The Nation: Not Black By Default : NPR: Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, 'Black by Choice,' about President Obama's having checked the box marked 'Black, African American or Negro' on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts 'standard definitions of blackness' and creates 'a definitional crisis for whiteness,' in American culture 'having a white parent has never meant becoming white' if one also has an African-descended parent.
When I read her piece, I was in a Columbia University faculty lounge, half listening to interesting people grumble interestingly about being asked to fill out another kind of census: the voluntary questionnaire, including self-identification of race and ethnicity, requested by the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System. This accounting, which gathers a broad spectrum of information about colleges and universities, is compiled by the Department of Education.
