All these many years after the nation's wrenching confrontations over civil rights, you can still hear the clenched fist in Rick Olguin's voice as he declares, "I am a Chicano." And the firm resolve in Maxine Chan's as she corrects someone who has just called her an Oriental, "I am not a rug." And the calm certainty in Nona Brazier's as she talks about abandoned labels and concludes, "I will always refer to myself as an African American."

      Few things are as fundamental as what we call ourselves. The labels we use affect how others perceive us and how we see ourselves; they shape how we see others and how we want to be seen by them; they are used by those in power to define the rest even as they struggle to define themselves. They shape who we are. Little wonder then, that when the names we have always used for ourselves and for others start to change, as they are doing, we feel a tremor down the spine of our collective national consciousness.

     Is it African American or is it black? Should we use Hispanic or Latino? Native American or American Indian? What about white? What about Asian American? Then comes the underlying question that--depending on who does the asking and what spurred the question--can inspire understanding or provoke outrage: "Why can't we all just be Americans?"

     Language is political

     Today, more of us than ever come from somewhere else. More of us than ever have brown or black skins, not white ones. More of us than ever are demanding that the names people call us are respectful ones, ones we have chosen to best describe ourselves.

     "Language is political," says Guadalupe Friaz, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Washington. "When we talk about language we're talking about the relationships between people, and what people call each other reflects whatever tension and anxiety that society is going through."

     We've fought for power among ourselves for generations, and words have been a frequent weapon. We sling epithets that bruise as much as bricks and police batons. Nicknames for whole groups of people slide from slang to slur, gathering the power to maim psychologically. Some labels retain for generations the power to call up a host of stereotypes that dig and slice and kill the spirit. But sometimes the group at the receiving end of that abuse reclaims a label, like "black," effectively changing it from a negative term to a positive and proud one. "Change is constant," Friaz says. "Group relationships always change, so of course terminology is going to change. As people of color we don't have power, and we haven't had the power to name." But that, too, is changing.

     Black or African American?

     In 1967, Larry Gossett stopped using Negro and became black. Today, he's African American. Gossett, executive director of the Central Area Motivation Program, was then involved in the civil- rights struggle, and the switch came as the black-power and black-pride movement gained steam.

     "We were defining black as beautiful and not as something ugly," Gossett says. "It had a profound inspirational impact on the youth of the '60s." The new label was a rejection of the labels imposed by whites and the labels of his parents' generation--a radical reclaiming of a word that had been viewed as a slur.

     "It was revolutionary and emotionally wrenching because we had parents saying, `We've been Negroes and coloreds all our lives. Why are you calling yourselves black?'" Gossett says. "Black, in America and in the English language, had such a negative connotation that it scared our parents."

     The changes in the labels used by or for African Americans over the course of the country's history reflect the struggles between the dominant culture and other groups.
For centuries, negro--in the lower case--was the accepted label. But after Reconstruction there was a push by black leaders and the black press to give dignity to the name by capitalizing it--an effort that took 50 years.

     In the 1900s, "colored" competed with Negro as the preferred group name, and it lives on today in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910. Afro-American was first proposed in 1880, but it didn't catch on. Eventually Negro emerged as the preferred name, surviving until the late 1960s, when it was rejected by younger black people because of its associations with slavery.

     Three years ago, Gossett decided it was time for him to make another switch--this time to African American. "How you refer to yourselves as a people has social, historical and cultural significance," Gossett says. "I'm from the current school of thought which says that African American comes closest to describing who we are as a people."

     The change is rooted in the political growth of the African- American community, Gossett says, and was also prompted in part by a sense of identification with Africa--especially the struggles of black South Africans.

     For Gossett, it was again the reclaiming of a word that had been tarnished. Today Gossett uses African American and black interchangeably, but he believes African American will prevail. Although most people still use black, many community leaders agree.

     For Nona Brazier, the switch to African American happened further back. Like Gossett, Brazier used black as a reaction to her parents' use of Negro. But by the end of the 1960s, she had started to use African American. "I often refer to black folks and the black community, but I never refer to myself as a black American," says Brazier, who is co-owner of Northwest Recovery Systems, a recycling firm.

     Brazier's preference for African American is rooted in her direct ties to Africa. She has a business in Nigeria and feels an attachment to the land from which her ancestors came. "The fact that I refer to myself as an African American reflects my time," Brazier says. "It's based on myself, my life and times, and even if other labels emerge, I will always refer to myself as an African American...It doesn't matter what others call you, but it's very important what you call yourself."

     Native Americans or American Indians?

     As every child learns in grade school, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue to find India, and when he arrived in the New World, he mistakenly named the people Indians. Yet the name survives today. And to Joseph Brown, a Lakota elder who has worked with the homeless and street kids, Indian is just fine.

     "The word Indian identifies us," Brown says. "Indian covers a lot. A lot of Indians don't like to be called Indian because they're trying to be white men and they're prejudiced against themselves." But for others, especially those who are younger, Native American is the preferred label because it rejects the tragic historical associations that the word Indian carries.

     "The idea of calling people Native Americans appeals to me because we are native--more so than any other group," says Allethia Allen, an assistant professor of social work at the UW. "I would prefer that because the name Indian comes from Columbus."

     Others say there are no right or wrong choices.  "I think the majority feels comfortable with the word Indian," says Cecil James, a resource-management worker for the Yakima fisheries. "Each individual has their own definition of how they want to be called. When I talk in public, I identify myself as an Indian of the Yakima Nation, but it should be up to each person to decide."

     Allen, who is half Native American and part black and white, says she hasn't eliminated Indian from her own vocabulary.

     "People tend to do what the majority does," Allen says. "But people are getting much more distinctive about what they say about their heritage and their customs and very, very identified with their bloodline."

     While there seems to be no overwhelming majority for using either Indian or Native American, most agree that using tribal affiliations is usually preferred.

     "Traditionally, among Native Americans, we identified each other by our tribal affiliation, and very often people greet each other that way," says Allen, who is Mohawk and Mohican. "To me, the more clearly a person is described in terms of heritage, the better it is."

     Robert Eaglestaff, the principal of American Indian Heritage School in Seattle says: "Most Indian tribes describe themselves as The People or human beings. The Lakotas, my tribe, means the friendly people. The others are labels, and I take labels for what they're worth--with a grain of salt. But I know who I am."

     What about Asian Americans?

     Not long ago, Ron Chew, director of the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle's International District, was interviewing an elderly woman in Sequim about some of the Chinese people who settled on the Olympic Peninsula in the early days. She described them as Chinamen.

     "I didn't correct her," he says. "She grew up in another era and was frozen in time. Maybe in her time and her place that was not a derogatory term. But language evolves. What might be appropriate at one time might not be at another."

     Chinaman is not OK anymore, and neither is Oriental, although it's a term still used by some older Asians and many whites.  "Oriental has a negative connotation," says Maxine Chan, a Chinese American who works with the community for the Seattle Police Department. "It's very much the Fu Manchu, Suzy Wong thing. It speaks about the 'yellow peril,' and the 'yellow horde'.  If someone calls me that, I just say I'm not a rug."
While Asian American is all right, most people of Asian heritage would rather be identified by the country of their origin.

     "Asian Americans need to be divided into Japanese Americans or Chinese Americans or Korean Americans--just because they want to be," says Setsuko Buckley, a Japanese language teacher and multicultural education expert at Western Washington University in Bellingham. "Even Southeast Asians are different from each other--Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian--and they should have the option of being called what they want."

     Tomie Rogers, a UW medical student, says she's "half Japanese, half Swedish-Irish."
When she was younger, new friends often thought--based on her almond-shaped eyes and tall stature--she must be Native American. "I don't really take offense to whatever people call me," she says. "I don't really have much ethnic feeling, and I don't even know how I'm listed as a student. I often mark the 'other' box."

     Being considered Asian poses a problem for some Filipinos and Pacific Islanders: They aren't from the Asian continent and feel they shouldn't be put in that category. Many Filipinos have the Catholic religion, Spanish surnames and some cultural vestiges of their colonial days.  "Our biggest problem in the Filipino community, besides economics, is an identity crisis," says Fred Cordova, a historian, author and manager of the UW information-services office. "We've never had a chance to identify ourselves. The majority of our community here is made up of immigrants now, and they're very different from the ones who have been here a long time."

     Most of the Asian and Latino groups are trying to deal with the chaos created by large waves of immigrants in recent years. As each new group begins to settle itself in the United States, another new group comes pouring in. Many never come to think of themselves as full-fledged U.S. citizens and neither do their children. They continue to use the ethnic label they arrived with, identifying themselves as, say, Chinese--not Chinese American.

     "A lot of us just don't put on the American tag," says Chew. "For most of us, it's understood that we're here, and for some, particularly the older generation, when they say American, they mean white."

     Hispanic, Latino or Chicano?

     Like Asians, people whose ethnic roots are in Latin America most often identify themselves by the country of their forebears --Mexican American, Cuban American. If they have to be inclusive, they'll be Latino.  Even that is "an umbrella term that will suffer the same complications" with age as other broad ethnic identifications, says the UW's Guadalupe Friaz. "If you have to have a broad term, it's OK. At least it's not Eurocentric."

     If Lorenzo Alvarado is given the choice of Hispanic to mark on a document, he'll say that's what he is.  But when he marks the box that way, he feels he's losing his real heritage somehow. "I may be in America, but I'm a Mexican," says the Kent School District math teacher.  Hispanic--a tag made up by census workers to identify Latin Americans, Caribbean Islanders and Spaniards--is considered by most of those it would describe as too broad, irritatingly bureaucratic or just plain unacceptable.

     "My understanding is there is no place called Hispanica," says Eduardo Diaz, a social-service administrator. "I think it's degrading to be called something that doesn't exist. Even Latino is a misnomer. We don't speak Latin." Friaz calls herself a Chicana, a term--like a raised fist of defiance--that gathered power during the anti-war and civil- rights movements. Although the term has lost some of its punch, many baby boomers who called themselves Chicanos (or Chicana, the feminine form) in their youth still do today.

     For some Mexican Americans, the term became a survival tool to replace Mexican, which had become tainted with racism, says Rick Olguin, a UW ethnic-studies assistant professor. Now Mexican is back in favor. Javier Almaya, a native Colombian who has been in the United States for 10 years, is reasonably comfortable calling himself a Latino. But, like many Latin Americans, he considers himself a mestizo--a mixture of European and Indian ancestry. It's a term that's used widely in Central and South American but isn't readily recognized in this country.

     Such complexity is the rule in discussions of ethnic labels for Latinos.  Consider the employees of Diaz's Seattle office:  Diaz is the assistant manager of the King County Guardian Ad Litem program, a court advocacy program for children. A Puerto Rican who grew up in the Bronx in New York City, he says he feels degraded if he's called a Hispanic. But Cathy Ortiz, the office's support staff supervisor, whose grandparents still live in Mexicali, Baja California, says although Hispanic is OK with her, she'd rather be called an American of Mexican descent.  And Rita Amaro, an office worker, is a third-generation Mexican American who says people can call her Latina, although the word reminds her of "kind of an island, like Puerto Rico or Cuba."

     Minority, Non-white or People of color?

     When whites were clearly the dominant group in this country, it was easy to divide the population into majority and minority.  Not the most sensitive division, but a handy one for whites that reflected the existing power dynamics and neatly summed up who had the power and numbers and who didn't.  But as whites lose their numerical dominance, and non-white immigrants continue to come into the country, the racial makeup of the nation becomes even more complex.

     The balance is shifting. At the current rate of growth, the groups we consider minorities will collectively become the majority in this country in about 2050, according to recent projections by the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit Washington, D.C., agency that studies demographic trends. The bureau based its projection on 1990 census figures. There has long been a debate over what to call people who aren't white.

     In 1962, in The Negro History Bulletin, Eldridge Cleaver wrote of the term non-white:

     "The very words that we use indicate that we have set a premium on the Caucasian ideal of beauty. When discussing interracial relations, we speak of 'white people' and 'non-white people.' Notice that that particular choice of words gives precedence to 'white people'...making them a center--a standard-- to which "non-white" bears a negative relation. Notice the different connotation when we turn around and say "colored' and 'non-colored' or 'black' or non-black'."

     These days much of the discussion centers on the phrase "people of color," an alternative that has emerged in recent years. It has generated strong reactions--but so far little consensus among those to whom the phrase would be applied. "I don't like the term 'people of color,'" says Almaya, a health educator with the AIDS Prevention Project. "It doesn't give us any definition. It could be a person from Colombia or a person from Samoa, and they don't really have anything in common at all."

     But Olguin likes the phrase and argues that it was significantly different from the now discredited "colored people." 

     "It's viewing it from the top instead of the bottom," he says. "`Colored people' says 'inferior,' and to be a colored person is to define a people by their color. But people of color are persons with other attributes."

     But the changes won't come easily, and those who would claim the power to name themselves--and do away with long-entrenched labels--should expect resistance, says UW Professor Haig Bosmajian, whose book "The Language of Oppression" explores the power of language.

     Bosmajian says opposition usually comes from two groups: those who need to be persuaded that there is a problem, and those who have a psychological stake in maintaining their power and not acquiescing to the new labels.

     "It's more than etiquette, it's power," he says.

     White, Caucasian or Euro-American?

     White people don't tend to think much about what they're called. Since they're already the majority, they see no need to label themselves.

     "I don't think of it the way a black person would call himself black," says Nick Wilson, a Metro bus driver. "I think my grandparents were Irish, but I don't really even know. The only thing I can tell you about one of my grandfathers is that he was from Texas. Come to think of it, he was a Texan."

     "I don't think about it at all," says Jerry Edwards, a Seattle yacht broker. "And I guess that's as much an indication of the situation as anything...It points out how privileged we are compared to other racial groups." When pressed to make a choice between white and Caucasian, Edwards dislikes both. "Caucasian is too antiseptic somehow, and white is too racial."

     "It's easy in America to be white," says Pier van den Berghe, a UW sociology and anthropology professor. "It's easy for whites to forget they're white. But it's impossible for blacks to forget they're black."

     When van den Berghe is asked to check a box with his ethnic background, he marks 'Other' or 'African American.' He's white, but he can do that, he says, because he was born in South Africa.

     In the Southwest, whites are used to being called Anglos. But Anglo, introduced by Mexicans, means English. And many whites point out that England is not their homeland.
Many white people dislike being called Caucasian. Van den Berghe calls it "a pseudo-ethnic label" and he finds it "profoundly objectionable."

     Most modern scholars no longer use racial divisions. Genetically, people are people, and any differences between them only skin deep.  Friaz, the UW ethnic-studies professor, calls whites Euro- Americans, a term many whites consider contrived and unnecessary and in some cases erroneous.

     Friaz believes whites should start their own discussion of heritage.  "Everyone has an ethnicity," she says. "Euro-Americans have to start seeing themselves as ethnics. Most Euro-Americans are not proud of who they are. I ask my white students about their ethnicity and they say, 'I guess I'm American'. They say it an apologetic way."

     This denial of cultural background is something that wasn't widely seen until World War I, Friaz says. Until then, most whites sent their children to language schools after their regular classes to preserve their culture.  But with the onset of the war, becoming "American" meant proving your loyalty by rejecting all ties to other lands.

     "This is one of the few countries in the world that is willfully ignorant--which is a worse kind of ignorance," says the UW's Olguin. "In the rest of the world it's a virtue to speak different languages. Here if you speak three languages you're trilingual, and if you speak two languages you're bilingual, and if you speak one language, you're American."

     Why can't we all just be Americans?

     It seems like a simple enough question, but it can be fraught with insensitivity and misunderstanding depending on who hears it and who asks.  At best, it's a naive, idealistic attempt to say, "Why can't we quit categorizing each other?" If we call each other the same thing, it insists, other differences will dissolve.  But Friaz and some other people of color hear the question this way: "Why do you have to keep emphasizing your ethnicity, your color? Why can't you be white like us?"

     Those questions release a flood of perceived insensitivities: Why don't you adopt white values, white culture? Why don't you dress in Western styles, eat Western foods? Why press universities to offer ethnic studies in a curriculum served perfectly well by the study of Western culture?

     To many, whites and people of color alike, the questions are a sign of a new imagery. The melting pot is now an ethnic salad.

     The simplistic solution is to cut ethnic roots.

     "The day we can just call ourselves Americans comes after the day that we can figure out what we call each other," Olguin says. "After centuries of antagonism, it's naive to think that we can just forget all of that."

     "God, if we could all just be Americans," says Cordova. "But there is such a thing as reality, and it's borne out by the acts of the past weeks. There is racism in this country. As long as we have to call ourselves something, I'm proud to be a Filipino American. What you call yourself, hell, that's up to you."

     Cecilia Concepcion Alvarez, an artist, believes the white majority and the society it dominates eye the immigrating cultures with suspicion because the country has never been racially homogenous. Some whites fear--singly and collectively, consciously or not--giving any other culture or its people even a sliver of power. Minorities sometimes fear losing their personal identity to a nameless mass.

     "We have to talk about that. We can't just dismiss it," says Alvarez. "A lot of people have been dismissed in the past. It's not cultural; it's not even necessarily genetics. It's human, and the discussion has to be how we can get together."

     So how do we get together?

     One way is to recognize and respect each other's identity, rather than insist everyone adopt the same identity. Nona Brazier argues that clinging to separate labels does not necessarily detract from the idea of a united people.  "One of the best things about this country is the variety," she says. "I think people need to accentuate the American, but people also need to accentuate the love of their history and culture."

     The UW's Bosmajian offers the following anecdote:

     During the late 1960s, at a panel discussion on the Vietnam War, one of the panelists used the phrase "our colored boys," a phrase that Bosmajian points out is triply offensive. The phrase erected a wall that divided the participants along racial lines and blocked further communication.

     "You're not going to change race relations by changing the language," Bosmajian says. "You're not going to get jobs by changing the language. But changing the language is one of the steps that has to be taken.... At least we'd be talking to each other."

     Census can't make sense out of race: Choices change over years

     Blame the Census Bureau for some of the confusion over what we call each other. The system set up by white Americans showed an obsession with race from the start. But the federal bureaucracy still hasn't settled on a set of labels for its racially diverse citizenry.  In 1870 the U.S. Bureau of the Census asked citizens whether they were White, Colored (Blacks), Colored (Mulattoes), Chinese or Indian.

     By 1950, the choice was simply: white, black or other.

     By 1980, the list was lengthy: white, black, Hispanic, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, American Indian, Asian Indian, Hawaiian, Guamanian, Samoan, Eskimo, Aleut or Other.

     By 1990 the list was not only lengthy, but complicated.

     The form everyone was asked to answer contained categories within categories. A person could chose from white, black or Negro, Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, Asian or Pacific Islander and other.  People were asked in a separate box altogether if they were of Spanish or Hispanic origin. If so, they could mark that they were Mexican, Mexican-American or Chicano; Puerto Rican; Cuban; or other. Under "other" was a box to write a country of origin.

     Most census years from 1850 to 1920, African Americans were counted as either black or mulatto (half black); in 1880, they also could have been quadroon (one-quarter black) or octoroon (one-eighth black). For the Native Americans, the degree of ancestry was by "blood quantum" and was expressed only in fractions. It didn't matter how few drops of African or Indian blood ran through a body; the slightest fraction meant the person was not white.

     According to the book "Racially Mixed People in America," a collection of essays published this year and edited by Maria P.P. Root, a University of Washington associate professor, the majority of Americans are of mixed racial stock--including many whites.
Experts estimate that from 30 percent to 70 percent of the present African-American population has partial Indian ancestry.

     If the census hadn't discouraged people from listing more than one ethnic origin, and if the white culture hadn't insisted on black classification for anyone with any degree of African ancestry, many more people would know of their Indian heritage, according to one expert.

     Here are some facts about our racial labels:

     - According to one source, there are about 100 ethnic groups in the United States, people claiming the same racial, religious, national or regional roots.

     - Nineteenth century scholars searching for a way to categorize the races decided there were three: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. That's where the term Caucasian comes from. Most anthropologists today consider racial labels misleading at best and prefer to use ethnic identity or biological heritage.

     - Negro comes from the Spanish word for black; mulatto from the Spanish word for mule, a hybrid creature that's part horse, part donkey.

     - Mexico hasn't asked for racial identity on its census for 70 years. The vast majority of Mexicans are comfortable with being mestizo, a mixture of Indian and European.

     - Black has been the term of preference--by whites anyway-- for African Americans off and on since slavery days.

     - Chicano, a slang term for Mexican Americans, came into use in the Spanish-speaking barrios of this nation's cities in the 1940s and was used widely in the 1960s as an expression of pride and defiance. It probably derived from the derogative Spanish word for mestizos, Xicanos (SheeCAnos), which came from the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs' word for Mexico, Mexica (MeshEEca).

     - Hispanic, which encompasses all people with Spanish surnames, came into use in this country only about 10 years ago and was an invention of census takers.