CENSUS FORMS MAY INCLUDE MULTIRACIAL ID.Byline: Martha Martha, in the New Testament, friend of Jesus, sister of Mary and Lazarus of Bethany. In Christian literature, Martha has been a symbol of the active, as opposed to the contemplative, life. Feast: July 29. Martha personification of the busy housekeeper. Waggoner Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. When her fifth-grade teacher asked students to raise their hands to identify themselves by race, Mitzi Carter raised her hand twice - once for African-American and one for Asian. "She stopped and said, 'Mitzi, you can't raise your hand for both,' " recalled Carter, whose father is African-American and whose mother is Japanese Japanese (jăp'ənēz`), language of uncertain origin that is spoken by more than 125 million people, most of whom live in Japan. There are also many speakers of Japanese in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, parts of the United States, and . The class laughed. "I felt like an idiot," Carter said. "It shaped how I identified myself through middle school and high school." The identity she assumed while growing up in Houston was African-American. More recently, the 22-year-old senior at Duke University has identified herself as both African-American and Japanese. That idea - that people with more than one race in their ancestry an·ces·try n. pl. an·ces·tries 1. Ancestral descent or lineage. 2. Ancestors considered as a group. [Middle English auncestrie, alteration (influenced by can identify themselves that way - sounds simple enough. But those who prefer a multiracial mul·ti·ra·cial adj. 1. Made up of, involving, or acting on behalf of various races: a multiracial society. 2. Having ancestors of several or various races. identification have problems when it comes to filling out some government forms, particularly the U.S. census. Many of them plan to join a July 20 march in Washington to support a change in census forms. |
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