The Browning Of America

My motivation for studying American politics is professional, whereas my motivation for studying the politics of race classification is both professional and personal. In order to fully express why I am interested in investigating the future of race classification used to create public policy, I must first explain the problem I face when classifying my multi-racial children. I am a first-generation Mexican-American, My husband is African-American, raised in Inglewood, California, and was born of an interracial marriage. We both fit the minority archetype: Inner-city kids, ethnic minorities, first in the family to go to college, with social and economic disadvantages. Our children are a combination of African-American, Cherokee, Mexican and European ancestries. Thus, they employ a variety of multi-layered definitions that so many minorities in the U.S. use to define who they are. In spite of this multi-ethnic/ multi-race reality of the 21st century, the 2010 U.S. census provided limited options for race identification—Black, White, or American Indian with a myriad of origin-derived options in the Hispanic and Asian categories. The U.S. census form tends to lag behind the realty that the U.S. population is increasingly multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural.