It was not until 2000 that Americans were given the option of choosing more than one race on the census. Now more and more Americans are identifying themselves as multiracial
Racial categorisation still bears marks of how white Americans thought in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first census in 1790 had three categories: free whites, other free persons and slaves. The 1890 census was obsessed with measuring the African blood in each American: octoroons had one box, quadroons another. In 1990 respondents were allowed to identify their own racial group . But they could choose only one.
Asked to fill out the form, a geneticist might tick all the boxes. The classification of races by Europeans began in earnest in the 18th century, and came with generalisations about each race’s characteristics from some of Europe’s most brilliant minds. “In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the perfection of the temperate zones,” wrote Immanuel Kant.
Such views return in guises like the “human biodiversity” movement, which exists mostly on Reddit, an online messageboard. Reddit is home to a fringe genre in which white supremacists taketests and either discover they are not, in fact, pure bloods, or boast of the percentage of European in them. Richard Spencer, an organiser of the rally at Charlottesville for neo-Nazis, turns out to have Mongolian and north African ancestors from the 19th century. Mankind’s family tree makes this inevitable.
For race to become less significant, which would be what most geneticists think and earlier civil-rights activists desired, it may need first to matter more. James Baldwin, who saw black identity politics as a means to the end of race mattering less, grasped this paradox early. “We find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of categorisations,” he wrote.
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