(Name-mce) ListServ On Race and the Census: Struggling With Categories That No Longer Apply

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Editorial Observer

On Race and the Census: Struggling With Categories That No Longer Apply

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/opinion/05mon4.html?th&emc=th

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: February 5, 2007  New York Times

Imagine the Census Bureau announcing that it would end the practice of
asking people to identify themselves by race beginning in 2010. Black
elected officials and their allies in the civil rights community would
fight the proposal tooth and nail by arguing that racial statistics
were necessary for enforcing civil rights laws — especially the Voting
Rights Act — and that dropping race from the census would dilute black
political strength. Enemies of affirmative action would jump for joy,
believing that they had finally won.

But these antagonists aren't the only factions in the fight. A growing
number of demographers and historians who are fully sympathetic to the
civil rights struggle would probably be happy to see the word "race"
disappear from the census as well. There seems to be an emerging
consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated
national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so
fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have
been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped
altogether.

This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But
it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched
battle over a proposal that would have added a "multiracial" category
to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one
box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a
conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated
American life and a different sense of identity that's clearly on the
rise among younger Americans.

Most Americans think of racial categories as objective, even benign,
descriptions that are part of the social fabric. But the historian
Margo Anderson writes that official statistics on "race" or "color"
were inaugurated into the federal statistical system in the early 19th
century. By then the government had embraced the view that people of
African descent were from genetically inferior ancestral groups and
could never escape subordinate status.

Armed with this view, the Census Bureau became the fountainhead of
19th-century racist dogma. The bureau reported, for example, that free
black people were disproportionately insane, thus supporting the view
that slavery was the only suitable status for them. It actively
promoted the eugenicist view that Americans of African descent were so
inferior and ill equipped to survive that they would eventually become
extinct.

The bureau during this period was obsessed with the notion that sexual
contact between people of African and European dissent was polluting
the theoretically "pure" white society. The belief that the so-called
"races" had been set apart by God and nature led to the popular theory
that children of mixed ancestry were akin to mules, which are sterile,
and would die out after a single generation.

With an eye out for what the government saw as racial abomination,
census wardens went house to house, eyeballing ostensibly white people
for traces of creeping "blackness." This period marked the rise of the
so-called "one-drop rule" — which defined as black anyone with any
African heritage at all. That often meant banishment from jobs,
housing and public schools set aside for whites. The "one-drop rule"
has been stripped of its worst penalties. But it is still evident in
the census, as Kim Williams of Harvard points out in her recent book,
"Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America." For example,
people who checked both "white" and one minority race in 2000 were
counted in a single-race minority group.

The system of racial classification used in this country will never be
scrubbed clean of its racist origins. Indeed, the seemingly innocuous
act of assigning people to "races" still sets them sociologically and
biologically apart in a way that scientists and anthropologists have
long since rejected. The Americans who checked more than one box in
2000 seem to reject this fixed, "one drop" formulation of race.

Many people now see race as a facet of personal identity that changes
from time to time or even from place to place. In a follow-up survey
just a year after the initial 2000 census, for example, about 4 of 10
people who had listed more than one race decided to change their
responses. Kenneth Prewitt, a Columbia University professor and former
census director, wrote in the journal Daedalus in 2005 that these
people seem to see race not as a fixed demographic fact, but as
"something closer to an attitude toward oneself."

The 2000 census suggests that we are gradually moving away from the
rigid, racialist system of classification that has long dominated this
country and toward a system that sees racial identity as more fluid.
Even historians and demographers who sympathize with the civil rights
struggle and who recognize the need to document discrimination now see
that the "one-drop rule" will not be sustainable in the new,
multiracial America. We may be stuck with the old formulation for the
moment. But it's no longer a matter of if it will fall away. It's a
matter of when.