Introduction

A few days after the Million Man March and the classroom discussion of race, Ms. Stein led her Life and Health classes in an activity in which students were instructed to stand up from their seats to indicate their affiliation with a variety of panethnic labels: African American, Asian American, European American, Latino, and Native American. Many teenagers of all backgrounds – indeed, the majority, in some classes – chose not to stand up to indicate their ethnoracial identity, but rose en masse in response to Ms. Stein’s final question, “How many of you prefer not to be racially identified?” The unease these young people displayed about being ethnoracially categorized recalled to my mind a student’s comment during the class discussion earlier that week: “I’m white, but I don’t really identify with my race.”

In the previous two chapters, I examined how white youth at Bay City High negotiated race in talk about friendship on the one hand and in narratives of racial conflict on the other. In this chapter, I show that even the apparently simple act of ethnoracial self-labeling presented similar interactional challenges, particularly for white students. The problem of classifying the self ethnoracially was not unique to classroom activities such as the one described above. Rather, it was an issue that students confronted throughout their academic careers. Although youth at Bay City High claimed a wide range of identities, at the time of the study the official ethnoracial categories used by the school in reporting the demographic breakdown of its student body were far more limited: American Indian, Asian, Filipino, Hispanic, Black, and White, terms that were clearly inadequate to capture the school’s racial and ethnic complexity. Outside the institutional context of record keeping, however, teenagers had more freedom to name and negotiate their own identities and often classified themselves ethnoracially either on their own initiative or when called upon to do so by peers. The terms young people used to label themselves and others in such contexts, like the school’s labels, reflected the wider ideology of race and ethnicity in US culture (Williams 1989) in variously drawing on such factors as skin color (e.g., Black), linguistic background (e.g., Hispanic), national heritage (e.g., Filipino), and geography (e.g., Asian).