Keeping Race Alive

"Americanism is not and never was a matter of race or ancestry."
By Eric H. Roth, Contributing Writer

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt February 1, 1943
A large wall chart showing 64 black-and-white photographs of 64 distinct races hung in schoolrooms across Nazi Germany. The Aryan race held the first and highest position. The Jewish race held the lowest position. The brutal consequences that followed from that "science" poster still shock and mystify.

Neither Aryan nor Jewish is considered a race today in the United States and Western Europe. But race as a way of counting and categorizing people is very much alive, as a glance at Census 2000 reveals. According to US Census officials, American residents and citizens fall within 126 possible combination ethnic/racial categories. That's up from five standard racial categories used by the federal government until 1997.

Times change, labels change, laws change. And critics of the census are wondering: Why can't our predilection for racial counting ever change? "I understand asking for race in South Africa under apartheid," said David Horowitz, author of Radical Son. "but not in the United States."

No one is taking issue with the Census itself. The United States Constitution requires the federal government to count the nation's population every 10 years. Article I, Section 2, discusses how House representatives shall be distributed among the states, and calls for an "actual enumeration" every 10 years. So the U.S. Census Bureau has been asking, "How many people live with you?" since 1790.

In October 1997, the Office of Management and Budget revised federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity. The latest federal standards allow census respondents to "mark or select one or more races." For the first time ever, people with mixed racial heritage may select more than one racial category. The 63 different possible racial groupings offered in the census race question can be collapsed into the minimum race categories needed by the federal government: "White," "Black or African American," "American Indian and Alaska Native," "Asian," and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander."

As the ethnic/racial categories have proliferated, an increasingly poignant question has emerged in public discourse.

Why is the federal government labeling and defining people by racial and ethnic categories? Does this focus on race reduce or cause social differences? Should the United States follow the example of Mexico (in the 1820s), and stop collecting this sort of information?

Census Bureau officials argue that "race is key to implementing any number of federal programs," including data to meet legislative redistricting requirements under the Voting Rights Act. The Census Bureau has included a question on race since the first census in 1790, which included a slave category and "Free Black."

The history of the racial categories on the census clearly reflects shifts in the popular and official conceptions of race.

At one time the Census form included "friendly Indians" and "hostile Indians." The 1970 census, for example, was the first to have a question on Hispanic origin on the sample or "long" census form. After 1980, all Census forms included a question on Hispanic origin to implement a number of federal statutes such as the enforcement of bilingual programs, the Voting Rights Act, and the enforcement of equal employment opportunities under the Civil Rights Act. Racial categories exist as a political, and not biological, concept, say Census officials.

"The census is as important to our nation as highways and telephone lines," says Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt in the widely seen ads. "It's how America knows what America needs. It will provide the data that will help target more than $2 trillion in federal funds during the next decade -- for schools, employment services, housing assistance, hospital services, programs for the elderly and much more." The Census Bureau itself will spend $6 billion trying to get as accurate a count as possible for this year's mandated census.

Yet not everybody believes that asking Americans to define themselves by racial categories is wise, or even necessary. Dr. Howard Elinson, a sociologist who specializes in urban affairs, has another take on the census forms. "I don't know what, except for reverse discrimination, the government would need this for," noted Elinson, who spent 30 years tracking federal census legislation.

Noting that there is a "whole literature of census criticism," Elinson focused on the controversy over undercounting minorities. "Black males, age 15-25, are not there. Just missing. Presumably many of them don't want to have anything to do with government." Census officials estimate that 7.6 percent of Blacks were "missed" in the 1990 Census.

The current racial categories, according to Elinson, are "bizarre and absurd." The census forms inquire about the national origins of Hispanic residents, yet remains silent about the national origins of Europeans. "Whites often don't know, or don't care, if they are part Swiss, part Czech, part German, part English. They don't know or care where their grandparents came from. They see themselves as Americans." Elinson also objected to the fact that the federal government placed race above income and religious affiliation.

"What does a person's race have to do with electing officials -- unless you are a racist," adds David Horowitz, observing that individuals can mark "any number of boxes you want, but they [the Census Bureau officials] will only count the minority ones -- whichever one they consider the most oppressed."

Affirmative action advocates, including President Clinton, argue that race conscious policies, sometimes called racialism, are necessary to overcome centuries of racism. Horowitz, however, dismisses that claim. "The distinction between racialism and racism is a distinction without a difference."

The debate over the new census forms and revised racial categories goes to the heart of America's long struggle to confront race. How did the new immigrants of the 1840s, clearly identified by their mother tongue, nation of origin, and perceived as separate races of "Irish," "Welsh" and "Austrian" become accepted as American citizens within two generations? How did the immigrants of the late 19th century, often classified as "non-white" because they were "Jews," "Irish" and "Italians," become "Whites" by 1950? Should the United States be a melting pot or a mosaic?

Elinson sees the "alchemy of race" as "real dangerous for schools that don't want to cut off Jews or Asians." The notion, once articulated by Sen. George McGovern during his failed 1972 presidential campaign, that each ethnic group should have the same proportion of professionals disturbs Elinson, a modern Orthodox Jewish scholar. "That puts back a ceiling on Jews and Asians. Personally, I don't care if Berkeley becomes 100 percent Asian."

Perhaps the democratic values that unite Americans, not those superficial skin pigmentation differences on which we differ, will provide the foundation for a tolerant, multiethnic society. Maybe the increasing rates of intermarriage will make the color-coding of public policy decisions and defining of American citizenship by racial groups impossibly complex in the next twenty years. Or Americans filling out the census forms in 2060 will be as mystified and horrified by the current obsession with "racial categories" as modern Americans feel when viewing the Nazi wall charts of 64 races. Or perhaps not.

 

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