Thinking Outside the Box
I like to believe in the old notion that there is strength in numbers. It usually makes sense and it’s quite romantic: many people working together can do so much more than one person working alone. However, experience has also taught me the wonders of the so-called “mob” mentality: just because you have many people doesn’t mean that they collectively have the sense of even one good-sized rock. But lacking that sense, the mob can use their sheer girth to achieve what a single senseless soul can only dream.
We Americans got evidence of this senselessness delivered right to our doors earlier this year in the form of the 2000 Census Form. Back in 1997, we started to hear quite a bit about this year’s form because this would be the first census in history to use the “revised standards for federal data on race and ethnicity.” (Yes, you read that correctly, and, as everyone knows, anytime you see the words “revised federal standards,” you better pull up a comfortable chair and pour yourself a drink.) These revised standards would allow respondents to check “one or more” of the category options listed in the racial question. Multiracial Americans, including myself, would no longer have to choose only one race or select the catchall “other” box. For some, this change is a major victory, for others, it’s a major setback in racial tolerance, and for still others, it’s a statistical nightmare the horrors of which they cannot begin to fathom. For me, it’s an opportunity to observe public debate on a topic that I’ve lived with all my life.
In my case, being multiracial is not a matter of having one white and one non-white parent. Interracial and ethnically mixed marriages go back several generations in my family – my maternal grandfather was the child of a black woman and a Native American man. He married a woman whose parents were Spanish-speaking yet had some Anglo-European ancestry. My paternal grandparents were an even more complicated mixed of African and European ancestry. Through the years, either because of geography or lack of reliable information, it became impossible to quantify exactly what part of whatever my family was. My parents, you see, were not raised in this country and, in many ways, their racial identity did not become an issue until they emigrated from Central America in 1969. Living in America gave my parents better jobs, better schools for their children, and a never-ending stream of boxes to check and questions to answer. Ever since I could pick up a pencil, I’ve been trying to answer these questions, too, with, appropriately, mixed results.
Which brings us back to the task at hand. Even before the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Census Bureau announced the new standards in 1997, multiracial advocacy groups and civil rights organizations were wrestling with the notion of just what to do with the multiracial population. One group, the Florida-based Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) has been lobbying for a separate “multiracial” box on all state and federal government forms since the early 90’s. To date, they’ve convinced eight states to retire the “other” category on their forms in favor of “multiracial.”
Project RACE and other multiracial advocacy groups could not have been happy when the OMB issued guidelines on reporting the data collected under the “revised federal standards.” Under the advisement of “the civil rights community and . . . policy analysts, statisticians, and representatives from law enforcement” the OMB detailed just how the government was going to deal with the 126 possible racial and ethnic combinations that could appear. They decided that when filling out the forms, Americans could identify all the racial groups that compose their ancestry but, for purposes of “civil rights monitoring” these people would be reassigned back to the traditional racial categories (American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black or African American, and white). People who checked white and another race would be placed in the “minority” race. People who indicated two non-white races would be put into either one of four major multiracial categories or in another category called “balance of individuals reporting more than one race.” I’ll wait while you pour yourself another drink.
Many multiracial Americans, myself included, were pretty annoyed at this decision, particularly considering how much hype the OMB gave to the new standards and their purported ability to reflect the “diversity of the present population.” Suddenly I’m back in the fourth grade trying to fill out one of those standardized testing forms with my number 2 pencil. The test part is a breeze but the racial question is too much for my young brain to handle. There isn’t even an “other” option. Sister Claire Therese is standing over me, angry because I’m holding up my row. She insists that I just pick a race so she can collect the rest of the answer sheets. I refuse and all Hell, well at least as much Hell is allowed in a Catholic school, breaks out. Catholic schoolteachers, even in the mid-eighties and even in our racially diverse section of Queens, New York, had no idea what to make of me. Now, the OMB is saying that, in the year 2000, with all the resources under the sun, they still don’t know what to make of me? Wait a second. Something else is at work here.
When I say “something else,” I don’t mean something inherently sinister out of the X Files. I am talking about generally well-meaning organizations such as the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza, who realize just how much is at stake with census data. I say “generally” because once we start talking about appropriating over $180 billion annually in federal funding, even well meaning people have that pesky sense problem I mentioned. Groups like the NAACP and La Raza (who, by the way, were very influential members of the OMB’s advisement team) were concerned that the new multiracial options would dilute their numbers leading to a decrease in the census-based benefits these groups receive. Census data is used to determine just about everything of consequence in federal funding including:
- drawing federal, state and local legislative districts
- drawing school district boundaries
- budget planning for state and local government
- tracking compliance with the Voting Rights Act
- tracking employer compliance with the Civil Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
However, the role these groups played in this matter became not just one of advisement, but rather a death grip on the archaic “all or nothing” approach to race. Remember reading about the old “one drop of blood” rules regarding race in the segregation era? Well, welcome to the modern version of the one-drop rule. Both the NAACP and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as other civil rights groups publicly called for their supporters to check only one race, their minority race, in order to preserve their total counts in the census data. Eventually the OMB, on the advice of these groups, adopted the reassignment system I mentioned earlier. When defending the OMB’s reassignment strategy NAACP’s Washington spokesperson Hilary Shelton said, “If someone is African-American and white, the are going to be perceived as African American when issues of discrimination are concerned. They are certainly not discriminated because they are part white.” Okaaay. There are so many things wrong with that statement, I’m not sure where to begin. For one thing, if a person is part white and part black, or any multiracial combination, their individual genetic makeup and features will determine how they perceived. Many children of black-white couples may be very light-skinned while their siblings may be dark. I am the youngest of three children and I have constantly been told that I both “look Spanish” (whatever that means) and “have black features.” My older sister, who has darker hair and olive skin, is always asked if she is of “Mediterranean” descent. My brother, on the other hand, is always assumed to be black.
Secondly, Ms. Shelton’s statement that people would not be discriminated against because they are part white assumes the ridiculous notion that only non-whites can be discriminated against and only whites can be the discriminators. That’s simply not true. Perhaps Hilary Shelton has a different term for when a group of black high school girls shoves a mixed-race female schoolmate up against a row of lockers because they don’t think she’s “black enough” to date a black boy. It sure felt like discrimination to me.
Anyone is capable of discrimination and prejudice, and everyone is vulnerable. That’s why I’m not going to argue that the civil rights legislation that relies on race data from the census is no longer necessary. That’s simply not true. We are not there yet. But no one, not the NAACP, not Project RACE, not La Raza, seems to be working towards the goal of not having these categories at all. No one seems to be willing to admit that racial categories are and have always been fluid, or as sociologists say, social constructs, defined by the society. They can be created and broken down. We seem to be locked in the mindset that racial categories are biological absolutes. Well, if evolution and the growth of the multiracial population have proved anything, it’s that nothing is absolute.
In my opinion, the civil rights organizations and the government numbers crunchers missed an opportunity here – they had a chance to strike a blow against the old racial hierarchy by saying that bridges across racial lines were more important than the final tally. Instead, when faced with a segment of the population that doesn’t fit their traditional ideas of race, they choose to try to change the people, rather than the ideas. Stanley Crouch, an editor at the New York Daily News, said something in 1998 in response to an entirely different racial quandary that I think also applies to this matter. He wrote, “nothing of significance to the social evolution of this country has been done by a single group, working on its own . . . . Alliances across racial, religious, and class divisions have always been necessary.” What is the growth of the multiracial population if not evidence that such alliances are possible? In the end, I do believe we can have strength in numbers, but not just for the sake of being big and strong. Ultimately, that strength is meaningless if it doesn’t move us forward.
