Multiracial Choices

Re “Multiracialism: Vive la Difference,” Commentary, Nov. 11:

Like Karen Grigsby Bates, I was pleased when the government decided to allow multiracial identification. I am Caucasian and Hawaiian, and in my youth particularly, I recall the dilemma of checking boxes on tests, college applications, government forms--white? Asian? other?--and there was no “Asian/Pacific islander” category to choose from, back then.

As a young person of mixed heritage, searching for an identity as all young people do, I often felt I didn’t belong anywhere in a society which forces its people to choose one race or another. When I claimed myself Caucasian, I felt I was betraying my Hawaiian mother. Likewise, I denied my father when I did not claim Caucasian. And what kind of message does it send when you force a person to identify himself as a faceless “other”?

It is obvious that those groups which bewail this change have their own political and financial reasons for maintaining division between the races. Oh, and on the next census, hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians in the U.S. will be able to check the brand-new box labeled “Hawaiian”!

DUKE McADOW

Van Nuys