natural in binary thinking,'' she told them last month, in her semester-ending lecture. ``American culture forces these binaries by offering them. We need to redefine confusion not as a state you're trying to get out of, but as a natural state when you're dealing with crazy things. ... When somebody asks me if I'm Japanese or white, I answer, `Yes.'''
Formally recognizing mixed-race people would open the door to a more flexible mindset about race. States like California, where Latino and Asian immigration has already blurred racial and ethnic lines, are particularly ripe for reinterpretation.
Yet the challenge also carries contradictions.
Classifying individuals as ``multiracial'' would trouble many blacks, who believe such a category would drain their ranks and thus their political influence.
And some social observers fear the new multiracial activists, while preaching inclusion, may be inadvertently creating another set of exclusionary racial membership rules that could further Balkanize the state and the nation.
``They stand a chance of blowing the traditional racial categories to smithereens,'' said Todd Gitlin, a professor at New York University and the author of ``The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Cultural Wars.'' ``But they could become a tribe themselves and become captivated by exactly what they oppose.''
Ideally, people of mixed racial descent can be the bridge-builders, the cultural brokers, said former Berkeley professor Terry Wilson, who is part Potawatami Indian and part white and the originator of the first university course on multiracial Americans.
``Those of us of mixed racial descent embody the cutting edge of race relations,'' said Wilson, who taught his course at Berkeley from 1977 to 1993, then turned it over to Nakashima, his protege. ``We're living reminders that the lines are there but the lines get crossed all the time.''
By crossing the lines, mixed-race people have no choice but to grapple with this knottiest of issues from early childhood. And a special perspective develops from challenging stereotypes: the realization that the conventional categories are both contradictory and overlapping, that mom is mom and dad is dad and that race is not the most significant thing about the parents' differences.
Gitlin is quick to call the new multiracial consciousness a ``movement'' and notes that it is ``striking how quickly it has materialized.''
The movement began with the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that legalized interracial marriage. It was fueled by the influx of Latino and Asian immigrants who don't fit easily into a binary formulation of race. And it vaulted to public consciousness with the recent bid to put a multiracial category on the 2000 census.
The 1967 Supreme Court ruling spawned a sharp increase in inter-racial marriage and childbirth. Inter-marriage rates have doubled each decade since 1970, from 310,000 mixed marriages that year to 1.2 million in 1992. The number of inter-racial children has grown accordingly: from 31,200 born in 1968 to four times that number, 128,000, in 1991.
Wilson's Berkeley class, which gave academic voice to these stirrings, began as a seminar for two dozen ethnic studies students and mushroomed into a lecture for 200, with a waiting list twice that size. Today, mixed-race Berkeley students students devour and contribute to a new body of academic research, read new magazines like ``Interrace'' and visit Internet sites dedicated to their concerns.
As academic interest flourished, so did grass-roots organizations, dedicated originally to the needs of parents raising mixed-race children. The first of them, I-Pride in Berkeley, was formed in 1979, and was followed in the next 15 years by similar groups in Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles.
These local organizations ultimately coalesced into two national lobbying groups: the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans, which last month won a seat on the committee studying the census categories for the year 2000, and Project RACE, which has successfully pushed seven states (Ohio, Illinois, Georgia, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida) to include a multiracial category on all school forms.
The two groups have jointly submitted a proposal for a multiracial category to the Office of Management and Budget, the federal agency responsible for the classification system for race and ethnicity. Those categories have shifted at intervals since the Colonial Period, but since 1977 have been dictated by the OMB's Statistical Directive 15.
The categories enshrined in Directive 15 are used on forms for not only the census, but for schools, jobs, scholarships, loans and mortgages. The data derived is not neutral in nature, but rather political, driving how the nation defines itself racially and how it assigns electoral power and money.
Inadequate as the current categories may be, they cannot be scrapped willy-nilly. Sawyer acknowledges there is a ``very substantial tension'' between the emerging claim of mixed-race people to define their own identity and the government's need to gather racial and ethnic information in a precise and consistent way, in large part because it feeds the machinery of civil rights.
Thus OMB has been deliberate in its efforts to determine what changes, if any, will be made in the year 2000. This effort has included public hearings in four cities, comment from all affected federal agencies, workshops organized by the National Academy of Sciences, literature reviews and test surveys using different methods of classifying.
The two national lobbying groups, AMEA and Project RACE, have urged OMB to include a box on the new forms for people of multiracial descent and then ask them, under that umbrella category, to indicate their various races and ethnicities. This dual approach is designed to mollify minority communities, especially some blacks.
According to various estimates, 75 percent of the people who check ``black'' on the census form are actually mixed.
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: graphicby CNB