The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity

5. Identifying with Multiple Races: A Social Movement That Succeeded but Failed?

5 IDENTIFYING WITH MULTIPLE RACES: A SOCIAL MOVEMENT THAT SUCCEEDED BUT FAILED?  Reynolds Farley THE CIVIL RIGHTS revolution of the 1960s fundamentally changed how racial information is used. Prior to that decade, race was used to assign students to schools, to determine where people could live, to determine which job, if any, candidates were offered, and even whom people could marry. The litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and their allies shifted federal courts away from their endorsement of state-imposed racial discrimination. Later, grassroots desegregation efforts led by such unlikely people as Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, and Ezell Blair, Franklin McClain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond in Greensboro, North Carolina, evolved into the most potent social movement of the last century. The word “tolerance” was still frequently mentioned with regard to race relations in the 1960s, rather than “racial ratios,” “quotas,” or “affirmative action.” Racial data were gathered and scrutinized to promote discrimination. Employers seeking white-collar workers typically asked job-seekers to include their picture with their applications, as did many colleges. This allowed both employment and admissions offices to readily limit or segregate Negroes. Using racial data from the census, lenders redlined neighborhoods, thereby perpetuating residential segregation. In its early stages, the civil rights movement sought to terminate the collection of racial information in hopes of thereby ending discrimination. Employers and colleges dropped their demand for photographs. New Jersey stopped collecting racial data on birth and death certificates. Later in the decade the pendulum swung far in the other direction. The federal government mandated that employers and schools at every level gather racial information to demonstrate the absence of discrimination. When we fill out job applications, seek admission to schools, go to hospitals, or borrow money from fiscal institutions, we report our race because of these encompassing federal regulations. And when we die, the mortician will register our race one final time. The social movement to allow us to identify with multiple races is the foreseeable outcome of three developments flowing from the civil rights decade. First, federal courts required racial data for the enforcement of constitutional mandates. Second, the controversy about which races would benefit from federal protection led to congressional actions and eventually a federal decree about how the population was to be classified by race. Third, after interracial marriages had produced a mixed-race population, dissatisfaction arose with the federal government ’s traditional rule that everyone fit into one and only one racial category. A multiracial movement developed in the 1990s and succeeded in getting the federal statistical system to permit a person to identify with several races. FEDERALLY REQUIRED RACIAL DATA: THE 1960S The congressional discussion that led to civil rights legislation in the 1960s focused on ending discrimination against blacks (Whalen and Whalen 1985). To do so, federal laws, agencies, and courts quickly insisted that job applicants, students, and those seeking mortgages be tabulated by race, since the most convincing evidence of nondiscrimination was an appropriate representation of minorities. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made the Fifteenth Amendment effective in all states by calling for federal oversight of elections in geographic areas where African Americans had not been allowed to vote. But rather than specifically mentioning race, the law required federal supervision in jurisdictions where less than 50 percent of the voting-age population was registered in November 1964 or where less than 50 percent of those registered actually cast ballots in the Johnson-Goldwater presidential election. Federal courts simultaneously wrestled with the unwillingness of southern schools to accept the integration mandates of Brown v. Board of Education (1955). When faced with a court order to desegregate, numerous southern districts adopted “freedom of choice” plans that, in theory, allowed white students and black students to transfer from schools of their own race to schools where the student population was of a different race. As expected, few whites sought to do so (Klueger 1976, ch. 27). Tired of southern strategies that kept schools thoroughly segregated despite court orders, the Supreme Court, in Green v. New Kent County (1968), declared that the only acceptable integration plan was one that actually placed white and black children in the same schools. Quickly, federal judges issued orders requiring the assignment of black and white students and black and white teachers to the same schools. In a key and unanimous ruling , Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg County (1971), the Supreme Court called for the use of...