Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell in The Nation has an interesting article on the meaning of President Obama’s choice to identify as “black” on the census. On the form, you have the option to identify with more than one race, but the president did not. Professor Harris-Lacewell points out that Obama really does not fit the stereotypes of a black man and that his very existence creates a kind of “definitional crisis for whiteness”.

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It’s entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

20 years ago, this black man, fresh out of the Army, spent the summer of 1990 reviewing questionnaires for the U.S. Census. I lived on the North Side of Chicago,in Edgewater, a true melting pot with people not only of every race, but immigrants from every part of the world. We received a fair number of forms with multiple races checked off and hand-written explanations of why various choices were made that more resembled the answers to an essay question than a multiple choice questionnaire.

This caused no end of debate in the office as we went back and forth about how to properly log in the responses. There was no code for “Black/Asian/Hungarian,with a touch of Cherokee”.

Of course, race and ethnicity are complicated matters for many people. I wouldn’t pass anyone’s paper bag test, but there is surely white blood in my family. Should I check “black” and “white” on the form? What about my Nashville relatives, several of whom are light-skinned with freckles? What of my wife’s cousins,the children of a half-black, half-Hispanic mother and white father?

To me, the answer is simple:the census form is really about the federal government trying to figure out how to allocate resources. As the billboard near my home argues, how can the feds know that your community needs more teachers if it doesn’t know that there are more kids?  But for many of us, the census form raises questions of identity that are hard to ignore. That the president has placed a stake in the ground of his blackness is gratifying to some and irritating to others. The professor has a theory as to why. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.