The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 4/8/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Caitlin Kinnett Elliott Lewis, a television journalist and author of "Fade: My Journeys in Multicultural America," discussed issues about interracial families on Tuesday evening in the LSC.

Defining race has never been simply a matter of black or white, and for journalist Elliot Lewis, deciphering race is not only a personal choice but one that's influenced by a person's generational standards.

Lewis, a multiracial American TV journalist, spoke to students Tuesday as a part of Mixed Race Week at CSU about the process by which people choose by which race to identify themselves in an increasingly blurred racial society.

"Racial identity is not a mathematical equation; it's a psychological process, and it unfolds differently in different people," Lewis said, explaining that before the Civil Rights Era, it was abnormal for a person to call themself multiracial -- a person who identifies with more than one race.

In the speech Lewis proposed five strategies that people use to define their identities. They can:

Choose to let society to classify them to one group,

Choose on their own initiative to belong to one group,

Try to embrace all heritages,

Reject them and form a new one, or

Choose to belong to one group but, symbolically or mentally, sympathize with the others.

From this he illustrated that each strategy is used differently by the individuals of different generations. Generations born before 1970 tend to classify themselves with one group, people born between 1970 and 1980 tend to accept or reject all, and people born after 1980 use all five.

Following the approval of a House of Representatives bill in 2000, which legally permitted people to identify themselves as multiracial on legal documents and college and financial applications among others, there was a spike in the national multiracial community.

Lewis' parents were both mixed-race by birth but chose to live a single-race lifestyle. Lewis, who wrote "Fade: My Journey in Multicultural America," has spent years discerning which group he belongs to and eventually accepted his multiracial character as both a Caucasian and black individual.

Krysta Atkinson, a freshman microbiology major and co-president of Shades of CSU, is a multiracial individual. For most of her life she claimed to be Mexican but accepted her father's Caucasian identity upon entering college.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools