The closing years of the twentieth century
and the early years of the twenty-first have witnessed a renewal
and rearticulation of the United States's long-standing fascina-
tion with interracialism. ¹ Nowhere was this preoccupation with
cross-racialism more evident than in the 2000 census. Politicians
and census board officials wrangled over how best to quantify
racial intermixture, finally inviting respondents to check mul-
tiple boxes indicating their “mixed” racial status. ² Yet this is not
the first time the construction of the U. S. census has signaled a
watershed moment in the nation's long struggle to delineate
racial boundaries. The mid-nineteenth century was another
such dynamic period in census taking, when notions of black-
ness based on “one drop” of African ancestry were in formation.
Signal reforms were made to the 1850 survey that suggest an
earlier instance of an ongoing struggle over the construction of
racial difference and its interconnectedness with American iden-
tity. That year, for the first time in U. S. history, the individual
rather than the household was made the primary unit of analy-
sis. This single innovation transformed the count from a simple
apportionment tool to a complex system of data gathering in
which race—among other characteristics—was newly classified
and enumerated. Whereas 1840 census takers counted only
groupings of whites, free persons of color, and slaves, the 1850
schedule posed detailed questions about individual slaves and,

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