High intermarriage rates, massive waves of immigration, and the easing of restrictions on global travel are blurring racial and ethnic boundaries more than ever. This was highlighted in 1997 when, in an interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show after he won the Masters, golfer Tiger Woods identified himself as "Cablinasian" -- a word he himself coined to describe the mixture of Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian in his family tree.
Concepts of race and identity have become so complicated that we no longer have an effective vocabulary to describe them, as Woods realized. Not only has this become troublesome for individuals, it has become problematic for the state. American census-takers have become hard-pressed to establish categories for race and ethnicity. How should the daughter of a Singaporean Chinese-American mother and a half-French national, half Malay-American father identify herself when classifying her race on a census form? Beyond the question of checking the right box, individuals must ask themselves the difficult question of "Who am I?"
A few hundred years ago, the racial mix in America consisted largely of whites, blacks and Indians, but the need for labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Since then, large numbers of Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners, South Americans and other groups have also settled in the U.S. and created a huge variety of potential racial and ethnic combinations. People of Asian heritage have played an important and ambivalent role in this history of immigration: They are often stereotyped in American society as paragons of success, creating feverish competition for admission to good colleges, but memories of "the yellow peril" and internment camps follow close behind.
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