The resurgent debate over race in America continues to fixate on black and white relations, as if the only way we can understand who we are is by positioning ourselves on a black and white checkerboard. The reality on the street has long been more complex and fluid, and our language needs to encompass it. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father," is an essayist for the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.

Since the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, many Americans have voiced pessimism about race relations. Tired clichés resurface. Like: We are a nation polarized by race. There are two Americas, one white, one black. ...

Beyond such language and official hand wringing, on the real American street, there is evidence of complexity and mixture. There are Americans who are neither black nor white. In the American crowd are Chinese faces, Indians, Samoans, Guatemalans.

Increasingly, there are Americans who say they belong to more than one race. In Washington the Bureau of Labor Statistics is considering a new "multi-racial" category for future surveys. The Census Bureau estimates that there are two million children of inter-racial unions. In fact, there are many millions more. For example, most of the 24 million Americans we call Hispanic are of mixed race.

A few weeks ago, thousands of Americans lined up to buy the autobiography of Colin Powell. Gen. Powell tells us early in his book that his ancestors carried a variety of blood lines: African, English, Scotch, Irish, and Indian. Why, then, do most Americans think of Colin Powell as "black"?

In French Louisiana and, even more commonly, in Latin America, there was an early colonial awareness of racial mixtures. Terms like Quadroon, mulatto, mestizo, etc., indicated the possibilities. Anglo-America had no such categories. Which is why, after more than 200 years, we have only the black and white checkerboard.

The United States has lived less easily than Latin America with the fact of miscegenation. For generations, there was rape, romance, marriage among the races in America. And not only among black and white. The story of the Indian and black marriage in America is one little told in our history books.

Where do the children of Nicole Brown and O.J. Simpson sit on the American white and black checkerboard? The Census Bureau reports that today 66 percent of the children of black-white marriages describe themselves as black. In other words, the child must choose one parent over the other.

In the anti-black south of segregated lunch counters and colored-only water fountains, any recognizable measure of African blood made you "black." You were forced to the back of the bus. Oddly enough, that same racist logic has become internalized decades later by the descendants and victims of that earlier racist America. Black Americans tell me today that they are black, regardless of any racial mix. It's not a question of choice, as long as the policeman or the banker or the realtor sees them as black.

Editorial writers, civil rights activists, politicians and pundits insist on describing a black and white Los Angeles. But LA, the largest Hispanic city in the United States, is therefore the most racially mixed. The Hispanic majority in Los Angeles carries a mixture of Indian and Spaniard, with African and Asian. One can, after all, be Hispanic and still carry the blood of any race in the world.

I grew up chagrined by talk of a black and white America. All of my life I have heard it. And as someone who felt himself neither white nor black I assumed such talk was a family quarrel. It went over my head when I was a boy. Today, I sense a weird nostalgia in such talk. And a vanity. Many black and white Americans seem unwilling to imagine an America peopled by anyone but each other.

Or is it a case of white insistence on remaining at the center of the racial debate? In fact, the most interesting questions about race right now have to do with racial meetings where the white is not even there. Guatemalans working for Koreans in Los Angeles, Filipinos and Samoans feuding in a San Francisco high school.

Despite the public gloom over race, there is reason to hope. The other day I met a girl, a high school student, who told me that she belonged to no one race. The daughter of a marriage of Africa and Mexico, she proclaimed herself a "blaxican." She is the prophet announcing the United Colors of Benetton.

One of the reasons why affirmative action will break down in coming months, I predict, is that racial identity is more fluid in America than we have hitherto recognized.

What race are you? Are you white? Are you Hispanic? Are you black? Are you a Pacific Islander? Are you Asian? I tell students all the time now to mark "yes" to everything. Yes, I am black. Soy negro. Yes, I am white. Yes, I am Chinese -- soy Chino. Yes!