Word: mulattos
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Race has long been a muddled matter: 1890 classifications included mulatto, quadroon and octoroon, Chinese and Japanese. In 1930, Mexican was listed. The 2010 survey has caused a stir with the inclusion of Negro in addition to black and African American...
...moment for a little history. The first Census, in 1790, explicitly asked about only one race: white. Blacks, for the most part, fell into the slave category. Race was about civil status. In the 19th century, concerns about keeping the white race pure led to the addition of the "mulatto" category in 1850 (and "quadroon" and "octoroon" in 1890), a process traced by Harvard political scientist Melissa Nobles in her book Shades of Citizenship. With rising immigration, Chinese and Japanese were added as categories - but not Irish or Italian - underscoring that somehow Asians were more fundamentally different...
...Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, its divisions and absurdities live on. Segregation may now be voluntary rather than legal, but South Africans still live in neighborhoods defined by skin color - white, black or "colored" [mulatto or descendants of slaves from the Dutch East Indies]. To address the iniquities of apartheid, the state decided it still needed to classify its citizens by race: The post-apartheid government instituted an affirmative action program called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) to redress the massive imbalance of economic power in favor of whites. BEE legislation relies for the most part on apartheid...
...course, I’m past being the tragic mulatto: It’s 2008, after all. When you pass me in the Yard, know that I’m more concerned with getting to section on time than with getting caught up in a tragic identity struggle, agonizing over the need to choose between black and white. That said, I expected to find a vibrant and active multiracial community and a forum for discussion in college, and the lack thereof has been disheartening...
...interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname...