What Color Is Black?

And what color is white? The markers of racial identity are every conceivable hue -- and suddenly matters of ideology and attitude as much as pigmentation.

Solidarity is hard to find. One third of

Africans polled say that blacks should not be considered a single race.

Nearly 400 years after the first african came Ashore at Jamestown -- and 40 years after Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott -- Americans are still preoccupied with race. Race divides us, defines us and in a curious way unites us -- if only because we still think it matters. Race-based thinking permeates our law and policy, and the sense of racial grievance, voiced by blacks and whites alike, infects our politics. Blacks cleave to their role as history's victims; whites grumble about reverse discrimination. The national mood on race, as measured by NEWSWEEK'S latest poll, is bleak: 75 percent of whites -- and 86 percent of blacks -- say race relations are "only fair" or "poor."

But the world is changing anyway. By two other measures in the same NEWSWEEK Poll -- acceptance of interracial marriage and the willingness to reside in mixed-race neighborhoods -- tolerance has never been higher. The nation's racial dialogue, meanwhile, is changing so rapidly that the familiar din of black-white antagonism seems increasingly out of date. Partly because of immigration -- and partly because diversity is suddenly hip -- America is beginning to revise its two-way definition of race. Though this process will surely take years, it is already blurring our sense that racial identity is fixed, immutable and primarily a matter of skin colon What color is black? It is every conceivable shade and hue from tan to ebony -- and suddenly a matter of ideology and identity as much as pigmentation.

The politics of racial identity are public and deeply personal. Twenty-eight years after the last state anti-miscegenation law was struck down, an interracial generation is demanding its place at the American table (page 72). They are not the first biracial Americans; that honor belongs to youngsters who grew up in Colonial Jamestown. But they are the first to stake a claim to mainstream status, discomfiting in the process blacks and whites who are reluctant to reconsider familiar racial categories. They are aided by older cousins who, if nothing else, are changing the talk of the nation, producing powerful memoirs about life on the color line.