Too Many Racial / Ethnic Categories May Render Census 2000 Color Blind!

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The needed separation of race and state (03/09/01)

Jewish World Review, by Deroy Murdock

          "THE U.S. Census Bureau's racial bean counters are about to open a brand-new bag of garbanzos. For the 1990 census, the bureau sorted Americans into five ethnic categories: white, black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific islander and American Indian/Alaska native. After 10 years and the stewardship of the Clinton-Gore crowd, those distinctions have grown larger than Jack's proverbial beanstalk.

          "The bureau, for starters, created a new "Native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander" designation. More important, it accepted the arguments of mixed-race citizens and allowed Americans to "mark one or more races" on last year's census forms. [The new multi-racial categories] yields 126 distinct ways in which government can classify, catalog and control America's population.

          "The good news is that the ethnocrats at the Office of Management and Budget who concocted this scheme may have outsmarted themselves. This unwieldy monstrosity eventually may cause federal race schemes to stall.

          But the racial shennanigans and dishonesty don't end there!  The black lobby has convinced the Office of Management and Budget to issue the following decree:  "Responses that combine one minority race and white are (to be) allocated to the minority race."  Hmm.

          Mr. Murdock continues:   "By cynically and artificially assigning citizens of mixed-race backgrounds solely to minority categories, OMB magically can inflate the apparent number of minorities in a given locale. This will supply federal, state and local officials with abundant raw materials for mischief, ranging from redistricting to set-asides to college admissions.

          "The Federal Reserve Board, for example, encourages banks to ask loan applicants about their racial backgrounds. If they refuse to answer, loan officers may guess the ethnicities of their potential customers.  ... the Los Angeles rapid transit system has given $19 million in minority subcontracts to Jon McGrath, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed railroad builder who is 1/64 Cherokee.

          "The alternative to this squalid public policy is simple: the separation of race and state.

          "Government simply should stop counting Americans by race. Uncle Sam has no business asking people how many Jews, Catholics or Unitarians inhabit a particular home or occupy a given office.

          Author Deroy Murdock describes government racial classification programs as "political acts of racial profiling" and compares the practice unfavorably with alleged police racial profiling.  "If it is wrong for a cop to eye a black man and consider him a criminal, it is equally wrong for a congressman to see that same black man and regard him as disadvantaged without even speaking with him.

(Based on the article by Deroy Murdock in the Jewish World Review 03/09/01)

[Last known link:  http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/murdock1.asp ]

Race data complicate new voting districts (03/05/01)

           [Washington Times] "... importantly, instead of reporting population tallies merely for whites, blacks, Asians, American Indians, Eskimos or Aleuts —the six familiar racial groupings —[Census 2000] will, for the first time, report 63 different categories.

          "And because each racial category is again divided by a census question asking respondents if they are Hispanic, the total of possible mixed-race combinations doubles to 126.

          "The government has made the multiplication of racial-ethnic groupings mandatory for all federal agencies that collect and report demographic and economic data.

          "Consequently, it's possible for someone to characterize himself as a white, black, Asian and American Indian.

          "While this choice cheers some, it has generated confusion and potential problems for many census data users, state legislators among them. The legislators will try to carve out new voting districts that have the desired racial concentration or the preferred racial integration that best serves their parties. To the extent that the mixed-race results cloud the racial picture, they tell those data users more than they want to know.

           [Suzanne Bianchi, University of Maryland sociology professor and past president of the Population Association of America said] "You could say that in 1990 we were artificially constraining the population, and that forcing people to choose one race made it look more unidimensional than it really is," she explains.

          "The constraint on people was of supreme concern to those [racial special interests] who lobbied passionately in the late 1990s for the ability to choose more than one race.  In 1997, Ramona E. Douglass testified for the Association of Multiethnic Americans before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight.  She argued people "are no longer willing to remain proverbial square pegs shoved into the consistently round holes of America's racial classification system."

           "In a way, allowing people to identify themselves as mixed race signals that less significance is given to race"  according to University of Maryland philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg, a specialist in public policy.

          Fortunately for advocates of race-blind justice, there is no way to compare the racial-ethnic totals obtained in 1990 and before with those collected in 2000.  It is reductio ad absurdem:  the more racial-ethic categories that are included  on the census, the less impact the data have.

           The Washington Times reports "The altered data also will confound the courts, enforcement agencies and government grant makers. Knowing which racial and ethnic groups have the most members is vital to many of their [race-based] calculations."

           The Washington Times continues:  "... even if small numbers of census respondents have declared themselves racially mixed, they still will subtract from the total number of people in the racial group with which they formerly identified. They will have "diluted" the group's clout in civil rights matters, is the way some express it."

(Excerpted from the Washington Times story by August Gribbin 03/05/01)

[Last known link http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200135224326.htm ]

Hispanics Draw Even With Blacks In New Census (03/07/01)

Subhead:   "Latino Population Up 60% Since 1990"

          [Washington Post] "The nation's Hispanic population has grown so rapidly that the 2000 Census shows their numbers are roughly equal to that of African Americans, a demographic shift that has broad implications for politics and culture at the beginning of the millennium."

Black Influence Diluted:   The Post reports that 5% of black census respondents listed themselves as "multiracial", i.e., they listed themselves not as "black" but as a mixture of "black" and at least one other race.  This fact has caused a great deal of concern within the NAACP since it tends to lessen the political importance of the black special-interest lobby.

          "The number of Americans who described themselves as Hispanic grew by nearly 60 percent in the 2000 Census and now total 35.3 million, about 3 million more than the Census Bureau had predicted.

          By comparison, "The black population ranged from 34.7 million to 36.4 million, with the larger number [36.4 million] including those who checked black and another race.

          "The unexpected increase in Hispanics is probably due mainly to high levels of immigration and poor counting in the past. 

          "Because Hispanics can be of any race, a portion would also be counted as blacks, whites, Asians and Native Americans. The numbers available yesterday did not include racial breakdowns for Hispanics.   Hispanics are generally considered to be people whose ancestors are from Spanish-speaking countries.  In the United States, about two-thirds of Hispanics are of Mexican descent.

          "The demographic milestone reflected in the new Hispanic population totals carries implications not only for political power in this country but for cultural dynamics.  The growing Latino population, for example, may sometimes mix uneasily with African Americans, in political life and in neighborhoods."  [Editor's Note:   A significant number of racially-motivated disturbances involving non-whites are between Hispanics and blacks.  Many blacks resent Hispanics because blacks do not want to give up their status as "most oppressed" -- along with all the political and economic benefits that go with being classified as "most oppressed".   tjf]

          The Post story continues:   "Around the country, the relationship between the nation's two largest minority groups [blacks and Hispanics] has at times been tense, sparking a civil disturbance a decade ago in Mount Pleasant and sharp political disputes in Compton, a formerly black Los Angeles suburb that is now mostly Hispanic."

          "When police stop drivers of color on the basis of racial profiles, he said, "half the time . . . they don't know whether they are black or Latino."

          "One in 12 black children younger than 18 also were reported as belonging to more than one race, many of them from the nation's growing number of interracial marriages. Among African Americans 50 and older, 2.3 percent designated themselves as being more than one race.

          "Roderick Harrison, a former Census Bureau official who is at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said the high multi-race numbers will make it difficult to track whether blacks have made progress in school test scores, health, access to jobs or housing and other important social goals."

          "Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans yesterday approved a Census Bureau recommendation that unadjusted population figures be released for redistricting purposes."

(Excerpted from the article by D'Vera Cohn and Darryl Fears in the Washington Post 03/07/01, page A01)

[Last known link:  http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32121-2001Mar6.html ]

Changing the way we think about race (03/05/01)

          [Seattle Times] "Someday, when race is more negotiable - more an expression of one's mood than one's identity - historians may say it started with Census 2000.

          "This census, due for release as early as this week, is the first in which Americans were invited to mark one or more races, creating a total of 57 new categories with anywhere from two to six races, such as white-Asian or black-Latino-American Indian.

          "...The census' formalizing of multiple-race answers undermines more than 200 years of law and tradition and explodes the most basic notion of race:  that there are distinct bio-cultural groups of human beings.

          "The ensuing debate could overshadow the census' traditional function of establishing the numbers upon which political reapportionment, federal revenue allotments and mass marketing are based.

          "...In the 1990 census, the third-fastest-growing category was "other," with 2 million people. Those statistics galvanized multiracial lobbying efforts.

          "But the multiple-race census was opposed by groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Japanese American Citizens League, which have argued that the destabilization of racial categories could weaken civil-rights enforcement efforts.

          "What about discrimination?  Foremost on the minds of many sociologists and civil-rights activists is the way multiracial data will complicate anti-discrimination monitoring and enforcement, the primary purpose of federal data on race.

          Race-based programs such as forced school busing and racial quotas for housing and employment all depend to a great extent on the old "single race" system.  It is unclear how these race-based programs will be administered when a person is categorized as 2 or more "racial mixes".

          [Office of Management and Budget guidelines suggest the following:  Multiracial people who indicate they are white and something else will generally be allocated to the minority race.  If this sound suspiciously like the old, very racist "one drop rule" that's because it is.]

          "[Also according to OMB guidelines] If a mixed-race person makes a discrimination complaint, that person will be allocated to the race he or she thinks the discrimination was based on.  For example, if a man who is black and Asian American believed he was denied a job at a grocery store because the manager was prejudiced against black people, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could list that individual as black, regardless of his Asian-American heritage."  [In other words, you can choose to be the victim du jour based on which racial category will get you the most benefit!]

          "If you're talking about racial profiling in terms of census data," said former census director Prewitt, "and you want to know how many blacks were picked up driving in New Jersey compared to the total black population of New Jersey, we're going to be arguing about who is and isn't black."

          "Also still undecided is how the government will deal with multiracial data when it comes to eligibility for [racially] targeted programs, such as the Small Business Administration's loans for minority businesses."

(Excerpted from the Seattle Times 03/05/01 from the article by Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times)

[Last known link: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=census050&date=20010305 ]

END: Multi-Ethnic Data Renders Census 2000 Colorblind!