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Multi-ethnic Census option confounds the stereotypes
Almost everybody knows someone -- or maybe is that someone -- who takes delight in listing, in great detail, the various blood lines in his ancestry, right down to the smallest fractions. If there was a Native American in the family tree a generation or two ago, that is dutifully listed along with every other ethnic intermarriage that produced today's DNA. Until now, that sort of exercise was discouraged by the Bureau of the Census, but after years of thinking about it, the head-counters have a plan. Instead of asking people of mixed ethnic and racial heritage to check off "multiracial" on the Census form in the year 2000, people will be able to tell the government in great detail just what sort of blood they've got running through their veins.
There is an urgent reason for this, of course. America is diversifying at a staggering rate. In the 20 years leading up to 1990, the number of children born into interracial marriages increased from 500,000 to 2 million; the California the rate today is one in every six. Such children grow into adulthood and are confounded and insulted by the previous demands that they choose one -- and only one -- category on the racial checklist offered by the federal government. Yet since most people are proud of their heritage, they are equally put off by the prospect of being lumped together in a nowhere category called "multiracial," which conveys none of the pride and wonder of owning a piece of more than one part of the human race.
The people interviewed by The Standard-Times in reaction to this news weren't bothered so much by this as they were by the whole issue of ethnic classification. It would be far better, many said, if they could just check off "American" and be done with it.
Just so, and yet the political and social reality is different. The United States has not yet emerged from the thicket of race-based policies designed to remedy past and current discrimination. The ugly truth is that a person with mixed black, white, Asian and Indian blood might be pigeonholed and discriminated against just as surely as if they were of one undiluted ethnic stripe.
With government programs often designed around specific counts of ethnic minorities, it matters plenty how many people can be included for the purpose of calculating a benefit formula, a subsidy, or a racial diversity goal.
Critics complain that all these new divisions, in which people will claim as many ethnic lines as they wish, will make it all the more difficult to sort out who gets help, which is undoubtedly true.
And which is the whole point, eventually. By making ever more precise breakdowns of Americans' backgrounds, we increasingly frustrate attempts to label discrete groups as victims in need of compensation. That may please bigots as much as it pleases those who personally wish all the ethnic categories applied to them would vanish.
And, really, it is the objective that most of us say that we want for this nation, a truly colorblind society in which race and ethnicity (and why not throw in gender) don't matter anymore. The trouble is, we have gone so far down this road of identifying various groups that we invited this muddle. The trick now will be to see how government policies can keep up with the changing ethnic reality as reflected by the Census -- and how many people will be prepared for what happens when it does.
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