I can’t begin to say how much I genuinely enjoyed filling out our census form this week, and writing down my daughter’s name. Her first census; my wife’s fourth, my fifth. Since my Colombian-born mother-in-law lives with us, she was included as well. It is her fourth census since immigrating to California just weeks before my wife was born.
And my wife and I had fun checking off the various boxes around racial identity. My wife, mother-in-law, and daughter were noted as having “Hispanic” origin, and we wrote in “Colombian” for each. My wife checked both the “white” and “black” boxes, honoring her mixed heritage (her maternal grandfather was from Africa), and we did the same for Heloise’s identity. My mother-in-law wanted to be noted as black and Colombian, but not white.
Three of my daughter’s four grandparents are white. Heloise would, under the “one drop” rule of the Old South, have qualified as an “octoroon”. It seems like so little, and yet Homer Plessy — the plaintiff in the famous 1896 Jim Crow case that bears his name — was also an octoroon. The discrimination and segregation he endured led him to file the lawsuit that would ultimately fail. As any historian of race will tell you, those with the same amount of black heritage as my daughter have known their share of bigotry. And because of that history, and because they asked, the census bureau will know that my child is black — and white. And she is much more than that as well.
When she is older, I will quote to Heloise — when the subject of her ancestry comes up — a line my great-great-grandfather wrote in his memoirs: My children, let your modest pride be this: you come of sturdy stock. He wasn’t referring to the size of our frames. Rather, he was rebuking gently and in advance any notions of aristocratic pretension that might arise. Heloise will learn that, and be reminded of another (not entiirely true) family saying as well: “Dukes don’t emigrate.”
She already has a few words in Spanish and English (when she wants my wife’s breast, she points and says “leche”). We hope to keep her bilingual, and just as importantly, to keep her a citizen of the world. She belongs not to America, nor to Britain, nor to Colombia, but to something bigger and grander. At some point, I’ll inflict on her Edward Abbey:
My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language or culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
(On the rare occasions when I hear the call to place my hand over my heart and recite what American schoolchildren are still regularly compelled to say, that’s what I mutter under my breath. Politely, in an OKOP way.)
And knowing my family’s way, within another century, should we still have such categories on our census forms, my daughter’s grandchildren will be entitled to check every damn box.
If three of her four grandparents are white, she might be a quadroon, not an octoroon. Octoroon, if I remember correctly, meant that seven of one’s eight great grandparents were white…
My mother-in-law is half black. Her father was from Nigeria, her mother a mix of Spanish and indigenous Colombian. Jim Crow laws generally considered Hispanics to be white, so they would have considered her to be mulatto, my wife a quadroon, and Heloise an octoroon. Crazy stuff.
Yep, she would be a “quadroon.” I’m in the middle of a really awesome fiction series set in New Orleans in 1833 and the main character is the of the opposite mix–three black grandparents and one white grandparents–and he’s known as a sambo. “Octoroon” is as defined above, and the term for a person with fifteen white great-great grandparents and one black one (ie, the child of an octoroon and a white) was a musterfino.
I got the census form in the mail too; I suppose from a heritage standpoint I could check both “white” and “Native American,” as my father’s father was a pureblood Apache, but I never have checked anything but “white” on any box on any form, ever. I am a blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonde raised by a blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonde whose entire family for countless generations hailed from Northern Europe til they emigrated here; it seems pretentious somehow to claim a nonwhite status that is nothing more than genetic. I wouldn’t know anything Apache if it bit me in the butt.
An interesting side note: Legal racial classification in the US does still exist for Native Americans; this classification system is know as “the Blood Quantum laws.” The biggest difference between the Blood Quantum laws and the Jim Crow laws is that the Blood Quantum laws are designed to benefit persons of Native American heritage, unlike the Jim Crow laws which were designed to harm them–but it’s still interesting that laws defining a person’s legal status based on race are still on the books.
Sorry, I was typing that while you were posting! I didn’t see the more detailed information you provided in your comment before I posted mine, Hugo.