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327 16 MULTIRACIALISM AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE Peter Skerry The 2000 census was the first in U.S. history to offer respondents the option of identifying themselves as belonging to more than one race. This multiracial option was considered a necessary adaptation to the demographic and cultural changes that the United States has been experiencing. The civil rights lobby, which resisted this change, has by and large been fighting a rearguard action. Yet at the same time, the provenance of the multiracial option was an unlikely alliance between multiracial advocates and conservative Republicans, two groups whose understandings of race in contemporary American society seem, in spite of their obvious differences , equally shortsighted. Not surprisingly, the multiracial option poses daunting challenges that should give us all pause. The multiracial option draws attention to the fundamentally political nature of the census generally and its racial and ethnic categories specifically . These are not issues that we Americans are eager to confront. Nor will they just disappear from public discourse, since the multiracial option reflects an ongoing collision between the powerful and still evolving forces of identity politics and the authoritative and enduring needs of the administrative state. Up to now, awareness of this dynamic has been confined to elites. Once out of the bottle, however, this genie threatens to erode public confidence in and support for racial and ethnic statistics. In this sense, conservatives who supported the multiracial option as the wedge that would bring down the entire edifice of “counting by race” might be proved correct. Yet regardless of the wisdom of race-conscious policies, race consciousness antedates them and will not soon disappear. In any event, we Americans, however regrettably, continue to have but one way of talking about social and economic disadvantage—in terms of race. Until we have some alternative categories for addressing such issues, we need to be careful about what we wish for. THE NEW RACE QUESTION 328 The Politics of the Multiracial Option The process by which the multiracial option came to be implemented illustrates the fundamentally political nature of the census. More specifically, it demonstrates how a small number of political novices were able to get the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a Democratic administration to rule against the clear wishes of civil rights organizations. In censuses before 2000, respondents were not supposed to check more than one racial category. If they did identify as belonging to more than one race (as about 0.5 percent did on the 1990 census), their answers were recoded for one race (OMB 1997, 36897). In recent years a growing number of multiracial individuals and parents of mixed-race children opposed this one-race restriction—on the grounds that it forced individuals, in particular children, to deny parts of their racial heritage, thereby adversely affecting their self-esteem, psychological well-being, and sense of pride in family (Graham 1994; Perlmann 1997; Williams 2000). In the early 1990s, in response to such criticism, the OMB began exploring the implications of a move to a new census item that would allow individuals to identify themselves as members of more than one race (Skerry 1996). Those implications turned out to be ambiguous. On the one hand, extensive test surveys demonstrated that an extremely small segment of Americans—fewer than 2 percent—identified as “multiracial” when offered the explicit opportunity (OMB 1997, 36903). Yet those surveys also revealed significant impacts of a multiracial question on specific groups. A multiracial option reduced the number of people identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native and as Asian or Pacific Islander. At the same time, there was little impact on the numbers reporting their ancestry as white or black (OMB 1997, 36907). The response to these findings was striking and somewhat surprising. Many American Indian tribal governments expressed concern about a multiracial question (Edmonston et al. 1996, 39). Some Hispanic leaders also raised objections. The most vocal and sustained disagreement, however, was voiced by African American leaders and organizations, who, to judge by the test results, had the least to lose from the proposed change. Whatever the results showed now, these leaders argued, a multiracial question would eventually reduce the numbers of those identifying as black and, more to the point, would potentially blur the categories upon which hardwon antidiscrimination and affirmative action programs are based. Longtime allies of these leaders, including civil rights enforcement agencies of the federal government, also argued against any change in the existing racial classification scheme (Linda Matthews, “More...

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