BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

A casual observer on college campuses today easily can find visual confirmation of one of the more recent issues to emerge in the field of ethnic studies.

"All you have to do," according to Stanford sociologist C. Matthew Snipp, "is walk across the Stanford campus and you [will] see these kids who look vaguely Hispanic or faintly Asian. They are racially very ambiguous in terms of outward appearances because one parent is black or Hispanic, another parent is Asian or white. And when these kids come to identify themselves, it's a hard choice, particularly when you have a federal government that has said you've got one race in your life, and that's what you're going to report."

A demographer who joined Stanford's sociology department in 1996, Snipp is one of a handful of scholars whose work has shown that Americans' racial or ethnic identities are becoming more complex, changeable and subject to interest-based mobilization. The recent history of American Indians offers a clue to the future for other groups, Snipp says. After 500 years of declining numbers, American Indians are now more numerous than they have been since the federation of the 13 colonies. Urban migration, which has led to more marriages across traditional racial categories, and changing views of their own ethnic heritages appear to be major reasons for their demographic resurgence.

An overlooked dimension of our heterogeneous society "involves persons who may toggle between several identities as the need arises," says Snipp, an enrolled member of the Oklahoma Cherokee nation who grew up in the postwar '50s in California's San Joaquin Valley, where his father worked in the Bakersfield oil fields.

Thousands of Americans have "toggled" since 1960, when the United States began asking citizens to identify their own race in the decennial census. Between 1970 and 1980, the census recorded a 72 percent increase in the number of American Indians, for example. The Indian population, which some believed to be nearing extinction, is still growing. Today there
are more than 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives, half of whom live in multi-ethnic urban areas. More than half of the married adults among them are married to someone who does not identify him or herself as an Indian.

Such changes pose challenges for census takers and for public policies, such as affirmative action, that use racial identity to allocate resources or opportunities.

"The census bureau's original take on this was that the data were wrong ­ that people who were changing their identity weren't real Indians," Snipp says about discussions he had with census officials in the early 1980s. Demographers eventually attributed 28 percent of the 1980 census increase in American Indians to natural phenomena ­ higher birth rates and longer life spans ­ and misunderstandings:

"There was a large increase of Indians, for example, in a suburb of New Jersey. It turned out they were Asian Indians. They had lived in America long enough to be American citizens and thought they were American Indians," he says.

But an increase of 600,000 people from one census to the next was too large to attribute to widespread misunderstandings. "In order to say [some] people aren't 'real' Indians, you have to establish what a real Indian is, and that is a problem in its own right," Snipp says.

In other words, the government should not assume that people make "errors" when answering questions about their ethnic identity but that people submit "corrections" when the questions they are asked change slightly or their understanding of their own identity changes.

Changing racial stigmas and preferences affect the way people identify themselves. In Snipp's grandparents' generation, for example, it was not uncommon for Indian children, many of them educated in boarding schools, to be punished by caretakers or teachers for speaking their own language. The 1960s and '70s saw a resurgence of ethnic pride and a "pan-Indian" movement in America that probably prompted many in this age group, as well as younger Indians, to be more public about their Indian identities and to re-establish ties with Indian communities.

Racial laws play a role in how people conceive their identity. In Oklahoma, the state with the largest Indian population and where Snipp's family visited during his youth, he met Indians who viewed themselves as "a darker version of white."

"The Oklahoma constitution mandated, for all intents and purposes, that Indians could be counted as white people," he says. "Where there were segregated facilities, they could sit in the white section."

Interracial marriage is another substantial factor. Figures about multiracial ancestry are scarce, but census data indicate that interracial marriages among all Americans rose by more than 800 percent between 1960 and 1990. First-generation immigrants often have spouses when they arrive or connections to marriage markets in their home country, but intermarriage increases with later > generations. Large cities bring together a diverse collection of potential partners, thus making intermarriage more likely as the nation becomes less rural. According to the New York Times, roughly one in 25 American married couples is interracial and "there are at least three million children of mixed race parentage in the U.S ­ not including the millions of Hispanic mestizos and black Americans who have European and Indian ancestors."

Another analysis of the 1990 census indicates that about 31 percent of native-born Hispanic spouses, ages 25 to 34, are married to others who identify themselves as white. The numbers are higher for Asians: About 45 percent of native-born Asian wives and 36 percent of native-born Asian husbands fall into that category. The highest rate is among American Indians: About 53 percent married whites. The lowest intermarriage rates are among African Americans, but they are also rising.

This issue has prompted organizations of multiracial Americans and their parents to demand that Congress permit multiracial identifications in the year 2000 census. Earlier this year, the Office of Management and Budget changed the instructions for the census and other government forms. The government now will ask people to check all races that apply. How to tally the results has yet to be decided.

"The bureau thinks the change probably won't impact their counts very much," says Snipp, who is a member of an advisory board on racial enumeration to the census bureau. But preliminary sampling indicated that the impact would be much larger if the government decided to include a category called "multiracial." In the sample surveys some people changed their identities from one time to the next, depending upon how the question was asked.

At a meeting of the advisory board last December, the board wondered how to tally those who will say they are several races.

There also have been allegations of ethnic fraud in states where universities give some preferences to underrepresented minorities. The Detroit Free Press, for instance, published stories in 1992 alleging fraud by several dozen University of Michigan students who claimed to be American Indian, perhaps only to get free tuition under the university's policy. Some argue that employers, educational institutions and government agencies should verify ethnicity claims.

"Self-identification is a problem for disadvantaged groups, in the sense that you have people who fraudulently claim to be part of the group" to obtain benefits, Snipp says. Policies based on self-identification "work to the benefit of the federal government and employers because it absolves them of the responsibility of verifying these claims. But trying to adjudicate or arbitrate a claim that someone is more entitled than someone else would be a nightmare."

The pitfalls of trying to establish a pseudo-scientific way of measuring ethnicity is something American Indians already have faced because of treaties with the U.S. government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has an elaborate structure for determining eligibility for tribal benefits on the basis of tribal ancestry, but it is fraught with problems and controversies. "I guess my own take is that you allow people to identify and you hope people will identify truthfully in terms of adopting a category that is meaningful to them," Snipp says.

Given the problems, some have urged the government to drop attempts to enumerate races or ethnic groups. Civil rights groups requested ending racial designations in the 1970 census. "At the last minute, they realized that if you didn't ask questions about race, you would never be able to show that black people have more unemployment, worse health, lower incomes and on and on," Snipp says.

"Racial differences exist, and they don't exist because we happen to ask questions about them.

"I don't think the difficulties are a justification for dismantling programs like affirmative action. The programs exist because of the importance of race and the harm that has been done as a consequence of segregation, or what you might think of as the American system of apartheid that existed for 150 years," he adds. ST