By Rebecca Bibbs
Photos by Jason Yoder

Kenneth Williams, Brooklyn Hudson and Craig Collins

Surrounded by African-American, white and Hispanic classmates at Day Nursery’s Wiles Center, 5-year-old Brooklyn Hudson limits her interest in colors to the ones that match the squares on her Bingo Bears card.

“I’ve got a blue bear,” she exclaims, reaching out her hand to take the piece and put it on her board.

Since Brooklyn is still a preschooler, her parents, Nancy Ruddick and Bernard Hudson, have rarely been asked to declare their biracial daughter’s race. But that will change next year when they fill in enrollment forms for Brooklyn to attend kindergarten in Pike Township, which has the highest reported concentration of interracial and multiracial population in Marion County.

Multiracial Americans received a great deal of attention in March when the Office of Management and Budget — now headed by Hoosier Mitchell Daniels — released race data from the 2000 Census. For the first time in decades, these citizens were allowed to express their identities by selecting more than one race classification. Indiana, however, was ahead of the curve when, in 1995, the General Assembly passed into law a requirement for a multiracial category on forms that request race information.

Supporters of such laws hoped that adding a multiracial category in state and federal data collection efforts would be a step toward racial reconciliation. The multiracial category, in their opinion, was a means to an end — a tool for social and political change.

But an examination of race reporting mechanisms shows that Indiana’s law may not be fully employed. In some instances, agencies failed to collect the information. And those that did were sometimes hobbled by inconsistent self-reporting that prevents establishment of a reliable baseline.

Census sparks interest

According to 2000 Census results, about 6.8 million Americans, or 2.4 percent of the population, checked more than one race category. This is more than three times the 2 million estimated in the mid-1990s. Of the more than 6 million people living in Indiana, over 75,600, or 1.26 percent, selected more than one race classification.

Marion County, because of its diversity and population density, has by far the largest number of people who checked more than one race category on the census. But those 14,119 people make up 1.6 percent of the population, a lesser proportion than the 1.96 percent in St. Joseph County, the 1.8 percent in Lake and Allen counties and the 1.77 percent in Elkhart County.

Multiracial activists, however, maintain that the true number of multiracial Americans is much higher. This census, they say, was skewed by a variety of factors, including a number of people who technically are multiracial but for historical reasons identify themselves as only one race.

The numbers are also affected by people who boycotted the Census Bureau’s policy of assigning those who checked more than one race to the largest minority selected. Some people refused to check any classification, and others identified themselves as “American Indian,” a move that was promoted by multiracial activists like Charles Byrd.

In addition, many Latinos, who normally consider themselves multiracial, may not have selected more than one category because of the aggressive efforts to discourage this by groups like the Council of La Raza. They wanted to emphasize the language barrier commonly faced by Latino Americans.

Indiana on the cutting edge

Indiana — not usually considered a national trendsetter when it comes to racial issues — joined an exclusive club when it became the third state to enact a law requiring a multiracial category on any form that requests race information. While the federal government wrestled with the interests of traditional civil rights organizations versus those of multiracial activists, the General Assembly quietly passed House Enrolled Act 1592. Signed by former Gov. Evan Bayh, the law, now known as IC 5-15-5.6-6.5, went into effect on July 1, 1995.

Surprisingly, most similar laws also originate in the Heartland. Other states with related laws include Ohio, Illinois, Georgia, Michigan and Maryland. The State Departments of Education in North Carolina and Florida have adopted the multiracial classification by a more limited administrative mandate.

Equally surprising is that rather than being introduced in a county with a larger multiracial population like Marion County, Indiana’s law originated in Vanderburgh County, where the multiracial population is about 1.1 percent. The law came about after former Rep. Jeffrey Hays, D-Evansville, received a flurry of correspondence on the issue from the Vanderburgh County Health Department. While he believed he had more relevant issues to tackle, including the budget, Hays introduced the legislation at the urging of his wife, Mary Lou, a former Health Department employee.

Multiracial activists on the national level faced stiff opposition to a “multiracial” classification from civil rights groups like the Council of La Raza and the NAACP. But it wasn’t their local chapters in Indiana or the Legislative Black Caucus that nearly derailed Hays’ efforts in Indiana. His main enemy, Hays says, was apathy from lawmakers and fear from statisticians, who argued that an additional classification would wreak havoc on their existing systems.

Still, Hays is proud of his accomplishment.

“Maybe it hasn’t worked out entirely as intended,” he says, “but there’s been a lot more awareness.”

Mixed signals

Race reporting for statistical purposes appears to be most prevalent in the civil rights, education and medical arenas.

But a survey of Marion County school districts shows that two districts never added the multiracial categories to their forms. Officials in those districts say they were unaware of the law, but they plan on bringing their districts into compliance.

Similarly, the Marion County Health Department, at least on some forms, does not offer a multiracial classification. Collette DuValle, director of communications for the Health and Hospital Corporation, says the omission was an oversight and that the agency will review all its forms over the next several months.

“We’re going to take a look at all our forms, down to our employment forms, because we want to be in compliance with the law,” she says. “We would like to offer this to the citizens of Marion County because we’re becoming a more diverse community.”

In some instances, agencies offer the classification “other,” which often is used as a default by multiracial people. Hays, however, says this does not meet the intent of the law he sponsored. Other, he says, should be used in addition to the multiracial classification, not instead of it.

New York City-based Charles Byrd, who is editor of the Interracial Voice Web site and helped organize a 1997 march on Washington, D.C., to highlight multiracial issues, agrees.

“First of all, we don’t even refer to our pets as ‘others,’ so why impose that definition on a human?” he asks. “It’s a demeaning classification, whereas ‘multiracial’ indicates that a self-determined individual, of his or her own free will, has decided that, as we construe the construct of ‘race,’ he or she is a blended or multiracial individual — not at all tragically confused as to identity. Methinks the ‘O’ designation is meant to lead people to believe that multiracials don’t even exist much less self-identify as such.”

Separated but unequal

The effectiveness of Indiana’s law is also affected by a hybrid of reporting systems established by each agency. The Indiana Civil Rights Commission, for instance, collects information on incidents based on the dual race of the victim and in only some instances reports the information as such.

Most school districts collect information on Asian, Native American and multiracial students, but the Indiana Department of Education requires that they report it under only two categories, “Black” and “White and Other.” IDOE officials admit they “get around” the Legislature’s mandate for a multiracial classification by following federal reporting requirements, which they say supersede state law.

Education officials, however, say not all fault lies with the school districts or the state. Mary Tiede Wilhelmus, director of communications for the Indiana Department of Education, observes that fickle students often reduce the value of race data through inconsistent self-reporting.

“The problem you get, especially on ISTEP, is that kids report themselves differently on different days,” she says. “One day they’re Michael J. Fox. The next day they’re J. Michael Fox.” ISTEP, which stands for Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress, is a mandatory testing program for students in the third, sixth, eighth and 10th grades at public and private schools that seek state certification.

“The best way to track students and identify their specific needs is to assign each student a number that can be tracked throughout their education and beyond,” Wilhelmus says. “That’s the only way we can meet the needs of a kid who is deaf and multiracial.”

Mixed feelings

Multiracial activists, however, prefer to be left to their own devices in determining their race. A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, published in 1994 by Maria P.P. Root, an author of white and Asian descent, asserts the individual’s right to change racial identity as often as he or she likes and at his or her own discretion.

While Indiana officials maintain that reporting oversights in regard to multiracial residents often are unintentional, Byrd remains skeptical. He notes that some states with similar laws were reluctant to implement them until the federal OMB decided how it would handle classification of multiracial Americans on the 2000 Census.

“I suspect statewide chapters of groups like the NAACP have applied pressure on these agencies to conveniently overlook the mandate to collect the data or keep it buried,” he says. If indeed the multiracial category is being ignored intentionally at the request of civil rights organizations like the NAACP, Byrd says, then the law is a failure.

Byrd also isn’t hopeful that there is much that multiracial Americans can do to ensure compliance with Indiana’s law.

“The multiracial community has no political clout as was evident during the Census 2000 debate,” he says, “and the one organization that most resembles one being national in scope has been in bed with the NAACP from the beginning.”

But Rodrick Bohannan, president of the Greater Indianapolis Chapter of the NAACP, says Byrd is off base. He denies that either the local or national NAACP has an official policy against a multiracial classification. The national organization and its local chapters, however, have questioned state lawmakers and federal agencies about how statistics for people who choose more than one race would be collapsed into single race categories.

“If you don’t take these numbers into consideration,” he says, “you lose representation through redistricting.”

But self-reporting means that representation for any race is less than guaranteed. The Census Bureau counts anyone who selected a minority race on the 2000 Census toward the largest minority they claimed. The Indiana Department of Education, however, combines multiracial people in “White and Other.”

Brooklyn’s world

Brooklyn Hudson pirouettes into the spacious living room of her parents’ Westside home, wearing a leopard-print leotard and a lilac-colored tulle tutu. She turns a few cartwheels and rushes off to find a star-covered hennin, a medieval cone-shaped hat with a swath of lilac tulle draped from the back.

The young dancer’s stash of costumes is stored in her bedroom with her other treasures, including a bevy of stuffed animals, an autographed photo of Barbie and a trophy from a modeling event. At the end of her bed, which is covered with a PowerPuff Girls comforter, is a basket overflowing with baby dolls in black, white and a multitude of shades in between.

Ruddick, Brooklyn’s mother, recalls her own childhood in lily-white Plainfield. When she played with dolls, she never imagined that the baby she’d have one day would hardly resemble the toys she nurtured.

“We haven’t had a lot of big issues. We got lucky,” she says.

Even so, Ruddick says, her daughter is aware of “race,” but her understanding is limited to skin color. In Brooklyn’s eyes, her father is “black,” her mother is “white” and she is “peach.”

“She definitely doesn’t think she’s black. It’s just because of her skin color,” Ruddick says.

But Ruddick, who describes her daughter as “very social, the life of the party type,” is confident that Brooklyn will overcome any challenges she faces.

“Sometimes I worry about her forwardness, but then I think about the world, and I know it will help her,” she says. “Brooklyn seems a lot stronger than I am.”

Unlike older multiracial Hoosiers, Brooklyn Hudson has, throughout her life, had the legal ammunition to force government agencies that ask about her heritage to supply an adequate classification. But Hoosier lawmakers may need to amend the law so that the way information is collected and analyzed can better meet the complex fiscal and social needs for which classifications exist. If they do, Indiana may find itself ahead of the U.S. Census Bureau again.

rbibbs@nuvo.net