I’m in the planning stages of a new presentation about questions of identity in genealogy. With that in my mind, I found a copy of LAS News (from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Illinois) waiting for me in my mailbox. I flipped to the first article, Thinking Outside the Boxes, and discovered it was about identity questions in the census and the question of ethnic and racial identity.
In early Federal censuses most people are simply numbers, counts of individuals in gender, age and race categories without names, but from 1850 onward, questions about race and ethnicity appear for people enumerated as individuals, not just as numbers in categories. I’ve mostly been concerned with how we reconstruct the identities of people in our past. There are other issues of identity brought to mind by the census. What identity did a person claim for themselves? What identity did the outside world give them? How could people specify that identity?
One can wonder if, when the census was actually enumerated by an enumerator, was a race simply assigned by the enumerator or was the question actually asked and the answer used? In 1850 a free person could be white, black or mulatto according to the census. In 1870 Chinese (meaning east Asian) and American Indian were added as possible answers. A person could be identified as one of these but not more, and there was no official way of specifying any other ethnic or racial identities. The only way to specify any racial mixture of any kind was mulatto, though in 1890 the terms “quadroon” (75% European and 25% African) and “octoroon” (12.5% African and the rest European) were added. How accurately such identities were recorded is something that one can question. That year Japanese was also added as a race. The motivations for recording such information can be questioned, and the categories themselves, no matter what we think of them, seem odd. Clearly racial terms like white and black, are mixed with ethnic terms like Japanese, and single terms for mixed races like octoroon.
Having this question and a restricted set of possible answers tells us something about the times, and they were times that gave us things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China from 1882 until 1943. The answers may have been related to what was of interest about people, but I suspect had little to do with how they would choose to identify themselves. Yet, within those constraints, people might still have some choice, and as we research we might find the need to be aware of how people might self-identify. Given discrimination, should we be surprised that someone who identified as white in one census, was identified as something else in an earlier census? No we shouldn’t. A child identified as something other than white, might realize later that if they could “pass” they could go farther in life than they could otherwise.
Ethnicity can drift as well. While it often is not explicitly stated, questions about place of birth, parents’ places of birth, language spoken and even surname all carry information about ethnicity and, if someone chose to change their ethnic identity, those answers would need to change. I’ve researched one person who gradually changed all those things over a period of decades, apparently experimenting a bit along the way. As we research, we might find it necessary to consider how a person might chose to identify, how they might be forced to identify, why those identities might be different, and why they might change. We might need to think about what attitudes and cultural and legal forces were present. Then we need to think about how that might affect our research.
Some people want to assert their unique background. Some people want to fit in. Often those are actually the same people in different circumstances or seeing those circumstances from different angles. Since the disappearance of terms like mulatto from the census, it has been nearly impossible to claim more than one race/ethnicity. Even writing in multiple choices in the space for “other” has resulted in only the first term entered being used.
In 1935 a judge ruled that Mexicans could not become citizens of the United States because they were not white. As one might imagine, many people, who would not have done so otherwise, chose to publicly identify themselves as white after that. There is a long history of trying to fit people into boxes, and preferably only one box at a time per person to keep it simple. That has a difficult time reflecting reality under any circumstances, but when the boxes change or circumstances and situations encourage movement between boxes, don’t be too surprised if your ancestors pop out of an unexpected box.