A Forced Identity

A student opens her exam booklet. Yes, it’s that time again. She has practiced a million times, but it never gets easier. Name, address and sex—no problem. But the final question is not so simple—she is asked to choose her race. Once again bureaucracy demands that she shed the complexity of her identity and simply “choose one.” “Only one?” she thinks to herself. Shakespeare’s famous quote, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” comes to mind. Squeezing into one racial box, choosing one race and denying another, and ultimately changing the way one has come to identify as a person, makes life for the multiracial individual more difficult than it ought to be.

Many institutions have come to understand the importance of racial complexities and have accommodated the need to “check all that apply.” For example, after much debate, the Census Bureau finally allowed respondents to identify all their racial groups on the 2000 Census. Even the common application for college admissions allows students to check more than one racial box. Multiracial students can breathe sighs of relief at not having to choose one parent over another and not having to superficially base their identities upon which box will reap more benefits.

Unfortunately, this relief is short-lived. Once a multiracial student gets to Harvard he finds that he’s been shoved back into one box. Upon registering for classes, at least 22 multiracial students found that Harvard had listed them as single-raced. They all clearly remember checking all that apply on their applications, as the common application requested. However, the registration site identified them as belonging to just one racial or ethnic group.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” says Michael Oshima ’08, a Russian-Japanese student at the College upon finding that the registration site identified him as Asian American. “I guess they chose whatever they needed more of.”

But since when is an institution allowed to “choose” a student’s race? Harvard proudly posts the class of 2008’s racial composition to incoming freshmen on the undergraduate admissions website. It celebrates the 8.9 percent African American, 4.1 percent Hispanic American, 3.1 percent Mexican American, 19.9 percent Asian American, and 1.1 percent Native American composition of the 2008 class and pats itself on the shoulder for recognizing diversity. However, the site doesn’t show the number of mixed race students or recognize that they even exist on campus. The college is clearly overlooking a significant minority within the minority—the multiracial students.

Though our society has long assumed that everyone identifies with one race, America is making strides towards acknowledging racial complexities. Nonetheless, many still find it difficult to not get sucked into thinking of race in the conventional manner. Living on a college campus doesn’t make this task easier.

“It’s really hard not to get sucked into the single-race track. As pre-frosh we step foot on campus and are immediately bombarded by members of Fuerza Latina or the Asian American Association or the Black Students Association who essentially claim us if we look a certain way or if our last names fit a certain category. Appearance and last name sometimes tell only half the story,” says a multiracial sophomore student who was also identified as single-raced on the registration site.

When adults look back at their college experience, they often describe it as a time when they began to find their identities. For multiracial students finding an identity is just as important but more difficult. Fortunately, there are sources on campus that explore the concept of “choosing sides” and provide opportunities for multiracial students to share stories about their families. Harvard provides nice and cozy settings for multiracial students to explore their identities with one another, but its cold institutional blindness to the existence of these students indicates that our society has not yet parted with its traditional mindset. A student shouldn’t have to choose whether to deny her father or her mother.



Sharlene Brown ’08 is a Social Studies concentrator in Winthrop House.