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119 4 BACK IN THE BOX: THE DILEMMA OF USING MULTIPLE-RACE DATA FOR SINGLE-RACE LAWS Joshua R. Goldstein and Ann J. Morning How are multiple-race statistics to be used to enforce laws created in the single-race era? The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued revised standards for racial and ethnic statistics, allowing respondents for the first time to mark multiple races on federal forms, including census forms, in 1997. It was not known at the time how multiple-race data would be processed, tabulated, or used. Just weeks before the 2000 census, however, the OMB issued guidelines for the use of multiple-race data: for civil and voting rights purposes, people who marked “white” and a nonwhite race should be counted as members of the nonwhite group (OMB 2000). The OMB guidelines, known as Bulletin 00-02, are limited in scope to “data on race for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement” and do not, for example, apply directly to the reporting of the many social, economic , and demographic indicators involving racial statistics. Nor are they meant to preclude the development of alternative allocation methods for preserving the continuity of time-series data collected under the old and new systems (that is, “bridging” methods). Nevertheless, they are the first explicit guidelines covering the use of multiple-race data, and as such they have set a precedent for the systematic reallocation of multiple responses back to single-race categories.1 The need for allocation rules results from the disconnection between statistical policy governing the collection of racial data and the laws and precedents for using racial data. The implementation of current civil rights laws calls for single-race categories that unequivocally distinguish between those who are members of minority groups and those who are not. The guidelines provide a way to do this: first, by specifying that any person who marks both “white” and a nonwhite race will be allocated to the non- THE NEW RACE QUESTION 120 white race; and second, by specifying that allocation of multiple nonwhite responses will depend on the circumstances of the complaint at issue. The OMB’s Bulletin 00-02 has the advantage of being easy to understand and relatively easy to implement. Most important, it does not reduce the overall size of the minority population. As the OMB points out, it also avoids the division of whole people into fractions, a procedure open to criticism because of the history of voting rights under the pre–Civil War constitution, in which slaves were given only three-fifths of the weight of free whites. However, despite the practical merits of this strategy, the allocation to nonwhite groups may nonetheless prove controversial for both the mixedrace community and the general population. First, the OMB approach reimplements , albeit in a civil rights context, the traditional American “onedrop rule” associated with slavery, segregation, and the history of racial discrimination. In the past, the one-drop rule was used to classify a person with any degree of African ancestry as black and thus to enforce a rigid color line between blacks and whites (Davis 1991). The modern use of a one-drop rule clearly has a different purpose; it is aimed at redressing discrimination rather than enforcing segregation. Despite its intentions, however , the rule is still open to the criticism that it repeats the mistakes of the past, further institutionalizing the divide between the white and nonwhite populations. A second difficulty in the reallocation plan is that it appears to violate the principle of self-identification. Now that multiracial individuals are finally permitted to “mark one or more” races, many expect to be treated as such without being put back in a single checkbox. Even government reports acknowledge that “congruence with respondent’s choice” is an important feature of any tabulation system. As the Tabulation Working Group of the Interagency Committee for the Review of Standards for Data on Race and Ethnicity has noted, “the underlying logic of the tabulation procedures must reflect to the greatest extent possible the full detail of race reporting” (OMB 1999, 13; italics added). A third challenge for the guidance is the risk of making race-based public policies even more controversial than they already are. The system of racial classification may come to be seen as too unwieldy and arbitrary to support civil rights legal decisions. There is probably no escape from this problem. Any assignment of multiple-race people to single races is open to criticism of...

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