The Changing Face of America

Check out Lise Funderburg's essay The Changing Face of America and the accompanying interactive gallery of portraits by photographer Martin Schoeller.

Funderburg writes about the experiences of multiracial people and many themes in her essay are things we've been hearing in the oral history interviews and public dialogues about mixed heritage that CBBG has hosted:

"Although the multiple-race option is still rooted in that taxonomy, it introduces the factor of self-determination. It’s a step toward fixing a categorization system that, paradoxically, is both erroneous (since geneticists have demonstrated that race is biologically not a reality) and essential (since living with race and racism is). The tracking of race is used both to enforce antidiscrimination laws and to identify health issues specific to certain populations."

The captions beneath Martin Schoeller's photographs include how each person self-identifies, for example "Mexican and Saudi," and what box s/he checked on the U.S. Census, "Some Other Race," and also where they are from, in this case, Brooklyn!  This reminds me of Kip Fulbeck's The Hapa Project  and also about exciting new developments with the the race/ethnicitiy categories for the next U.S. Census in 2020.  You can watch Nicholas A. Jones explain the new plan for the 2020 Census here.