The end of the Civil War did not engineer an immediate end to white supremacy and racial segregation, both of which accompanied the culture and legacy of slavery. After federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, wealthy whites started to regain political power by disenfranchising blacks and poor whites through Jim Crow laws. The pernicious nature of these laws is exemplified in so-called intelligence and comprehension tests given to African American voters. The test questions were often incomprehensible or unanswerable. Bea Clark of Sardis, Mississippi, recalled being asked "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" If she failed to answer correctly, then she was forbidden to cast a ballot. Whites were excused from these types of questions because of "grandfather clauses," which exempted anyone whose ancestors had the right to vote before the Civil War.
In 1896, Homer Plessy challenged a Jim Crow law in Louisiana that separated railroad passengers by race. He was one-eighth black and considered "colored," i.e., neither black nor white because of his mixed background. Plessy's case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the "separate but equal" treatment of coloreds and whites was legal in public places. This ruling reaffirmed racial segregation in schools, hospitals, trains, and many other public places.
Plessy v. Ferguson paved the way for even more restrictive and discriminatory segregation. Southern politicians sought to preserve the "purity" of the white race long after slave owners established the practice of fathering children with their enslaved women (Small, 1994). The push to ensure white racial purity resulted in the creation and enforcement of hypodescent laws or the "one drop rule," in which anyone with "one drop" of "Negro blood" was considered black. Whereas a "colored" (racially mixed) man like Homer Plessy was able to use the same facilities as whites before 1890 that was no longer the case 30 years later. With few exceptions, anyone who was not "pure" white was "colored" in the eyes of the law. As a result, the status of racially mixed people was largely relegated to that of the racial minority identified in their ancestry. At the same time, numerous people were successful at "passing" as white because of their light complexion (Golub, 2005). This demonstrates that even during times of strict racial segregation, there are areas of gray where dominant ideologies about race are negotiated, reinterpreted, and indirectly subverted.
The collection of census data (and lack thereof) on multiracial people continued in much the same way for the next 80 years, but the events that eventually led to major changes in the 2000 U.S. Census originated from government responses to the civil rights movement (Fernandez, 1996). The social unrest, protests, and riots that occurred from the 1950s to the 1970s to draw attention to the inequality experienced by racial minorities spurred landmark legislation, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It became apparent to government leaders that the U.S. Census could be used as a tool to help measure racial equality and collect accurate figures for civil rights enforcement (Perlmann, 2002). A few months after implementing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson enacted Executive Order 11185 to better organize the delivery of public education, especially with regard to underserved ethnic and racial minorities. This led to the formation of the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE), which brought together 30 different federal agencies.
In 1973 FICE produced a report on access to higher education among
Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Native American students. Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar Weinberger latched on to the
part of the report that explained the absence of useful data on
ethnic and racial groups because of a lack of common definitions.
A year later an ad hoc committee was formed to solve this
problem, which developed guidelines to make "compatible" and "nonduplicative"
categories of race used by all federal agencies. One of the stipulations
was that racial categories could not be combined or overlapped.
In effect, this reinforced the system of mutually exclusive racial
categories, and it led to the creation of the Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) Directive No. 15: Standards for the Classification
of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity. The standard issued in 1977
defined five main racial categories.2
- American Indian or Alaskan Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America, and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliations or community recognition.
- Asian or Pacific Islander. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands. This area includes, for example, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine Islands, and Samoa.
- Black. A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.
- Hispanic. A person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.
- White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.
By 1994 the OMB's standards of race and ethnicity were considered simplistic, and pressure built to revise them. Public hearings were conducted in which multiracial people demanded changes, such as, "adding a multi-racial category to the list of racial designations so that respondents would not be forced to deny part of their heritage by having to choose a single category"; "adding an other category for individuals of multi-racial backgrounds and those who want the option of specifically stating a unique identification"; and "providing an open-ended question to solicit information on race and ethnicity, or combining concepts of race, ethnicity, and ancestry" (Office of Management and Budget).
Nearly 30 years after the Loving v. Virginia decision legalized
interracial marriage in the U.S., the movement to grant multiracial
people the freedom to create and define their own identities on
government forms was well underway (Weisman, 1996). The impetus
largely came from two sources. (1) Organizations like the Association
of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA), A Place for Us (APFU), and Project
RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) pushed for change on the
national level (Farley,
2005; Spencer, 1999).
White women married to middle-class black men spearheaded petitions
at the state and local level because they felt their children
were being forced to choose one parent over the other on government
forms (Williams, 2006).
Conservative political leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly supported the shift to multiracial classification, largely because they saw it as contributing to the curtailment of race-based affirmative action programs (Williams, 2006). Republican Congressman Thomas Petri of Wisconsin introduced H.R. 830 in the 104th Congress (June 1996), which tried to force the OMB to add a multiracial category to the 2000 U.S. Census. Petri dubbed this the "Tiger Woods Bill." Despite numerous efforts, Tiger Woods refused to join or endorse the multiracial cause (Williams, 2005).
Opposition to multiracial identification appeared from the old guard of the civil rights movement, including many Democrats in Congress. They argued that allowing multiple racial identities on government forms would reduce the visibility of racial minorities in statistical data, especially African Americans who are already undercounted by government agencies.3 The cumulative effect would be a reduction of money and services to minority communities (Williams, 2006). It has also been observed that discussion involving multiracial identification and racial classification is inseparable from administering the modern welfare state, especially with regard to civil rights enforcement and affirmative action programs (Skerry, 2002).
In the end, the OMB capitulated to the demands of those advocating for the inclusion of multiracial identities on government forms. By 1997 it was decided that selecting more than one racial category would be permitted beginning with the 2000 U.S. Census.
Go To Multiracial Identity and the 2000, 2010, and 2100 U.S. Census