She doesn't like to check the multiracial box. "It erases everything," she says.

She doesn't like biracial, either. Or mixed. It's not her identity.

"There's only one race," she says, "and that's the human race."

"I am a descendant of a stolen African and Irish and English immigrants. That makes me black - and white - in America.

Blackness and culture?

Biany Perez, 31, loves Michael Jackson but she doesn't know the Jackson Five. She didn't know that "Good Times" was a television show about a black family struggling to survive in south Chicago. Nor was she able to pick up certain colloquialisms in the English spoken by the black kids in the Bronx, where she grew up the daughter of Dominican parents.

Some people questioned Perez's blackness because she didn't fit into their definition of black.

She spoke only Spanish at home. She watched Telemundo and listened to Puerto Rican boy band Menudo.

She wasn't black enough because she was Latina and not Latina enough because she was black.

"The way I look shakes the image of Latina," says Perez, a program manager at a nonprofit in Philadelphia. "As I started getting older, I felt more comfortable in my skin."

Now, she calls herself Afro-Domincan.

"I think black is a broader definition I also embrace," she says. "Black is more than just saying that I am an African in America. It's political.

"It's about me connecting myself to my ancestors."

For Perez, black is about empowerment.

Colorism

Creole identity is a complicated thing in Louisiana, says Kristina Robinson, 29, of New Orleans.

It's an ethnicity, a cultural designation for people descended from colonial settlers in Louisiana, mainly of French and Latin lineage.

The term Creole was claimed by the French and Spanish settlers in colonial times but it also referred to Africans and people who were a mixture of races. Those mixed-race descendants became a unique racial group and sometimes even included Native American heritage.

But in popular representation, Robinson says Creole has come to be defined as skin color.

She doesn't want to deny the rich Creole history but she doesn't identify as such if it means moving away from her blackness.

Black people think that her embrace of Creole means a rejection of being black.

Race equals identity, or not?

Race is a social construct; identity is personal.

That's how James Bartlett, 31, views it.

"I'm black, I'm biracial," he says of his black father and Irish mother, who met and married in Louisville, Kentucky, just a few years after a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.