Biracialism in the United States

Significance:Historically, mixed-race Americans have occupied a hidden or virtually invisible place in society, partly because they were not identified under what was then considered a traditional, one-race categorization systems. However, as the population of individuals identifying as more than one race has grown in number, being biracial or mixed race has become less of a societal barrier.

Mixed-race people have been called biracial, brown, interracial, mestizo, multiracial, mixed, and rainbow. Strictly speaking, the term’s use of the prefix bi- indicates two races; however, the concept of race itself is open to debate. Between 1870 and 1920, people of black and white parentage were called “mulatto.” Historically, people of racially mixed parentage have been considered to be of the same race as the nonwhite parent—if one parent is black, then the child is considered to be black. If both parents are nonwhite and one is a Native American, then the child is considered to be a Native American. However, the notion of a one-race classification system is considered archaic and noninclusive, and Americans are now encouraged to acknowledge all of their racial identities.

The number of mixed-race births in the United States increased noticeably during the last quarter of the twentieth century. US Census Bureau figures showed that the number of interracial marriages increased from 310,000 in 1970 to 994,000 in 1991. Between 1968 and 1989, children born to parents of different races increased from 1 percent to 3.4 percent of all births. Furthermore, the 2000 US Census marked the first time that it was legally acceptable to identify as more than one race on a federal form. The number of children under the age of five who were identified as more than one race in the 2000 Census almost doubled in the 2010 Census: just over 8 percent in 2000 to almost 16 percent in 2010. Furthermore, the US population in 2000 was reported to be just over 281 million people, and over 6.8 million individuals (or 2.4 percent of the total population) reported a multiracial identity. According to the 2010 Census, the US population had grown 9.7 percent to almost 309 million people, and the number of individuals who identified as multiracial had increased to 9.0 million people (2.9 percent of the total population).

History

The first recorded interracial marriage in US history was between adventurer John Rolfe and Pocahontas, the North American Indian princess reputed to have saved Captain John Smith from execution. Fur traders, trappers, mountain men, and Indians often married and produced racially mixed children throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As more white settlers entered the Americas, laws defining an individual’s race and other laws against intermarriage began to be passed. In 1785, a Virginia law defined a black person as anyone with a black parent or grandparent. People were considered white if they were one-eighth black. In 1830, Virginia adopted the notorious “one-drop” law—defining as black anyone with one drop of African blood. Whether a person was black was determined by genealogy, physical appearance, claims to identity and heritage, and blood. In essence, the one-drop law excluded everyone with a black ancestry from white society.

Laws prohibiting sexual relations or marriage between a man and a woman of different races—called miscegenation laws—were in force from the 1660s through the 1960s. The laws, created shortly after African slaves were first brought to colonial America, were attempts to restrict mixing of the races and were among the longest lasting of US racial restrictions and the most prominent examples of white supremacy in action. These laws criminalized mixed-race marriages and illegitimized the children. Legislators passed miscegenation laws and judges and juries enforced them because they believed setting racial boundaries and categories was crucial to the maintenance of an orderly society. They were determined to protect “white purity.” These laws were issues in civil cases about marriage and divorce, inheritance, and child legitimacy and in criminal cases about sexual misconduct.

Milestones in Interracial History

A state miscegenation law was first deemed unconstitutional in 1948 in Perez v. Lippold. The laws prohibiting miscegenation began to fall in the western states in the 1950s and 1960s but persisted in the South until after the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision, ruled on by the US Supreme Court in 1967. The Court declared the Virginia miscegenation law unconstitutional because it violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices said the Virginia statute was designed to maintain white supremacy through racial categories and argued that culture—not race—determined meaningful human differences. The Court’s ruling made racial categories synonymous with racism. Despite this ruling, it was another thirty-three years before the final state in the union would overturn its ban on interracial marriage. In November 2000 Alabama passed the Alabama Interracial Marriage Amendment. Forty percent of the voters in the state, however, voted to retain the ban on interracial marriage.

In its 1954 ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the segregation of schools, the Court took another step toward eradicating racism by its deliberate nonrecognition of race. Because of Brown, during the 1960s and 1970s, most US states repealed statutes that defined race through blood proportion. The states then attempted to erase racial terminology from their laws.

As the US Supreme Court was trying to limit or eliminate racial categories, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) began to emphasize racial categories. In 1977, it issued a directive that divided Americans into five major groups—American Indian or Alaska native, Asian or Pacific islander, black, white, and Hispanic. The categories were created because the government was mandated by new laws to monitor voting rights and equal access for minorities in housing, education, and employment. These categories and the statistics they generated helped determine everything from census data to eligibility for inclusion in affirmative action programs to the drawing of voting districts. During the biracial baby boom that began in the late 1960s, people who did not fit neatly into these categories were instructed to choose the category that most closely reflected how they were perceived in their communities.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, interracial groups were formed around the country to challenge the official one-category-only classification of multiracial, multiethnic people, particularly in public schools. Some multiracial parents complained that their children were being forced to favor one parent and his or her racial heritage over the other. They argued that forcing children to select one race was a denial of their right to choose who and what they were. In 1990, the US Census Bureau came under mounting pressure to recognize multiracial as a distinct racial category. People who did not want to identify themselves or their children as monoracial led the lobbying campaign to add a multiracial category to the census form. Organizations such as the Association of MultiEthnic Americans argued that monoracial categories were a form of bigotry against racially mixed Americans. They wanted the federal government to establish a public policy that explicitly acknowledged the existence of multiracial/multiethnic people. The government decided against including a multiracial category on the 2000 census; however, it allowed multiracial or multiethnic people to check as many categories as applied to their self-identification.

Politically, the United States saw a change in attitude and acceptance of multiracial heritage when the country elected its first biracial (and first nonwhite) president, Barack Obama, in 2009. In 2013, New York City politician Bill de Blasio, who was married to a black woman, was elected mayor of New York City.

Bibliography

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