The boxes that define American

Jeb Bush made national headlines when a New York Times article reported he had marked “Hispanic” in a 2009 Florida voter registration application. The uproar has raised a range of questions, from how do you really pronounced his name (Heb or Yeb?) to, did he commit a felony?  

It wasn’t just Jeb’s “erroneous” box check that stirred controversy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts also checked the Native American box when she applied to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.  

{mosads}The questions these incidents have raised for me are: why do we all have to fit into outdated “boxes”? And, how long will it take before they more accurately reflect our country’s racial and ethnic make-up?   

I was born and lived in Mexico, where I only met other Mexicans, until I was eleven years old.  Until I moved to Texas twenty years ago, I never consciously thought: I am Mexican.  It was only in the U.S. where I was forced to describe myself as “Mexican,” “Mexican-American,” “Hispanic,” “Latina,” “Chicana,” and the many other labels that exist for people with my ethnic background.  Such labels have many implications in this country, and implicitly tell others the level of education and type of job you are expected to have.  

When my visa expired at the age of fourteen, there were more labels slapped on me– illegal alien, illegal, criminal, and wetback–labels that took away my humanity.   

In an emerging America where diversity is now the norm, are the “boxes” for race and ethnicity outdated?   

I never know what box I am supposed to check when it comes to race.  The boxes for race in the 2010 U.S. Census included: White, Black, African American, Negro (yes, the word Negro actually appears in the 2010 U.S. Census), Japanese, Korean, Samoan, and Other. According to commonly used sources like Wikipedia, Hispanic/Latino is not a race, it’s an ethnicity to collectively describe people of mixed race that speak the Spanish language. Therefore, if you consider yourself Hispanic/Latino but you don’t speak Spanish, you better start thinking of checking another box, according to this definition.  All kidding aside, this is the problem with these narrow definitions– they force us to fit into “boxes” instead of allowing Americans to define our own identity.   

I have checked the White box for race in almost every form I have ever filled out.  If I’m not White, Black, or Asian, what box am I supposed to check?  There are times when the race box includes an option for White, and one for White-Non Hispanic. This scenario is less confusing.  I don’t check the White box because I am trying to assimilate, as some have suggested, but because none of the other choices define me either. 

The racial and ethnic identity boxes in the census are supposed to inform our government of disparities so that resources can be deployed in an effective manner.  They help to determine where schools should be built, what roads need to be built, and even how many congressional seats a state receives.  The boxes are supposed to give a picture of who makes up our country.  But how can these boxes be informative if they do not ask Americans the right questions about how they define their identity?  How can these boxes be accurate when 12 million undocumented people living and working in the U.S. are afraid to fill them out?  

Research shows that Hispanics will make up 18 percent of the U.S. population by the year 2020, the year of the next national census.  According to Nielsen, over half of all families with children will be multi-cultural by the year 2025.  The U.S. Census predicts that the U.S. population of foreign-born Americans will reach almost 19 percent by the year 2050. This is not because there will be masses of people coming into the U.S. as is often feared, but because the birth rates of U.S. born children will decline. 

These numbers and statics show one thing: we must re-examine the labels we use to define our country, and the people who live here.  The current problem with the boxes is that they are too narrow.  The sooner we change them, and how we define American, the sooner we will be able to have a more accurate picture of who we are as a nation, one that includes all of us. 

 Arce is director of Development at Define American, a media and culture campaign that uses the power of story to shift conversation around immigration, identity, and citizenship in America.