Mixed Race Studies

Racial/Ethnic Categories: Do They Matter?

Poverty & Race
November/December 1994

Lawrence Wright

Chester Hartman, Director of Research
Poverty & Race Research Action Council

Last fall, the House Subcommittee on Census, Statistics and Postal Personnel, chaired by Rep. Thomas Sawyer (D-OH), held a series of hearings on modification of the existing racial categories used by the Census and on the larger question of whether it is proper for the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of skin color and ancestry. The issue is of deep interest to scientists, government agencies that collect data, and, of course, to advocacy groups in the various minority communities concerned with group entitlements.
 
Census statistics are crucial for so many reasons. “Congressional districts rise and fall with the shifting demographics of the country,” as Wright notes. And program funding of all sorts is a function of how many people are placed in each category—”the numbers drive the dollars,” as Sawyer puts it.
 
The government agency responsible for determining standard classifications of racial and ethnic data is the Office of Management & Budget. OMB’s 1977 Statistical Directive 15, which controls these categories for all federal forms and statistics, recognizes four general racial groups in the US: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Black; and White. With regard to ethnicity, Directive 15 also recognizes Hispanic Origin and Not of Hispanic Origin. “The categories,” as Wright notes, “ask that every American fit himself or herself into one racial and one ethnic box.”…

…Multiracialism

One obvious problem with the existing classification system is mixed-race persons, whose numbers are vast but not precisely known. There have been proposals to add a “Multiracial” category to the Census. The proportion of people who now check the Black box but could, because of mixed genetic heritage, check Multiracial, is at least 75% and may be as high as 90%. This proposed new category, Wright observes, “threatens to undermine the concept of racial classification altogether.”
 
Some, of course, argue that would be no “threat” at all. “Multiracialism has the potential for undermining the very basis of racism, which is its categories,” asserts G. Reginald Daniel of UCLA. But the impact on present programs could be catastrophic. School desegregation plans would be thrown into the air. Legislative districts would have to be redrawn. “The entire civil rights regulatory program concerning housing, employment and education,” Wright notes, “would have to be reassessed . . . Those who are charged with enforcing civil rights laws see the Multiracial box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action.” While no one knows how many multiracial persons in fact would opt for that new category, “merely placing such an option on the Census invites people to consider choosing it,” says Wright. He notes that when the Census listed “Cajun” as one of several examples under the ancestry question, the number of Cajuns jumped nearly 2,000%.
 
Multiracialism, of course, is the story of America ever since Columbus and his men stepped on our shores. Clearly, slavery fueled the process, as white slave-owners, in order to enlarge the slave population (as well as gratify their own lust) fathered tens of thousands of mixed-race “Negroes.”
 
Census categories have constantly confused and been confused about race. “How unsettled this country has always been about its racial categories is evident in that fact that nearly every census since [the original 1790 Census] has measured race differently. “With regard to the most volatile racial category, until recently we had “that peculiar American institution known informally as the ‘one-drop rule‘,” which defined as Black a person who had as little as a single drop of that mythical substance, “Black blood.” The measure applied only to people of African descent. And it is, of course, a racist rule, two-way street: one did not jump over the white community by virtue of having’ “white blood.” (Wright notes that the rule may still be the law of the land, according to a 1986 Supreme Court decision.)
 
America, to be sure, has always had “Black” leaders who were to some extent “white”—Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lani Guinier, Douglas Wilder and Louis Farrakhan are a few of the more prominent names. Both whites and Blacks acceded in defining such persons as Black…

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