The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters Bitterly fought controversies surrounded the late-twentieth century censuses in the United States, and in particular the 1990 census, over the issue of population undercounts and possible adjustments. Such controversies drew attention again in connection with Census 2000. Yet Kenneth Prewitt, the director of the Census Bureau during the 2000 enumeration, writes in this volume that when historians look back on the history of the census, the debates over the undercount will get only a footnote ; the change in the race question will get a chapter. Indeed, the 2000 census race question has opened the door to a new way of measuring and thinking about race. By allowing individuals to report identification with more than one race, the census challenges long-held fictions and strongly defended beliefs about the very nature and definition of race in our society. This volume examines these monumental changes from a multidisciplinary perspective. Under the old formulation of the race question, the respondent was instructed to select his or her race from a list and to mark one category only; under the new formulation, which was introduced in Census 2000 and will be used by all federal agencies by 2003, the respondent may mark one or more races. The Census Bureau (and other government data collectors) must now decide how people who mark more than one race will be counted and how the counts of races will be aggregated from the raw data. At first sight the issue seems technical and marginal; but behind it lie at least two important features of American life and American thinking about race. The first is the growing prevalence and recognition of racial intermarriage. Not so long ago, according to the typical pattern, interracial sex and marriage were officially forbidden, and offspring of unions that violated these norms were ignored or defined away. The mechanism by which this was usually accomplished was the “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any African ancestors as black. Under these circumstances , “race” distinguished social groups in important ways. THE NEW RACE QUESTION 2 By contrast, if members of different “races” are allowed to intermingle and their mixed status is not ignored (no one-drop rule placing them in one race category only), and if racial groups do in fact intermingle to a great extent, then racial origins begin to look like ethnic origins—that is, as origins that are often mixed. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans have ancestors from three or more places, such as England, Germany, and Italy. Second, the development of the strong antidiscrimination and voting rights laws of the 1960s, and affirmative action policies, came at great social and political costs, first for African Americans and later for other groups as well. These laws need simple and clear race categories into which to place individuals for the purposes of documenting and redressing discrimination. Yet the social reality of racial intermarriage is increasingly at odds with this requirement for simplicity. Race counts are used in connection with legislative and judicial actions involving civil rights and voting rights, as well as in educational and health statistics. They are also the basis for Census Bureau projections about the future racial composition of the U.S. population. In addition, researchers across the social sciences use race data to analyze the experiences of racial and ethnic groups. How, then, will racial combinations be aggregated under the new race question? Who will decide, for example, whether a respondent who self-identifies as black and white, or an Asian category and white, will be counted as a member of the minority or as a white? At present, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been handed the politically hot potato. That agency has ruled that, for purposes of civil rights enforcement, people who identify themselves as members of more than one race should be counted in the minority category. For all other purposes guidelines have been slower to emerge and are looser. As many of the chapters in this volume make clear, there is more than one reasonable way in which these classificatory decisions might be made. This is the context for the conference held at the Levy Economics Institute on September 22 and 23, 2000, which considered these issues under several rubrics. The conference brought together scholars from sociology, demography , political science, history, and American studies and government officials from several important federal agencies—the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of...