Latinos Are Redefining Notions of Racial Identity : Census: 51% in California say they’re not white or any other race but hybrid Americans, just as America is a hybrid nation.

At a conference on minority health in Washington last year, a Census Bureau representative enlivened an otherwise tepid discussion on methodology with an observation about Latino census data: “Over half of all Hispanics failed to respond correctly to the question on race.”

A prominent Latino academic once complained that research on Latinos confused him. When he analyzed voter responses on certain key issues, he found that whites often lined up one way and blacks another, but Latinos invariably wound up all over the map. He mused that perhaps Latinos didn’t really exist.

The inability to locate Latinos vis-a-vis the mainstream of American society not only deprives them of full consideration and understanding as a major American group--and soon to become the country’s largest minority; it also points to the archaic assumptions that still dictate our discourse on race and ethnicity.

This country formed its racial dialogue out of the antagonistic relationships that Anglos had with African slaves and Native Americans. From the beginning, the dominant society generally believed that behavior was genetically determined and hence uniform in a given racial group. The attitude that a person had to belong to one race or the other became enshrined in policy, creating a racial scheme that political scientist Andrew Hacker calls “a rigid bifurcation.”

Whereas in many countries and cultures, a person of mixed ancestry could be referred to by using a term denoting hybridity, such as mestizo or mulatto , in the United States a single provable African ancestor has been sufficient to categorize a person as black.

It is not surprising, then, that Latino Americans, a wildly heterogeneous population whose history has been one of mixture and among whom mestizos are the rule rather than the exception, should continually elude attempts at ethnic reductionism. In the 1990 census, 51% of California Latinos stated that they were not white, black, Indian or Asian. Genetic descendants of all of the those groups, they categorized themselves, quite correctly, as “other.” That census officials consider this an “incorrect” answer indicates how strongly our national dialogue still demands the homogeneity and mutual exclusivity of racial and ethnic groups.

Whether it be derived from our early race relations or an even more ancient search for racial purity, a disdain for mixture haunts and inhibits American culture. Because it does not recognize hybridity, this country’s racial framework emphasizes separateness and offers no ground for mutual inclusion. The term half-breed still connotes inferiority; a hyphenated American is still considered less than an American; the “cult of ethnicity” is still blamed for tearing at the American social fabric.

It is hypocritical to glorify diversity while continuing to stress separateness. But it is not enough to simply invoke the American Creed, the great unifying principles of our political democracy, in an effort to bring together a varied American landscape. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. proclaims that any hope in a united America lies in rallying around our political ideals and institutions, but if, as sociologist Robert Bellah has argued, we no longer enjoy the cohesive purpose--or understand the moral meaning--of our institutions, we are in need of a new common bond.

As an addendum to the American Creed, an ideology of mestizaje may prove to be such a binding force. While emphasizing commonality, it lessens the importance of race and focuses on the future of a heterogeneous nation in search of a shared ideal of unity amid diversity.

Success in an increasingly diversified 21st-Century America necessitates the rethinking of our attitudes toward race. Latinos not only demonstrate the inadequacy of our current scheme; they also bring with them a notion of mestizaje that could help us all transcend the evilsof racialization, America’s historical fatal flaw, and to forge a new common identity.