The Others
How Claude arm-wrestling Carolyn in 1957 affects how Americans think about race
If Claude had been born before August 2, 1790 and happened to reside in the original 13 states or the districts of Kentucky, Maine or Vermont, a young marshal would have paid his family a visit. He would have been classified: as a free white male, as a slave, or as ‘all other free persons.’ He would have been among the new Republic’s 3.9 million inhabitants, a figure that left President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson deeply skeptical. They had expected a grander final count from the first census ever conducted in America.
But Claude wasn’t born that year. He was born 142 years later in the Bronx in New York City, and by the time he agreed to arm-wrestle Carolyn in the last few hours of 1957, the Bureau of the Census had been counting people and classifying them racially for over 50 years. Until 1902, there was no permanent census-taking organization. The bureau was assembled before each decennial census and disbanded after the work was finished. A regular population count was needed to reapportion congressional seats and electoral college votes, allowing America’s representative democracy to work according to its constitutional design.
Claude and Carolyn, both in their twenties, presumably had been counted as part of the American population twice before they first met. But their joint story began at a party in Brooklyn to ring in the New Year. Carolyn had taken the subway instead of nervously maneuvering a blue and white Chevy all the way from Upper Manhattan. Claude was impressed with her firm handshake and, under the influence of a couple of drinks, agreed to her arm-wrestling challenge. Their hands locked awkwardly and soon she found herself on the floor. Claude felt guilty, as he had no intention of hurting her. But they laughed it off, and he decided to ask for her number.
It was Claude’s good fortune that he met Carolyn in New York City. Elsewhere, a ‘Negro’ arm-wrestling a ‘White’ woman would not have been seen as flirtation, and he might have paid with his life. They dated for nine months, frequenting the Thalia, a small theatre on the Upper West Side that screened classics and foreign films, and stopping off at the deli next door to pick up potato knishes. Carolyn pored over restaurant reviews to find potential date venues. The Chinese restaurant near her house that received four stars in the New York Times became a favorite. The flow of migrants from China had begun to rise in the mid-19th century, the first wave of non-European immigrants since the end of the slave trade. The 1870 Census was the first one to include a national-origin category, ‘Chinese,’ alongside color and race in the census form. It would be two decades more before high demand for labor would increase migration from Japan.
When Claude proposed soon after they started dating, Carolyn’s roommate, a tall blonde girl with glasses, was miffed by her friend’s choice in life partner and hurriedly moved out. Her neighbors were supportive. The old woman downstairs presented her with a beautiful necklace, and the gay couple on the first floor wished the couple well. The wedding was set for September 6, 1958. The Church of the Resurrection on West 151st Street in Harlem divided along color lines.
On one side sat ‘Negroes’ — it would be twelve years before the term ‘Black’ officially re-entered the race lexicon. Proponents would say it was because of a renewal in ethnic pride in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. The re-emergence of ‘Black’ occurred gradually over a number of years, from measuring a “black blood quantum” of ‘mulattos’, ‘quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’, none of which applied to Claude’s relatives. They were a different kind of ‘Black’: immigrants from the West Indies. On the other side of the aisle sat three ‘White’ social workers, Carolyn’s colleagues. She had only informed her Polish-American parents the night before that she was marrying a man of color. Claude’s best friend, Harold Schwartz, a Polish-American Jew, was there as best man, sweating profusely in a panic over being in a Catholic church.
That same year, the Gallup poll asked Americans what they thought of marriage between “white and colored people.” Ninety-four percent of those surveyed disapproved. It would take another decade for the United States Supreme Court to strike down laws prevalent in the American South that forbade interracial marriage. But it would be sooner that a mixed-race child would soften his Polish-American grandmother’s heart and prompt her to call for a ‘come-to-Jesus-meeting’ where she would “bang her fist” on the table and declare that Claude was now family.
America’s obsession with categorizing people spans 226 years. Today, every person who comes to this country from anywhere in this world is asked to tick a box, sometimes a uniquely American one like ‘Hispanic,’ a concept found nowhere else. In fact, ‘White’ is the only consistent term in use since the very first census. Every other group description has changed or been added over time. The official list of American identities has expanded, and sometimes contracted, through a mix of bureaucratic decision-making and big social phenomena like the emancipation of slaves, the extension of civil rights, and waves of immigration. Every 10 years, the census form and its menu of categories holds a mirror up to America and captures how, at least officially, the country thinks about race.
It’s an awkward exercise and one that many countries, in Europe for instance, avoid by simply omitting racial or ethnic categories from their census. The racial history of the United States means this is not an option. Race has always been a factor in the allocation of rights and resources — from slavery, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination against whole groups of native-born or immigrant people, to the array of jurisprudence and policies to redress their direct and indirect effects. Today, the Black Lives Matter movement and a sharpened focus on disparate policing have put racial and ethnic identity, once again, at the center of conversation. The backlash against immigrants and Muslim-Americans, witnessed in current politics and the 2016 presidential campaign, has added fuel. But, in reality, the topic of racial identity never went away, and has always carried material, life-shaping implications.
Yet for a growing proportion of Americans, racial identity has become difficult to pin down, beyond the reach of the census and its tidy little boxes. In 2010, ‘Other’ became the third-largest category after ‘White’ and ‘Hispanic,’ after growing slowly for more than forty years. If nothing changes ahead of the 2020 census this non-categorical category of people could become the second-largest ‘racial’ group.
Plainly, the rise of ‘Other’ means that more and more people do not relate to the current categories, rendering these less effective for guiding research or policy. This presents the Census Bureau with a problem. Is it time for a new set of racial categories? Does the question even make sense anymore, in a country of increasing mixed marriages and children born with two, three, four, or more possible ethnic identities?
Claudewell Sidney Thomas was born hungry and was fed mostly thanks to his mother’s ingenuity of collecting the discarded tops of beets and carrots to make soup to feed her two children. Claude was born on October 5, 1932, four years into the Great Depression, in a Bronx neighborhood where nearly everyone came to rely on public welfare. His first word was “toast” and he learnt to walk under the watchful eyes of his Caribbean grandmother Florence.
It was Florence who first migrated to America’s east coast in 1910, traveling steerage from the island of St. Kitts following a long stream of immigrants from the British West Indies. She had been a school teacher and left partly because of the disgrace of bearing a child out of wedlock with a ‘mulatto’ schoolmaster of Welsh ancestry. Claude’s great-uncle John followed two years later, and Claude’s parents shortly after. His mother wore just a light sweater for the journey, ill-prepared for New York in November.
Claude was a happy child. His mother Frances and sister Pearl kept him convinced that Santa Claus existed; one Christmas he received a bunch of coins that did not add up to a great deal, but the weight of it made him feel important. He got his first tricycle from a white janitor who worked at a local school and often gave things to people he knew in the black community. But Claude would only learn to ride a bicycle years later, when he and Carolyn went to live in Japan.
Claude loved Action comic books. He was rarely allowed to read them, but traced the figures of the Little Orphan Annie series in the Daily News on wax paper. The turbaned character Punjab was his first, fictional, South Asian acquaintance. Sometimes he would watch Pearl and her friends play out their fantasy of being beautiful young white girls. He noticed Pearl’s discomfort when their mother brought home a colored doll. Claude grew to believe that success came easily to those who were white.
The soft-spoken boy grew up in the southeast Bronx around island people who had migrated from the British colonies of St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Barts, Jamaica and Trinidad, all loosely of ‘West Indian’ ethnicity and fiercely united when it suited them. Immigrants had trickled into the United States from the West Indies since 1820, but the early numbers are hard to tally, because there were no classifications by country for 40 years. In the Bronx, the women of the community labored under an enormous workload, cooking and cleaning for their families, which often included parents, cousins and visiting relatives. Claude was always a passive participant when the women got talking outside the storefront Methodist Church, or when his mother would drag him from house to house, where people discussed the lynching in the South. The world came to the Bronx via radio, and Claude learnt quickly how to fix a broken machine.
To friends, Frances was religious in a sort of proverbial way, often quoting from the Bible but seldom dogmatic in her views. The same was not true of Claude’s father, Humphrey, who was an intermittent part of his son’s early life. Reverend MJ Divine, an African-American spiritual leader, had moved to Harlem in the early 1930s and accumulated followers in the black community. Father Divine claimed to be God, and Humphrey relocated to live in his ‘Kingdom’, where members purchased several hotels which they called ‘Heavens.’ The only interaction Claude had with his father in those years was when Humphrey would stop by the house for a meal. He would ask his children to pinch their noses and hold them up, so they would avoid inheriting Frances’ broad nose and instead gain his own, less blatantly black, features.
Humphrey eventually returned from the ‘Kingdom’ and tried to find a steady job. He had worked odd jobs before but rarely found work in his trade as a carpenter due to the infamous ‘shape up’ that served as the principal method of hiring labor. The men ‘shaped’ in a circle around the hiring foreman, who unabashedly hired along racial and ethnic lines. The union protected Humphrey to an extent, but he wasn’t a popular person. He spoke like a preacher, carried a Bible, and regularly delivered lengthy and portentous speeches in which he talked about Marcus Garvey and the Back to Africa movement that deeply annoyed his family.
Sometimes Claude would accompany his father to Randall’s Island or Van Cortlandt Park to watch what was to him a strange game: cricket. Humphrey was a fan of an Indian batsman, Ranjitsinghji, who played for the English cricket team. Claude would learn to correctly pronounce the man’s name decades later, during a visit to India with Carolyn. It was, in fact, a nail-biting cricket match between St. Kitts and the neighboring island of Nevis that had ensured Claude’s own existence. The story goes that Humphrey was the last batsman that day, armed with the responsibility of securing the team’s victory. He shuffled onto the pitch looking unsure, while his countrymen wrote off the match. But, miraculously, he sent the ball flying towards the boundary. St. Kitts won and a delighted Frances saw her future husband being carried off on his teammates’ shoulders.
Claude had no patience for love stories or cricket. Like most Bronx residents, he too was captivated by boxing. It was the era of the ‘Brown Bomber,’ Joe Louis, who had begun to dominate fights. In 1937 Louis claimed the world heavyweight title from ‘Cinderella Man’ James Braddock, sending the entire black community into giddy excitement at the victory of a black man over an Irishman. Years later, while attending New York’s Columbia College, Claude still toyed with giving up his education to become a boxer. “Education is what you are going to build the foundation of your life on. Not getting into a ring and getting your head knocked off,” his white coach admonished him.
The 1940s brought a lot of people who looked like Claude into the Bronx and introduced him to the complexity of race. Black Southerners were migrating North to escape discrimination and find jobs in industrial towns. Antagonism grew between the native blacks, the West Indian community, and the newest arrivals from countries such as Nigeria and Ghana. The African immigrants had received education under the British system and tended to consider themselves superior. All this tension sometimes turned to violence in the streets. Yet officially, there were no racial differences. White society called all these people ‘Negroes.’
It had been three decades since the government had begun to record the nascent ‘Korean’, ‘Filipino’ and ‘Asian Indian’ populations that were making their way into the United States. In the 1920 census form a religious term, ‘Hindu’, was included as a category under the race question — the only time religion entered the census form. By the time Claude turned eight in 1940, ‘Mexican’ had come and gone from the US census form. Mexican-Americans, along with the Mexican government, had lobbied successfully against the use of ‘Mexican’ as a separate racial category. But Mexico would reappear several decades later as a national origin option under the uniquely American ‘Hispanic’ ethnicity marker.
In Claude’s 1940s Bronx, the world outside the West Indian community was all white — Irish, Jews and Italians. New York City’s police force was predominantly Irish Catholic, but beginning to include Italians. Frances had told Claude early on that the police did not treat black people well and that he should steer clear of them. His first encounter with a policeman was strange. Claude’s foot had slipped and his ankle got caught in a sidewalk grid. A young Irish beat cop walked up to him and used a billy club to pry the grill open wide enough for him to release his foot. The boy was smilingly admonished and left puzzled by the encounter.
It was the Jewish community that grew most concerned with the demographic changes in the Bronx. They effectively lobbied the city council to redraw school district lines, and Claude was gerrymandered out of Public School 54. The school’s boundary stopped where the red-lining, the real estate practice that directed colored people to undesirable areas, began. Now Claude attended PS 99, a school with no textbooks, where boys dipped girls’ braids in ink and scribbled bad words on each other’s shirts. He learned to read at home. Frances would often spell at him: C-L-A-U-D-E-W-E-L-L-G-O G-E-T T-H-E P-E-P-P-E-R.
The Stanford-Binet intelligence scales had been revised by the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, and a social worker urged Frances to make sure Claude took the IQ test. He scored 168. Within a week he went from PS 99 to PS 63, to the experimental “Terman class” where children learned from one another by doing. Claude would show up in his British-style knickers which was the prescribed uniform and join his classmates to discuss poetry, make model airplanes and study French.
There were only a handful of black students in his class. Many of the black students dropped out, finding it difficult to cope. Claude would only notice his skin color if someone made him notice it but mostly his classmates left him alone. George Dunns who had Jamaican ancestry stuck it out like Claude and, since he was a few years older, was put in charge of walking him home by Frances.
Claude learned a valuable lesson during these late afternoon walks. A fight had erupted in the schoolyard when a black boy from the South beat up a smaller black kid. George had intervened but backed off very quickly when his own life was threatened. The intervention put an end to the fight, though, and Claude realized that sharing skin color meant nothing. It wasn’t enough for trust. Years later, during his commute on the subway to medical school with a stack of books on his lap, a black woman confronted Claude. “Those books aren’t going to do you any good,” she charged. His mother called such people “old crabs in a barrel”, waiting to pull the others down. “They are better ignored,” she warned.
Claude was nearly 11 when he stood in an alphabetically ordered line behind Harold Schwartz at Junior High School 113. Harold was a couple of years older, white, a Polish-American Jew, and also lived in the Bronx. The borough was changing at a rapid rate. Claude’s family had been evicted for defaulting on the rent and had taken a long walk through the Bronx to 215th Street to find a new place to live. Their furniture lay piled up outside their old apartment and people came out to watch them walk by. Some jeered at the group of black people.
The change in neighborhood meant a change of school. At J.H.S. 113, Claude with his high IQ was enrolled in the ‘one’ class, along with Harold. The school drew from a large area spanning three subway stops. The ‘one’ class was for smart kids across age groups, the ‘two’ was made up entirely of Italians, and so it went all the way up to the ‘six’ class, where the gym teacher was in charge of the ‘rowdy’ students. There were 40 students in Claude’s class: 37 Jews, two Italians and him. Harold forgot his coat for the class photo that year, and also forgot to get a haircut. He stood in a borrowed coat with unkempt hair. Claude stood in the second row and stared into the camera.
The boys used to play handball together, and the Jewish neighborhood where Harold lived had the bigger playgrounds. The Jews were more politically active; the voting patterns dictated the quality of the streets and the size of the parks. The wide Boston Post Road was the dividing line between Jews and Italians, and errant crossovers asked for a beating. The Italians were strong on property lines, and fences had come up. Yet, officially, they were all ‘White’ regardless of which part of Europe they’d migrated from. The only time the two communities interacted was in the presence of a police escort — and when a whole group of Italians came into the Jewish neighborhood for a handball tournament. The boys ran around throwing a ball, and the men in uniform, the Irish cops, served as referees calling out fouls.
Claude and Harold were inseparable for the years they studied together, and even their families grew close. Harold’s parents, who were tailors in the Bronx, made clothes for Claude’s family, and Humphrey made furniture for Harold’s. The boys sat next to each other when they took the New York State Scholarship exams for admission to the Bronx High School of Science. They were each assigned a number and told not to put their names on the answer sheet. They usually studied together and scored similar grades. That day, they finished the exam around the same time and even put their sheets on the pile one after the other. Harold won the scholarship. Claude was told his answer sheet could not be found. Harold’s father loaned Claude’s family money so the boy could study further. The couple of hundred dollars was repaid in full.
The growing West Indian community in the Bronx had its own doctor, a bespectacled man named Theodore Roosevelt Gathings, who had powerful forearms. The community was proud of him: he was black, a doctor and he kept people alive. Dr. Gathings was the perfect example for Frances to show her son a professional black man who served his people. Yet one day the doctor blew his brains out, and Frances had to find a replacement as Claude was suffering from pleurisy at the time and needed a doctor’s care. But another black doctor was hard to come by.
Doctor Hunt’s clinic was situated somewhere between Intervale and Prospect Avenues and was a chance find when Frances and Claude walked past his clinic one afternoon. Hunt was a kind, old white man with a Merck manual at his side at all times. Frances had announced to the doctor on one of her visits that Claude wanted to be a doctor too. The old man had wiped his brow and simply warned: “It is hard work”. Claude had found his new role model.
But medical school was certainly not Claude’s first option. He wanted to be a carpenter like his father, but for the life of him could never manage to drive a nail straight. He considered a career as a Pullman porter, the only role designated to black people in the train set he owned as a child. Or how about a railroad engineer like Casey Jones, he had asked his mother one day. Frances vetoed all his hare-brained ideas and would help him draft his application letter to Columbia College. She had already compromised by allowing him to study in New York. Ideally, she would have preferred he attend Oxford or Cambridge. Pearl had made it clear to Claude how stacked the odds were against him because of his skin color and lack of money. The view in the Thomas household was that if you could get past skin color and get into the right pew, you could then make money.
Columbia College had a quota system in the late 1940s: Claude getting his foot in the door meant one less Jewish student. Claude studied anthropology and enrolled in pre-med science courses before moving on to medical school. Columbia had been New York’s only medical school at the end of the 18th century and was notorious for rumors that a group of medical students had robbed graves for dissections in the burial ground for ‘Negroes’. The city’s newspapers were abuzz at the time, and a group of free and enslaved blacks submitted a petition to the Common Council that was not so bold as to demand a stop to the grave-robbing, but asked that it be “conducted with the decency and propriety which the solemnity of such occasion requires.”
The first couple of years of medical school hit Claude with brute force. His friend Archie, another black student, had bowed to the pressure and flunked out. Claude had tried his best to help his friend and himself, but something was different. His strongest tool had been taken away from him: he no longer enjoyed the luxury of a photographic memory that he had since he was born and had helped him perform better in school. He had a tough time getting through the finals and was forced to remember the words of a teacher from junior high school telling him he should apply to second-tier educational institutes. He’d been angry that his teachers were willing to give their white students an opportunity to apply wherever they preferred, while dictating where people like him should apply.
Claude set his mind on internal medicine and signed up to gain experience by working the city ambulance beat. He dealt with all sorts of cases: gunshot wounds, suicides, drug overdoses and poisoning. When ambulances were unavailable, Claude and his partner would ride with beat cops in police cars and have the thrill of ripping through the New York streets at 80 miles per hour.
A small bag filled with digitalis, anesthetics and opioids accompanied him on his rounds. These staples worked for most routine cases. But then there were matters pertaining to the mind, the “Psycho+” calls, for which that stuff was useless. Claude was eager to solve puzzles rather than treat rashes for the rest of his working life. So when he met Carolyn on the night of December 31, 1957, he was six months away from an internship at the Brooklyn Veterans Hospital as a psychiatrist.
Carolyn Pauline Mary Rozansky grew up on a hog farm in Secaucus, New Jersey, seven minutes by road from Times Square. She was the third child born to Mary and Julius on May 7, 1936, towards the end of the Great Depression. She was ‘Carolka’ to her grandmother, and the two cuddled more than they conversed. It was her grandfather who had migrated to New York to work in a slaughterhouse, and her grandmother surprised him by joining him soon after. “Hey Joe, your wife is here,” someone had informed him.
Carolyn was born into a ramshackle house with ice crystals on the windows during the winter months and often fought with her older brothers for her share of the bread. The children spoke only a smattering of Polish and she was raised reading books in English. Just like Claude, Carolyn too was forbidden from reading comic books but she found ways to sneak away to her cousin’s to read. One time, she fell asleep and was discovered under a pile of illustrations.
Secaucus was white — Polish, German and Italian families lived together with barely any Jews, let alone blacks. Tommy Jackson was the first black kid Carolyn ever saw. She was five years old and Tommy a year or two older. His family had attempted to move into the neighborhood, which had caused quite a stir, and Tommy would wave at Carolyn many times at the bus stop after that.
People from Carolyn’s town did not usually go to college, but Julius accompanied his daughter to Rutgers University to see if she was an eligible candidate. She wore a hat and gloves and carried her regional accent, shared by her working-class parents, which would be the target of her classmates later that year. They would sit Carolyn down, hand her a list of words and correct her pronunciations enough to prompt the ice cream parlor owner in Secaucus to tell her she sounded “high and mighty”. But she liked how she sounded.
After graduation, Carolyn sat in her parents’ backyard for three months to work on an elaborate piece of embroidery. Then she picked herself up and found a job at the social security office. Twenty years had elapsed since the passage of the Social Security Act, and Carolyn still tackled phone calls and letters from Americans reluctant to put away their money. “I am doing this out of protest. I don’t want to contribute,” the letters would read.
She worked there long enough to be considered for a promotion, but was passed over for a male co-worker. Men were prioritized for promotions since they had to care for their family. Carolyn was miffed but did not protest. Instead she switched jobs to work as a social worker at New York Foundling, a Catholic hospital that cared for abandoned children and orphans. Her job involved visiting foster homes in black neighborhoods, and she would often dose off on the subway after a long day of visits. She had even moved out of her home in New Jersey and rented a small apartment with a friend on the Upper West Side. Rent took up much of her salary, leaving very little for anything else. But she often visited friends in Brooklyn, the ones who hosted the New Year’s Eve party where she met Claude.
The first time Claude crossed the Mason-Dixon Line — a demarcation line among four US states which symbolizes the cultural boundary between North and South — he wore a uniform and was anxious to get to Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama as quickly as possible. He had enrolled in active reserve soon after he was married, and an order to report to the base arrived in the mail. The Korean War was ongoing and a senior doctor had recommended that Claude enroll in active reserve so he could continue his education, and not be drafted into front line troops. It took all his efforts to convince the draft board head, an Italian woman, who felt a black man should not be getting a deferment when so many Italian men were getting drafted.
At Montgomery airport Claude hired a white taxi driver, who made him sit at the back of the vehicle and piled up luggage between Claude and the white passenger in the front seat. It was the segregated South in its starkest form, but Claude made sure he tipped the driver well when he reached the base. Most of the postings in the United States Air Force were in the South, and he knew he couldn’t handle long stints away from his young wife. He phoned the head office in Washington DC, to explain he was in a mixed marriage and asked for a posting in Germany, where a mixed couple might be more accepted. “How about Japan?” he was asked.
New York wasn’t particularly pleasant to the couple when they bid it farewell. “Nigger lover!” somebody yelled at Carolyn as they were packing their Dodge for a long road trip to the West Coast, where they were to take military transportation to Japan. Claude packed a gun in the car, just in case. He was fascinated by guns even as a child, and had pestered Frances to buy him one.
It was 1960, a year after Hawaii and Alaska achieved statehood, and ‘Aleut’, ‘Eskimo’ and ‘Hawaiians’ could for the first time tell the federal government they too existed. The number of racial categories had been reduced in the 1950 Census. ‘Korean’ and ‘Hindu’ were omitted as separate categories, and the term ‘Indian’ was changed to ‘American Indian’ to distinguish indigenous people from those with origins from India.
It was dusk and the smell of night soil was overwhelming as Claude got off the plane in Yokohama and was driven to Johnston Air Force Base. He was now Dr. Thomas, base psychiatrist, and in the days to come would be made aware of the reluctance of white Southerners to consult a black psychiatrist. Carolyn joined him a few weeks later and the couple decided not to live on base. They found a small place surrounded by rice fields and a stunning view of Mount Fuji from their front window. The Japanese landlord, Mr. Watanabe was taken aback by the sight of a black officer, but offered them a lease nonetheless. Their neighbors were white Southerners who did not fancy the idea of living next to a mixed couple, but respected the bars on the shoulders of Claude’s uniform and kept their feelings to themselves.
This was Claude and Carolyn’s second honeymoon. They had been to Puerto Rico soon after the wedding but in Japan they went away for little trips and attempted to climb mountains together. A Japanese woman named Keiko, introduced by mutual friends in New York, accompanied them to the springs, the markets, and taught them some Japanese words that Carolyn would try out while buying bread and eggs from the store.
A little white crown appeared on Mount Fuji during the autumn months and grew bigger as winter progressed. Carolyn was heavily pregnant and would take small walks — much to Claude’s annoyance — and talk to the local school children. The couple was elated on February 14, 1961 when Carolyn gave birth to their first child, Jeffrey. Her mother-in-law wrote the next day:
“My Dearest Claudie,
I received the telegram this morning. The way telegrams are delivered around here, is something, it is just rested on your box, and left, they do not even ring your bell, but I was looking out for it so I heard the door, and went down, for both telegrams. Well Pop, congratulations. I felt like a great load was lifted off me. Although I knew everything would have been alright. I prayed for that, night and day. And must now say, thank you, Dear God. I hope little C did not have a hard time and that they are both fine. Pearlie got there just in time…May the Lord bless him, strengthen him physically, mentally and spiritually. God bless you and little C…much love and xxx Ma.”
This was a happy note in comparison to the distressing ones that Claude had recently received from his parents. Money was running low, and the Sicilian landlord had dragged them to court over minor alterations done to the house. Then there was the war, Vietnam was brewing, and Claude started to notice people disappearing on secret assignments from the base. The mission in Japan had become clear to him: “keep the airmen flying so they can deliver damage to the enemy wherever the need arises.” He was not interested in re-enlisting and fighting these wars and decided it was time to take his son home.
Claude’s first contact with Yale Psychiatry came when he interviewed for a job while in Yokohama for an opening at the third-year level in the residency program. He was offered the job but as the chief resident at the West Haven Veterans Program. He was not surprised since he had the experience — two years as a career resident at the Brooklyn Veterans’ Hospital and later as base psychiatrist in Japan, making him familiar with the Veterans Administration and with military psychiatry.
Claude’s was the only mixed family on the block. Discriminatory housing practices in New Haven, Connecticut, at the time instructed that they live in working class West Haven, where housing was less expensive than the other suburbs. So Claude, Carolyn, Jeffrey and Claude’s parents moved into a two-story family house in a white working class neighborhood where people did not know what to make of them. Claude’s white coat and stethoscope were especially confusing.
His main concern was to earn enough money to take care of his family and his aging parents. It was 1963 and Carolyn was pregnant with their second child, Julie. Two years later, Claudewell Sidney Thomas was appointed as the first African American full-time faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine.
Ahead of the 1970 Census, the White House had instructed the Secretary of Commerce to add a ‘Hispanic’ self-identification to the Census Form. This was the first time people from South and Central America were asked to specify their origin or descent and as the largest estimated ‘Hispanic’ populations at the time, ‘Mexicans’, ‘Cubans’ and ‘Puerto Ricans’ were separately identified as sub-categories. ‘Koreans’ made an appearance once again, as a result of increased immigration. The tumultuous decade that saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act ensured that the ‘Negro’ category now offered the term ‘Black’ as an alternative.
Claude had remained clean-shaven, with closely trimmed hair, for most of his working life. He wore a suit and tie and spoke English with a slightly British twang, like many immigrants from the British West Indies. He did this even during the two years he spent at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, DC — an offer he accepted after he looked around New Haven and realized it was no longer safe for his family to live there.
The family’s stay in the nation’s capital was short-lived, however. Claude had left Yale as an associate professor and was now being offered a full professorship at the New Jersey Medical School. The institution did not enjoy a good reputation in the 1970s. Newark, New Jersey’s biggest city, was troubled and dangerous. But here was an opportunity to save a dying psychiatry department. Claude could hire his own staff and become as involved in the community as he wanted to be. He took charge as the first minority chairman of a non-minority medical school.
A stubble appeared on Claude’s face, and he let it grow. In Yale and Washington, he had kept to his neat look, and always with a tie. Flaunting a beard would have been a kiss of death. Now he began a slow but powerful transformation. He had spent much of his life fitting into a ‘white framework’, but in Newark he tried to move more into the ‘black framework’. To some of his friends, it appeared phony and contrived. Claude studied street language, began to curse mildly, let his hair grow big, and eased into his new identity. His predecessor, a white man, had been seen as imposing a ‘white model’ that was not adapted to the community. The counter-image Claude was cultivating was important — a statement in keeping with many black radicals of that time.
Years later, Claude would recognize this as the challenge President Barack Obama faced: whether to serve black people preferentially, or serve a broader community that is majority white. If Claude did the latter, he would be adopting the biases of the white group and neglecting blacks. He knew the black community would not support him in that case.
At the age of 45, Claude was officially and unofficially a black man.
The year 1982 marked the culmination of an edgy and dangerous time in New York City that had begun with a blackout five years earlier and had plunged whole neighborhoods into frantic looting. It was also the year that Claude got rid of his radical New Jersey beard, trimmed his hair, and boarded a flight to California, where he and Carolyn still live to this day. He had accepted a job at the University of California. By now he realized that if a door opened and he did not walk through it, what happened to him was his own fault.
Farhanna Balgahoom’s father, Dave, ascribed to the same dictum. His wife gave birth to their second child, Farhanna, in January 1982, more than a decade after Dave first set foot in the United States. He had come in search of the American Dream, in the belief that the roads in this illustrious country across the Atlantic were paved with gold. Confronted with a reality that was vastly different, he rolled up his sleeves, worked odd jobs, saved money to start a business, and travelled back to Indonesia to find a bride. He was in his mid-thirties then; his bride was in her early twenties and raring to study further. It was a pointless battle. Farhanna’s maternal grandfather simply pointed to the kitchen: “You are going to end up there, anyway.”
The newly married couple arrived together from Indonesia in 1979, and had little trouble renting a house in Flatbush. The blackout of 1977 was a turning point for this Brooklyn neighborhood: Jewish businesses left and white families moved to the suburbs, making space for “fresh off the plane” immigrants. Flatbush grew into an expansive neighborhood with blocks informally structured along ethnic lines. Farhanna and her mother both had diverse friends: West Indians, Eastern Europeans, Pakistanis, Chinese and Hispanics.
In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that supervises the US Census Bureau lay down a new policy on racial and ethnic classification, defining the racial and ethnic categories for federal statistics. Ethnicity — such as ‘Hispanic and Non-Hispanic’ — was separate and distinct from the concept of race. Thus individuals who were Hispanic could be of any race and, in response to immigration patterns, ‘Vietnamese’, ‘Guamanian’ and ‘Samoan’ were introduced under the race question as sub-categories in the 1980 census form.
Farhanna’s family were Indonesians of Yemeni ancestry. Either way, they represented too insignificant a population to warrant an official count in the 1980s. Farhanna’s father ran the grocery store and deli below their house and gave himself a random American nickname to fit in. Nearly every grocery store in Flatbush was immigrant-run. Dave had realized his dream of owning a business and building a home for his small family, yet he and his wife were aware they no longer lived in a Muslim-majority country. They were Muslim-Americans, part of the hyphenated identities that took shape in the United States. They understood how important it was for their children to learn the public school curriculum. Yet it was equally important that they learn Arabic, and about Islam and its history.
Every Saturday morning Farhanna and her older brother would be woken up early for the long subway ride to Queens, where a small group of Indonesian Muslims had begun to settle. She did not have to wear a hijab for her regular school, but her mother would hastily slip one on her head before she walked into the religious school. It was an informal setting in those years, in someone’s living room, where the children sat on makeshift desks and chairs or simply on the carpeted floor with Qurans nestled on their laps. The teachers were strict and Farhanna knew that if she did not memorize a few verses by the following week, she would have her knuckles rapped by a wooden ruler.
At PS 139, her regular school, skin tone largely determined class composition, as Farhanna and her brother realized more clearly some years later, when they looked back at their school yearbook. Her brother, who was lighter-skinned than her, was in a class with white students, while she landed the ‘darker’ children. Much like Claude’s school, Farhanna’s had an advanced class, known as ‘Eagles.’ As the Balgahoom siblings saw it, the ‘Eagle’ class served to shelter the white kids from Flatbush’s growing diversity. The black parents objected to this division and the school compensated by setting up another advanced class for the rest of the kids. Farhanna’s brother was put in the white class as a nod toward diversity.
The Islamic school was shielded from such divisions. As the Indonesian community grew, the physical surroundings within which the children learnt the story of Prophet Mohammed and traced their fingers from right to left each Saturday changed considerably. When funds were collected for a community center, the Balgahooms too contributed substantially. Farhanna was 13 when Masjid Al-Hikmah opened at the corner of 48th Street and 31st Avenue in Queens. Her mother was the bookkeeper for several years. Today, the Saturday school that started with seven children has nearly 100.
The murmurs began sometime in the mid-1990s when OMB received photographs from a white mother. “Look at my kid,” the note attached to the pictures read. “He looks kind of mixed-race to me. What do you want me to call him in the Census? I don’t want to check just one box.” The conversations had started in individual states where the local legislatures began to recognize people who said they were mixed. Education forms, drivers’ licenses and college applications introduced new categories to acknowledge multiracial Americans.
A loose confederation of organizations, many led by white mothers of mixed-race children, wanted recognition. “The effort made for strange bedfellows,” reveals Kim Williams in the book Mark One Or More, which examined the story of the struggle to include the multiracial category on the 2000 US census. “Republicans like House Speaker Newt Gingrich and affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly took up the multiracial cause while civil rights leaders opposed the movement on the premise that it had the potential to dilute the census count of traditional minority groups.”
On May 22, 1997, Ramona E Douglass testified as the president of the Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans in front of a congressional subcommittee for a hearing on multiracial identification. “I consider it an honor and a privilege to stand before this subcommittee and be able to tell its members what being multiracial, multi-ethnic means to me and the more than 2.5 million others like me in the US today,” she said. “We are no longer willing to remain proverbial square pegs shoved into the consistently round holes of America’s racial classification system.”
Douglass herself was of mixed African-American, Native American and Sicilian origins. “The multiracial community is one that extends beyond the boundaries of black and white,” she continued. “We are also American Indian, Asian and Pacific Islander as well as Hispanic multiracial, multi-ethnic people. To attempt to pigeonhole or limit us again to a black-white context minimizes our complexity and ignores ethnic, racial discrimination that encompasses more than the history of slavery in America.”
The argument was over how to go about acknowledging these individuals, says former US Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt. “Should it be one that said ‘Multi-race’ or ‘Mark One Or More’? I think the Bureau did the right thing by putting the latter, but politically perhaps just the ‘multi-race’ option would have made the numbers loom larger.” There were 281.4 million people in America on April 1, 2000, of which 6.8 million or 2.4 per cent reported more than one race.
The federal government had noticed. In 1997, the OMB issued a fresh directive, allowing respondents to report more than one race on the Census form. In 1997, the race categories available were ‘White’, ‘Black, African-American or Negro’, ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,’ along with the option of marking more than one. Separately, the word “Latino” was introduced as an alternative phrasing for the “Hispanic” ethnic category. The ‘Some Other Race’ category, long part of the census, was not mentioned in the OMB directive. But the Census Bureau decided to retain it.
That same year another group of petitioners wrote to the bureau, asking it to include a ‘Middle East/Arab’ category. This was a reversal from a century ago, when people from the Middle East argued in court to be counted as ‘White’ instead of ‘Asian.’ Back then, a major concern was anti-Asian legislation that sought to restrict immigration and deny American citizenship to Asians. Now, people of Middle East and North African descent were going against the tradition of historically identifying themselves as ‘White’ on the census form. But their initiative gained no traction, for lack of consensus on the exact definition of the category they were demanding.
Farhanna counted five Muslims when she went to study at Drew University in 2000. It was advertised as the ‘University in a forest,’ set in an 80-acre forest reserve in Madison, New Jersey. Her parents had been reluctant to allow her to take up the offer. Farhanna’s older brother had not demanded to leave home to go live on a university campus, so how could she? Growing up, the rules were different for the two Balgahoom siblings. But Farhanna persevered and, armed with her scholarship and the support of her high school guidance counsellor, convinced her parents to let her go.
The students Farhanna encountered in her freshman year were so different to where she grew up in Flatbush. She saw the university as an opportunity; they, as a venue to party and get drunk. Growing up, her parents had laid out explicitly what was expected of her as a Muslim girl. She was forbidden from eating pork, drinking alcohol, or having a boyfriend. She was told she could only marry a Muslim, and preferably an Indonesian, when she was older. But Drew was the typical American undergraduate experience, which differed vastly from her immigrant upbringing. Farhanna would show up to parties, attempt small talk, and leave before the beer pong games got into full swing.
It was September 2000 and the second Palestinian Intifada had just broken out. Eighteen-year-old Farhanna was in awe of what was happening in the world, especially the Arab world. Dinner-table conversations growing up had been mechanical with her mother instructing her to eat, to hurry up, or to finish her schoolwork. The evening news would alert the family about a conflict somewhere in the world, but she had never paid attention or been asked to pay attention. Not until Drew and her friendship with a young Palestinian student.
Farhanna found herself embracing Islam willingly. She ran the Muslim student association after a conversation with the university chaplain, who had told her that it fizzled out each time the Muslim population on campus dwindled. It was a pivotal moment in her student life as she attempted to figure out who she was. She had been socialized as an Indonesian at home, eating the food and speaking the language. Her best friend was a black American whose family migrated to Flatbush from the American South. She had Arab ancestry, didn’t speak Arabic fluently, yet could read and write it thanks to Saturday school. She had attended a regular American public school that was extremely diverse, and spoke English with a strong American accent. But she was constantly reminded at home that she was a Muslim woman, and this dictated her dress, her diet and her dates. It was all very confusing.
“Please don’t be Muslim, please don’t be Muslim,” Farhanna muttered to herself when she saw images of the Twin Towers crashing to the ground. She was working on the help desk at Drew on September 11, 2001. A young Indian student had rushed over to inform her that the boys in his dormitory were drunk and yelling that they wanted to beat up Muslims. She tried to talk him out of his panic. “I am not worried about you,” the student told her. “They may think I am Muslim!”
Just a month earlier, Farhanna had responded to a university application calling for cultural theme houses on campus. The feminists with their Gloria Steinem quotes, the artists, the Asians: all had started cultural activities on campus, but there was nothing for Muslims. She applied to start the Islamic Cultural Theme House, a haven in one part of her dormitory for anyone who wanted to understand and share Islamic culture, and a place to pray for Muslim students who commuted to the university.
September 11 affected Farhanna’s family. Her older brother attempted to convince their mother that she should no longer wear the hijab. Farhanna’s mother, who had previously never covered, had changed her dressing style entirely after a pilgrimage to Mecca. Now she took her son’s advice and wore her hijab a little differently — more like a scarf. The incident affected her brother’s career path as well. The following year he signed up to be a police officer in the New York Police Department. Farhanna felt uncomfortable too. Someone had unfairly hijacked Islam and was attempting to put American and Muslim identities at odds. It was the opposite of what she was attempting to do with the cultural theme house — show that being Muslim was as American as apple pie.
Four years later Farhanna was helping out at a fundraiser for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and found herself sitting next to a tall Arab-American politician from Paterson, New Jersey. They chatted for a while and he left her his card: Andre Sayegh. He was working as an aide to a congressman at that point. Farhanna and Andre played phone tag for a few days before meeting at a restaurant that served sumptuous chicken wings. She was hoping he was Muslim. He was hoping she wasn’t.
She had been to Paterson, New Jersey’s third most populous city, once before, with a girlfriend who convinced her that she must try the falafels there. It was America’s first industrial town, prominent for silk production that very quickly moved away to Asia. Paterson was historically a place to settle for people coming in from the Levant and other parts of the Middle East. It’s where Andre’s parents chose to build a house, and where his mother drove a private school bus for twenty years.
Andre did a good job of showing Farhanna around his hometown, often sampling the food in local restaurants and showing off the main attraction: The Great Falls of the Passaic River. He would even leave her little presents on her car’s windshield. Once it was a Backstreet Boys CD. Farhanna broke off the relationship many times, knowing that her parents would never accept a Catholic son-in-law. Andre was of Syrian-Lebanese descent and attended a convent school. Farhanna repeatedly warned Andre that there would be many repercussions from marrying a Muslim, especially if he wanted a career in politics. He didn’t seem to care, and kept calling. They agreed that staying away from each other on religious grounds was silly.
In 2010, the couple married in a civil ceremony in the Lambert Castle in Paterson. The Mayor of North Haledon, Randy George, officiated. Farhanna’s parents attended only after much persuasion. She had not invited many people from the Indonesian community, fearing that her own parents would refuse to attend the ceremony. Andre’s mother stayed home in protest.
Farhanna now lives on Dundee Avenue in Paterson. Her Syrian mother-in-law lives downstairs with the family dog, a white poodle named Tommy, and she, Andre and her two daughters, Sophia (3) and Kayla (8 months) live upstairs with an array of bobble-head dolls. Her daughters are of Syrian-Lebanese-Yemeni-Indonesian descent, which Farhanna jokingly says covers nearly all the countries on the United States’ terrorist watch lists. She has decorated the children’s room in the New York Mets baseball team colors as a pseudo-man cave so that Andre spends more time in there with the kids. Husband and wife are nuts over baseball: their older daughter’s middle name, Shea, celebrates the Mets’ former stadium in Queens. They have visited every major league baseball park in the country with and without their children. There is proof of this, too: a scrapbook that Farhanna gave Andre for his birthday.
Farhanna just completed maternity leave and is back to work from her parents’ spare bedroom about five minutes away from Dundee Avenue while Andre is gearing up for re-election in May 2016 as the councilman for Paterson’s Sixth Ward (update: He won and is now running for Mayor). His constituency is largely ‘Hispanic’. Farhanna has reined in her urge to be vocal about political events in the Arab world, aware that she is the wife of a politician now. In the past, she had to consciously change her TV and reading diet to include sports channels when she worked at a bank, and later People magazine when she entered the beauty industry. It was necessary for the water cooler conversations. Sometimes she genuinely thinks her complexion and her name have hampered her career growth, but she shuts off these thoughts as soon as she has them.
Andre is an usher in church on Sundays, while Farhanna stays home with the kids. She keeps a prayer rug in the dresser in the children’s room which she occasionally uses to pray. Sometimes she accompanies her mother to the mosque in New Jersey. Her mother helps with childcare and Sophia often mimics her grandmother when she prays five times a day. It’s been a while since Farhanna visited her childhood home in Flatbush. Her father rents the grocery store to Pakistani immigrants who sell school uniforms. The family has white tenants upstairs: a young white couple above the grocery store, and a single white male on the top floor. The last time she visited she noticed the effects of gentrification, which she finds deeply unfair. Why should it take an influx of white people to lead to development of neighborhoods?
Farhanna was once asked where she was from when she was riding the subway to Flatbush with her mother. “Brooklyn,” she replied. “But where are you really from?” the person insisted. “If I were Caucasian, I would not have to explain right? I am part of a second generation born in the United States, but because I am brown I have to explain myself. I am American, thank you very much.” She and Andre often talk about how “all bets are off” once you come to America. “Not that I am not proud of my family ancestry, but I agree with my husband. I am American at this point.”
The year she married Andre, Farhanna checked ‘Some Other Race’ on the US Census Form and wrote in: ‘Yemeni-Indonesian-American’.
‘Some Other Race’ is an all-encompassing net to catch people who do not identify with any of the colors, ethnicities or national-origin questions on the census form. A case in point: Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. It is a bit like a rogue category lurking about to attract rebel identities like Farhanna’s — people who feel too constrained by America’s racial categories or want to assert how mixed they really are.
Two men in the Census Bureau, one biracial and another multiracial, have been keeping a close watch on the growing ‘Other’ category, afraid that if nothing is done ahead of the 2020 Census, this could very well become the second largest ‘racial’ category. It was obvious to Nicholas Jones and Roberto Ramirez when they looked at the data that people were increasingly not answering the race question nor identifying with the current classifications. Was it time to tweak the central question, ‘What is Person 1’s race?’
The bureau conducted an experiment that involved half a million households close on the heels of the 2010 Census to find alternative ways to ask questions to gauge a person’s race and ethnicity. It was labelled the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) and tested strategies to increase reporting in the OMB categories and elicit detailed race and ethnic reporting. The results showed that the Bureau would be better off scrapping the separate ‘Hispanic’ ethnicity question and putting it alongside the list of categories asking for a person’s race. It worked: in the experiment sample, ‘Some Other Race’ shrunk from seven per cent of the population to less than half a percent.
Jones and Ramirez also found that people were raring to tell the federal government who they really were. When space was offered for people to write in their choices, respondents seldom checked the little box that said ‘White’ or ‘Black’ and instead wrote in ‘Irish’ or ‘Jamaican’ or similar. “The proportions were very different, too. It went from three to five per cent of the white or black population giving the Bureau detailed responses, to over 50 per cent of whites and 75 per cent of blacks using the write-in lines,” says Jones, who heads the racial statistics branch in the population division of the Bureau.
Focus group discussions that ran alongside were more revealing. “The foreign-born populations among the black category, for instance, were tired of being clubbed under the black (umbrella) category and wanted to identify ethnically or nationally,” says Ramirez, who heads the ethnicity and ancestry branch.
During the 2010 AQE, the Census Bureau conducted 67 focus groups that comprised 768 individuals from a diverse sample of racial and ethnic communities. Yet there was no consensus on the definitions of race and origin. What was the Census form really asking? Some felt ‘race’ and ‘origin’ were the same. Others felt ‘race’ was defined as skin color, ancestry or culture and ‘origin’ as where they or their parents were born. The terms were confusing, the Bureau was told, and should be defined.
The Bureau’s focus group moderators went a step further and asked questions to understand participants’ ‘situational identity’, recognizing that respondents discussed and reported on their race differently depending on the context in which questions were asked. They explored themes of awareness and fluidity with questions such as “When did you first become aware of your race?” and whether and how racial identity had changed over time. “We asked people how they came to define their identity,” Jones says. “They said based on familial, social and educational experiences and interactions in their life and society, or coming to live in the US from other societies.” Essentially, racial identities were fluid.
Take Andre Sayegh as an example. He has mixed Syrian-Lebanese ancestry with no contact whatsoever with relatives ‘back home’, has a fair complexion, a French-sounding name, was raised Catholic, grew up in a vibrant immigrant community which included Arabs, Hispanics and African-Americans, and is now married to a Yemeni-Indonesian-American who was raised a Muslim. What does he check on the Census form? “White. Because there is no option to check Arab,” he says.
In a combined race and ethnicity question tested during the 2010 AQE, the ‘White’ race category included several examples — among them ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Lebanese’ — to guide those who might check the box. Yet when Census officials asked participants in a focus group discussion, many said the suggested examples were “wrong” or “inaccurate”. Before the 2010 Census, activists launched a campaign that urged people to check ‘Other’ on the form and write in their ancestry. The campaign’s slogan: “Check it right, you ain’t white!”
Now the category being tested is ‘Middle-East/ North Africa’ (or ‘MENA’), which hopes to capture the identities of immigrants from 19 countries and ethnic groups, as well as some transnational groups like the Middle East’s Kurds. “We invited experts from all over the country to come talk to us about the MENA category. We asked them about classification, who should be in, who should be out, how it should be defined. We also talked about tabulation. Should it be under the White category or should it be separate?” says Jones. The experiment sample is testing the ‘MENA’ category as the seventh race in the 2020 Census, after the sixth: ‘Hispanics’.
Sociologist Richard Alba grew up in the Bronx too, but twenty years after Claude, in the 1950s. He grew up in a large housing project that was owned at the time by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and despite no legal segregation the community supported property owners’ will to keep black people out. Alba is third-generation Italian and grew up around a mixed white community of mainly Irish-Catholics and some Jews. He paid little attention to racial dynamics as a child. He believes that in a racially stratified society like the United States an individual’s racial origin largely determines that person’s life experiences.
Currently, Alba says, there is a lot of racial mixing occurring in marriages and other unions — 15 per cent of marriages in the United States are between people of different ethnic origins. In other words, people are coming together to start families across racial and Hispanic origin lines, and most of these marriages involve a white partner and a minority partner. He looked at data from the American Community Survey in 2013 on the families of infants which, he points out, provides a good shot at obtaining data on both parents. He found that one in seven infants is now born into an ethno-racially mixed family. “The largest group by far of these infants consists of those with one non-Hispanic white and one Hispanic parent. They are nearly 40 per cent of the total,” he writes in The American Prospect. “Other sizeable groups are mixed white and Asian, white and black, and white and mixed-race parentage.”
“This is a really new and possibly important development, because these are individuals who grow up in families that involve whites and minorities. They are truly straddling the dividing lines in American society. We don’t really know enough about them to be able to say how will they identify themselves, how will they locate themselves within American society,” he says sitting back in his chair in his office at the City University of New York in downtown Manhattan.
“I think there is good reason to think that the identities of these individuals will be more fluid than the identities of people coming from consistent family backgrounds, and that they may identify themselves at times as whites, identify themselves as minorities, or may simply say they are mixed,” he adds. Alba thinks such individuals will associate themselves with the white-dominated mainstream society. They will integrate into neighborhoods, into networks, even into families they create through marriage that will change based on the white mainstream.
Last year, the Washington, DC-based Pew Research Center released a report on ‘multiracial’ Americans that revealed that most Americans from mixed backgrounds do not think of themselves as multiracial. For those who are white and Asian, the affinities with the white group were stronger and for those who were white and black it was a completely different story. The majority in this latter group believe that others see them as black and they also have much closer ties to their black relatives. The Pew Survey also found that the way the question is framed influences multiracial Americans — the survey ended up counting more such individuals than the census does, leading to the conclusion that adults with mixed backgrounds often choose single-group categories when identifying themselves for the census.
Alba also writes about an internal census study, America’s Churning Races, which found that large numbers of people identify themselves as multiracial in one census but identify as white in another. For instance, many with mixed Asian and Hispanic family origins identify with the white majority some of the time. “The one exception to this pattern of ‘leaning white’ involves individuals of mixed white and African-American heritages, who are much more likely to indicate that they are only black than only white,” he writes. President Obama is among the most prominent examples.
The Sayegh children, Sophia and Kayla, are among those multiracial and multi-ethnic Americans who will grow up to choose whether to identify as mixed-race. Research has shown that adults with multiple racial or ethnic origins often report only one. Perhaps they will feel closer to their Syrian or Indonesian roots, depending on which grandmother they spend more time with. Much like Claude and Carolyn’s children and some of their mixed-race grandchildren: They all identify as ‘Black’.
Claude takes 17 tablets to “stay alive”. His medicines are organized by day of the week and stored in a basket on top of the refrigerator. He and Carolyn now live in Ranchos Palos Verdes near Los Angeles, close to a golf club named after Donald Trump. Claude drives a red sedan and Carolyn a blue one, which is not an indication of their political leanings. Both have prominent stickers in support of Hillary Clinton on their car bumpers.
Barack Obama smiles from above their mantelpiece — they framed the New York Times front page from the day he was elected president. Their entire mixed-race family smiles from various photo frames, with a mug shot of their youngest grandchild tacked onto the frame. Carolyn did not want him to feel left out. They are ‘Dede’ and ‘Nene’ to all their grandchildren, which is Turkish for grandfather and grandmother. Their second oldest granddaughter, who is one-fourth Turkish, called dibs on how the rest of her siblings and cousins will refer to them.
If Claude is asked who he is, he says: “‘Son, father, husband, brother…’ get the core family. After that the external application: ‘Physician, psychiatrist, professor…,’ which are all secondary.” If he is prompted to think in terms of race: “Oh! That’s not primary. Down the line, I am a black man. I say Black American on the census or whatever the term is. African-American? I wouldn’t use that word ‘Negro’ even though a lot of Americans think of black people that way.” The term ‘Negro’ is still in use in the US census form.
In the late 1990s, Claude’s curiosity got the better of him and he took a swab of the inner lining of his mouth and sent it off for a DNA test and paid $600 on a website that traces black ancestry. “I was interested in these peculiar traits of precognition and eidetic imagery and I was wondering if I can find out something from a cultural, anthropological point of view.” He did: Frances’ family came from Sierra Leone and Humphrey’s from southern Nigeria. He never pursued the Welsh strain in his lineage.
If Carolyn is asked the same set of questions: “I am Carolyn Pauline Mary Rozansky Thomas. I think of Claude’s phrases: ‘I am a work in progress. I am still developing.’ I intend to live to be 100, unless I get Alzheimer’s, in which case once I can’t function by myself, I am gone. Send me off.” What is your race? “I check White or European. I don’t think they are more specific than that. It’s not a strong desire to identify as Polish. If they give me the option, I might.”
It’s the first week of January and Claude’s white, plastic, Christmas tree takes up almost half of the living room which, among many other personal touches includes a Freud action figure on top of a bookshelf. Carolyn refers to Claude’s tree as a Simon Rodia creation after an Italian-American artist for the random selection of items that have found their way onto it. There is a non-functioning wrist watch that hangs low from the plastic branch at the bottom. She once discovered her scarf curled around the branches and was miffed that Claude had not noticed her wearing it around her neck that morning.
Under the glass slab on their dining table, the couple smiles for the camera from their time in Greece, and with friends in St. Kitts. They have travelled widely together. Claude always preferred to hang back while Carolyn attempted to conquer mountains. Her sense of adventure is constantly at odds with his love for glass-bottomed boats and life vests. Even now he drives carefully, while she drives with one foot constantly testing the gas pedal. Last year, she was fined for speeding, and the cop’s audacity still baffles her.
The couple eats a mix of cereal out of bowls that have ‘Carol’ and ‘Claude’ painted over them. The bowls were a gift from their daughter Julie. Claude loves speaking in medical terms. His submandibular gland was swollen that day, yet he insisted on repeating the oft-repeated story of their son Jeffrey. “Have you heard the story of Jeffrey and the lamp post?” Claude would ask. “Let me tell the story,” he would say to Carolyn (though it was really her story).
“I came home from work one day when we were living in West Haven when Carolyn told me what had happened. Jeffrey was about four years old and he was hanging off a lamp post outside our house when his mother came in search of him,” he continues, smiling. “He had got up to the top of the lamp post and was clinging on, not being able to climb any further. He called Carolyn and said: ‘Mommy, Mommy! I can’t go higher up, I am all out of black power.’ To which Carolyn replied: ‘Use your white power and get your ass down here!’”
Carolyn alluding to “white power” was of course in jest. But in a year where the Republican front-runner is calling to “Make America Great Again”, it does take on a more sinister meaning. Alba and Prewitt are partners in influencing the Census Bureau to resist putting out further press releases about its exaggerated predictions of America’s “white decline”. “The Census Bureau is deliberately distorting social realities, which is contributing to a sense of insecurity among whites and feeding into nasty politics. A lot of white Americans are uncomfortable at the thought that their society will soon be different to the way they grew up,” Alba says. “I don’t think it’s clear that the United States is a majority or minority society. Maybe, I don’t know. But the Census Bureau does not know either.”
The policy implications will be on affirmative action programs, which Prewitt believes gets tied up with the immigration question. “That’s a question that Trump can ask: Are we supposed to provide affirmative action to Syrian kids?” Prewitt says making affirmative action policies broad-based to include some of the immigrant groups was a huge mistake by liberals. This move really irritated many white Americans. “If it had really just been reserved for populations which seriously suffered maltreatment, we would not be looking at a diversity target over a social justice target,” he says.
In the vast checkerboard of racial categories that have evolved over 200 years, whether the Census Bureau will make ‘White’ some groups that are currently not in the statistical system is yet to be seen. Like Indians from South Asia were briefly: They were ‘Hindus’ in 1920s, ‘White’ in the 1940s, ‘Other’ in the 1960s, and have been included under the ‘Asian’ category since the 1980s. Perhaps it will be the Hispanics who will be the ‘honorary whites’ that reinforce the statistical ‘White wall’ — a development that would be deeply ironic given Trump’s rhetoric during his primary campaign.
Who gets elected to the White House in November 2016 will certainly affect the future of how America thinks about race. Would it be appropriate to collect detailed statistics on Muslim-Americans, partly under the MENA category, for the benefit of a president who wants to ban Muslims from America?
Prewitt believes that the demographic future is going to play out — at least statistically — based on how people identify themselves. Jones and Ramirez agree. The Census Bureau, a data-gathering agency, will allow data to instruct changes to the 2020 Census. The most serious change they’re considering would remove the words ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘origin’ from the forms altogether. Instead of answering the question ‘What is your race?’, Americans of the future might simply be asked, “Which categories describe you?”
The End.
