eir mixed genetic heritage. If a certain proportion of those people say, ten per cent should elect to identify themselves as Multiracial, legislative districts in many parts of the country might need to be redrawn. The entire civil-rights regulatory program concerning housing, employment, and education would have to be reassessed. Schooldesegregation plans would be thrown
51. One Drop of Bloo<
into the air. Of course, it is possible tha only a small number of Americans wil elect to choose the Multiracial option if it is offered, with little social effect Merely placing such an option on thi census invites people to consider choosing it, however. When the census listec  Cajun  as one of several examples under the ancestry question, the numbei of Cajuns jumped nearly two thousanc per cent. To remind people of the possibility is to encourage enormous change
Those who are charged with enforcing civil-rights laws see the Multiracia box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action, and they hold those ir the mixed-race movement responsible  There s no concern on any of thes< people s part about the effect on policy^  it s just a subjective feeling that thei identity needs to be stroked,  one gov ernment analyst said.  What they don  understand is that it s going to cos their own groups  by losing the ad vantages that accrue to minorities b way of affirmative-action programs, fo instance. Graham contends that the ob ject of her movement is not to creat another protected category. In any cast she said, multiracial people know  t check the right box to get the goodies.
Of course, races have been mixing i America since Columbus arrived. Visi tors to Colonial America found planta tion slaves who were as light-skinned  their masters. Patrick Henry actually pre posed, in 1784, that the State of Virgin: encourage intermarriage between whit< and Indians, through the use of tax ir centives and cash stipends. The legar of this intermingling is that Americar who are descendants of early settlers, < slaves, or of Indians often have ancesto of different races in their family tree.
Thomas Jefferson supervised tl original census, in 1790. The populatic then was broken down into free whi males, free white females, other persoi (these included free blacks and taxab Indians,  which meant those living in around white settlements), and slavr How unsettled this country has alwa been about its racial categories is e\ dent in the fact that nearly every ce sus since has measured race different For most of the nineteenth century, t census reflected an American obsessi with miscegenation. The color of sla 
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
was to be specified as  B,  for black, and  M,  for mulatto. In the 1890 census, gradations of mulattoes were further broken down into quadroons and octoroons. After 1920, however, the Census Bureau gave up on such distinctions, estimating that three-quarters of all blacks in the United States were racially mixed already, and that pure blacks would soon disappear. Henceforth anyone with any black ancestry at all would be counted simply as black.
Actual interracial marriages, however, were historically rare. Multiracial children were often marginalized as illegitimate half-breeds who didn t fit comfortably into any racial community. This was particularly true of the offspring of black-white unions.  In my family, like many families with African-American ancestry, there is a history of multiracial offspring associated with rape and concubinage,  G. Reginald Daniel, who teaches a course in multiracial identity at the University of California at Los Angeles, says.  I was reared in the segregationist South. Both sides of my family have been mixed for at least three generations. I struggled as a child over the question of why I had to exclude my East Indian and Irish and Native American and French ancestry, and could include only African. 
Until recently, people like Daniel were identified simply as black because of a peculiarly American institution known informally as  the one-drop rule,  which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of  black blood.  This notion derives from a long-discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, which was correlated with physical appearance and social behavior. The antebellum South promoted the rule as a way of enlarging the slave population with the children of slaveholders. By the nineteen-twenties, in Jim Crow America the one-drop rule was well established as the law of the land. It still is, according to a United States Supreme Court decision as late as 1986, which refused to review a lower court s ruling that a Louisiana woman whose great-great-great-great-grandmother had been the mistress of a French planter was black even though that proportion of her ancestry amounted to no more than
three thirty-seconds of her genetic heritage.  We are the only country in the world that applies the one-drop rule, and the only group that the one-drop rule applies to is people of African descent,  Daniel observes.
People of mixed black-and-white ancestry were rejected by whites and found acceptance by blacks. Many of the most notable  black  leaders over the last century and a half were  white  to some extent, from Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass (both of whom had white fathers) to W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (who had an Irish grandmother and some American Indian ancestry as well). The fact that Lani Gui-nier, Louis Farrakhan, and Virginia s former governor Douglas Wilder are defined as black, and define themselves that way, though they have light skin or  European  features, demonstrates how enduring the one-drop rule has proved to be in America, not only among whites but among blacks as well. Daniel sees this as  a double-edged sword.  While the one-drop rule encouraged racism, it also galvanized the black community.
 But the one-drop rule is racist,  Daniel says.  There s na way you can get away from the fact that it was historically implemented to create as many slaves as possible. No one leaped over to the white community that was simply the mentality of the nation, and people of African descent internalized it. What this current discourse is about is lifting the lid of racial oppression in our institutions and letting people identify with the totality of their heritage. We have created a nightmare for human dignity. Multiracialism has the potential for undermining the very basis of racism, which is its categories. 
But multiracialism introduces nightmares of its own. If people are to be counted as something other than completely black, for instance, how will affirmative-action programs be implemented? Suppose a court orders a city to hire additional black police officers to make up for past discrimination. Will mixed-race officers count? Will they count wholly or partly? Far from solving the problem of fragmented identities, multiracialism could open the door to fractional races, such as we already have in the case of the American Indians. In order to be eligible for certain federal benefits, such as hous
ing-improvement programs, a must prove that he or she eit member of a federally recognize tribe or has fifty per cent  Indiar One can envision a situation i nonwhiteness itself becomes the ued quality, to be compensated it ways depending on a person s ]
Kwame Anthony Appiah, of f Philosophy and Afro-American Departments, says,  What the M category aims for is not people ancestry, because a majority of A are actually products of mixed This category goes after people 5 parents who are socially recog belonging to different races. O.K. that s an interesting soc gory. But then you have to ask v pens to their children. Do we war more boxes, depending upon whe marry back into one group or tl What are the children of thes supposed to say? I think about the because look, my mother is En; father is Ghanaian. My sisters an to a Nigerian and a Norwegiar nephews who range from bloi kids to very black kids. They an cousins. Now according to the ? scheme of things, they re all bls the guy with blond hair who skis That s what the one-drop rule s
* Multiracial scheme, which is i solve anomalies, simply creat anomalies of its own, and that s the fundamental concept that yc be able to assign every American three or four races reliably is i
These are sentiments that R tative Sawyer agrees with pro He says of the one-drop rule, embedded in our perception an but it doesn t allow for the blur is the reality of our population.. at What are the numbers?  h his congressional office as h through a briefing book.  Thii per cent of American Japanese and eighteen per cent of A Japanese males marry outside t ditional ethnic and nationalit Seventy per cent of American marry outside. I grant you that 1 mous growth potential of mi marriages starts from a relativi base, but the truth is it starts fr< tion to begin with; that is, i think of as black-and-white n
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51. One Drop of Bloo
are not marriages between people who come from anything like a clearly defined ethnic, racial, or genetic base.  The United States Supreme Court struck down the last vestige of antimiscegenation laws in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. At that time, interracial marriages were rare; only sixty-five thousand marriages between blacks and whites were recorded in the 1970 census. Marriages between Asians and non-Asian Americans tended to be between soldiers and war brides. Since then, mixed marriages occurring between many racial and ethnic groups have risen to the point where they have eroded the distinctions between such peoples. Among American Indians, people are more likely to marry outside their group than within it, as Representative Sawyer noted. The number of children living in families where one parent is white and the other is black, Asian, or American Indian, to use one measure, has tripled from fewer than four hundred thousand in 1970 to one and a half million in 1990 and this doesn t count the children of single parents or children whose parents are divorced.
Blacks are conspicuously less likely to marry outside their group, and yet marriages between blacks and whites have tripled in the last thirty years. Matthijs Kalmijn, a Dutch sociologist, analyzed marriage certificates filed in this country s non-Southern states since the Loving decision and found that in the nineteen-eighties the rate at which black men were marrying white women had reached approximately ten per cent. (The rate for black women marrying white men is about half that figure.) In the 1990 cen-sus, six per cent of black householders nationwide had nonblack spouses still a small percentage, but a significant one.
Multiracial people, because they are now both unable and unwilling to be 'Snored, and because many of them refuse to be confined to traditional ra-c'al categories, inevitably undermine the entire concept of race as an irreducible ifference between peoples. The con-rinual modulation of racial differences m America is increasing the jumble cre-by centuries of ethnic intermarriage.
be resulting dilemma is a profound Olle. If we choose to measure the mix
ing by counting people as Multiracial, we pull the teeth of the civil-rights laws Are we ready for that? Is it even possible to make changes in the way we count Americans, given the legislative mandates already built into law?  I don t know, Sawyer concedes.  At this point, my purpose is not so much to alter the laws that underlie these kinds of questions as to raise the question of whether or not the way in which we currently define who we are reflects the reality of the nation we are and who we are becoming. If it does not, then the policies underlying the terms of measurement are doomed to be flawed. What you measure is what you get. 
SCIENCE has put forward many different racial models, the most enduring being the division of humanity into