Multi-Ethnic Student Population Growing Fast In Oregon
As Oregon kids head off to summer vacation this week, they leave behind public schools with a rapidly changing student body. And one statistic really captures how they’re changing.Oregon’s population of students identified as “multi-ethnic” grew by 22 percent last year. As Rob Manning learned when he sat down with a group of multi-ethnic students, these kids bring a very different sense of identity to school. Orley Estrada: “I’m Mexican, Native, and white.”Stratton Hager-Reedy: “I’m white and Native American.” That’s Stratton Hagger-Reedy, and Orley Estrada before that. They’re two of many self-described multi-ethnic students from Portland’s Marshall High School.The campus has its own complicated identity, drawing students from the families of recent immigrants from Mexico, Asia, and Eastern Europe to join black and white families that have been in Portland a lot longer. Dominique Butler is a junior at Marshall’s Renaissance Arts Academy. Dominique Butler: “I’m black and Native American.”But when she was younger, she identified more as black.Dominique Butler: “I think it’s hard because when people think you’re just one race, they think you have to stick to that culture. So, for me, I’m stuck in two worlds. I have to figure out who I am – do I settle for the Black culture, or do you I settle for the Native American culture? And it’s hard for me to settle out what I really am.” There are now more than 16-thousand multi-ethnic students in Oregon. That’s more than the number of Native American students and it rivals the Black student population. The state has only had a multi-ethnic category for a few years – and the increasing number is driven both by new students and by existing students who have switched to “multi-ethnic.” In spite of their varied backgrounds, these Marshall High students share a sense of identity they say is clearly different from their friends who come from mono-racial backgrounds. Part of what gets complicated, multiethnic students say, is that their peers tend to want to pigeonhole them into a single ethnicity. Like freshman Desmond Miller.Desmond Miller: “Uh, black and white.” And he feels pressure to act in keeping with one race or the other.Desmond Miller: “I came out looking black (laughing) – people are like – oh, why don’t you wear baggy pants and crap like that. Why don’t you say the ‘n-word’? Because it’s not how I like to act. I have a friend who’s half-black and half-white, but he came out looking white, and he thinks of himself more as white. I think of myself more – I’m white and black, but I think of myself a little bit more as black, because I came out like that.” Appearance always matters in high school, but imagine how much harder it is for multiethnic kids.Adalea Johnson: “German, white, and Native American.” Adalea Johnson has tan skin, dark brown hair and brown eyes. That’s not how her sisters look. Adalea Johnson: “All my siblings take more the white, instead of the Indian, I take more of the Indian, like my skin and everything. More people kind of suspect me as an Indian, than my sisters, because they’re really, really pale white, you know, German – blonde hair, blue eyes.” And because she looks more Native American, Johnson says she’s more interested in that side of her family tree.Adalea Johnson: “Like, my Dad, he teaches us all this stuff, and we’re related to some really powerful Indians back then.” The teenagers say that their view of their own ethnic identity can shift over the years – sometimes depending on where they are, or how they look. “I’m Vietnamese and Mexican.”Samarra Rodarte grew up mostly among Mexican families in California.. Samarra Rodarte: “When I was little, and I lived in LA, it’s like, mostly the Mexican people looked, like, brown and dark, and you can tell. And the Asian people looked pale. And like, I was really, really dark back then. But then if I cut my hair, I would look different. But today, Rodarte says, people assume she’s entirely Asian. Samarra Rodarte: “Pretty much, people don’t want to ask ‘what race are you?’.” Rodarte says she doesn’t really mind if people ask, so long as they’re not rude about it. But these kids do have a problem when they’re asked about race on forms they have to hand in for school, or something. In the past, when there was no “multi-ethnic” or “multi-racial” option, Rodarte says she’d mark several boxes, even if the forms asked her just to mark one. And it’s even harder for freshman Diamond McWoods.Diamond McWoods: “I’m black, white, Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican.” She says sometimes even when there is one box that might apply – it’s not necessarily a label she wants attached to her name. Diamond McWoods: “I don’t remember what the form was for – I don’t really read them, I just fill them out – but like on the racial box, it had black, African American and everything, and then it had ‘other’ and it had ‘mixed breed’.” Samarra Rodarte asks a broader question – why is that race box on the form at all? Samarra Rodarte: “Like whenever I look at the test things, it’ll say, like - grade makes sense, and everything else makes sense but why does it matter what race or gender I am when I’m taking a test, or a bus survey?”After pausing for a second, she acknowledged that on some level, that race does matter. As for Dominique Butler…Dominique Butler: “For me, I think it doesn’t matter but people make it matter.” Butler and her fellow students say ethnicity matters especially in one case: they’re proud to have a multi-racial president. Samarra Rodarte: “I never thought of that.”Samarra Rodarte. Samarra Rodarte: “I never, ever heard people anybody say he’s the first multi-racial president.”Rodarte says she’d always heard people say Obama was “black.”
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