When Evelyn Brown-Wilder was growing up in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in the 1950s, life was a matter of warring opposites. Though some of her ancestors were white and her face was pale, the law said she was black. She wrapped both arms around that identity.
Her daughter, Sonya Colvin-Boyd, lives in a different world and chooses a different identity. When it came time for Colvin-Boyd to indicate her race on her 2000 U.S. census form, she picked both white and black. “We’re all mixed,” said the Powder Springs resident.
Claiming both races puts her in one of the fastest-growing segments of America’s population. It’s a trend that reveals seismic shifts in both outward social and cultural relations and inward notions of individual identity.
Across metro Atlanta’s counties, the last decade saw a doubling or tripling of the number of people identifying themselves as being of more than one race, according to the Census Bureau. In Gwinnett County, the number of respondents checking two or more races rose from 12,673 in 2000 to 25,292 in 2010, a 99 percent jump. In Fulton County, the number rose from 11,853 to 20,279, a 71 percent increase. In Henry County, the numbers went up 269 percent.
Although lines are no longer quite so sharply drawn between black, white and Asian, those who feel an allegiance to more than one culture still face traditional barriers. Tiger Woods was criticized when he invented the term “Cablinasian” to describe his Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian roots, as if he were refusing to choose sides.
But his insistence on claiming all elements in his background made sense to Denise Smith, 44, an email marketing manager from Acworth.
The daughter of a black father and a Filipino mother, Smith was seen as African-American by her peers, but with her straight black hair, there was always something “different” about her, she said. “Today as an adult, now I get, ‘You look very exotic,’ and, ‘What are you mixed with?’ I forever have identified myself as ‘other’ on all forms. I can never select one race.”
An option to finally inscribe that reality on the census form is a relief, she said.
The 2000 census was the first time, since the count began in 1790, that respondents could check more than one race. Census officials theorize that the new liberty took some getting used to, and that the surge between 2000 and 2010 largely reflects a growing comfort level.
“It’s still catching on,” said Gerson Vasquez, with the Atlanta Regional Office of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Yet mixed ancestry is a matter of fact for most Americans whose ancestors include people from Africa; they operate in a world of gradations where skin color sometimes determines status. “A lot of darker-complected blacks saw it as the ‘house Negro’ syndrome versus the ‘field Negro’ syndrome,” said Troy Gordon, 42, who teaches elementary school in Lithonia. Gordon is a copper-skinned mix of African-American and American Indian, and his light skin drew “flak” when he was younger.
He knew, growing up, that “black” was a whole range of colors, from his white great-grandmother, to his “paper-sack brown” aunt and his green-eyed, red-haired uncle. “I was black,” said Gordon, “but you’d see family pictures and say, ‘Wow, who’s this white lady?’”
Such conversations were limited back then. Today, there are many more talks about their multiracial heritage with his light-skinned 4-year-old son Chase. Chase’s mother is white, and he considers himself white, though he pronounces it “wipe.”
In Sonya Colvin-Boyd’s family, there have been interracial marriages on both sides.
But for her mother, who watched Alabama Gov. George Wallace rise to national prominence by turning black children away from the schoolhouse door, race was defined by political oppression more than biology. The daughter remembers pointing out the inconsistency, saying, “I’m blacker than you mom, and you hate white people.”
In the world Colvin-Boyd inhabits today, which includes her white fiance, Jason Menssen, “color doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s about that person’s character, about that person’s heart.” (Her mother, she adds, has come to love Menssen, white skin and all.)
The differences between mother and daughter reflect the latest evolutionary step in a long and troubled history. The descendants of slavery-era unions were often consigned to a shadowy middle-ground, as the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings will attest. Jim Crow laws made some interracial marriages illegal, and the “one-drop law” in Georgia and many other states enforced strict segregation by decreeing that anyone with a single drop of black blood was black.
When Phil Jenkins’ white grandmother married a black man in the 1940s, her family tried to have her committed to a mental institution, Jenkins said. He lived with his grandparents for a time on the South Side of Chicago, and the presence of “black” and “white” members of the same family provoked more than one fight between Jenkins and his neighbors in the projects.
Some divisions still persist in the family, but in his household “we were raised to be colorblind,” said Jenkins, 43, of East Point, who described himself to the census as multiracial. “People are people,” he said.
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Multiracial Atlantans in 2010
County | Persons | % of total* | +/- since 2000
Cherokee 4,471 | 2.1% | +144.2%
Clayton 6,567 | 2.5% | +33.4%
Cobb 18,663 | 2.7% | +64.1%
DeKalb 16,512 | 2.4% | +16.9%
Fayette 2,388 | 2.2% | +109.7%
Forsyth 2,876 | 1.6% | +215.7%
Fulton 20,279 2.2% +71.1%
Gwinnett 25,292 | 3.1% | +99.6%
Henry 4,977| 2.4% | +269.8%
TOTAL 102,025 | 2.5% | +69.6%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
*Percentage of total population.
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