{"id":11905,"date":"2011-02-13T23:13:34","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T23:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11905"},"modified":"2012-03-25T00:12:04","modified_gmt":"2012-03-25T00:12:04","slug":"room-for-debate-new-education-department-rules-on-multiracial-student-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11905","title":{"rendered":"Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times
\n<\/a>2011-02-13<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues.<\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

An article in a Times series<\/a> on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category.<\/p>\n

But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.<\/p>\n

Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?<\/p>\n

Debaters:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy Race Still Matters\u201d
\nAnthony P. Carnevale<\/a><\/strong>, Research Professor and Director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
\nGeorgetown University<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Check One\u2019 Didn\u2019t Work\u201d
\nSusan Graham<\/a><\/strong>, Executive Director
\nProject RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIdentity and Demography\u201d
\nLani Guinier<\/a><\/strong>, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law
\nHarvard Law School<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Color Wheel\u201d
\nEric Liu<\/a><\/strong>
\nAuthor of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker<\/em> (1998)<\/p>\n

\u201cRacism and the Multiracial Label\u201d
\nRainier Spencer<\/a><\/strong>, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
\nUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas<\/em>
\nAuthor of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix<\/a><\/em> (2011)<\/p>\n

\u201cTake the Politics Out of Race\u201d
\nShelby Steele<\/a><\/strong>, Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow
\nHoover Institution<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRace, Poverty and Educational Equity\u201d
\nGerald Torres<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law
\nUniversity of Texas, Austin<\/em><\/p>\n

…The change endangers the accurate monitoring of civil rights compliance in education. Despite the important gains of the civil rights movement, much discrimination still exists, albeit in less overt forms. Civil rights compliance monitoring\u2014the use of racial statistics to uncover suspicious patterns in education, housing, employment, etc.\u2014is our very best means of detecting covert and institutional discrimination. It is the reason for all those \u201ccheck boxes” for racial identity that no one loves…<\/p>\n

…People, including students, are not discriminated against on the basis of being mixed-race, but rather on the basis of being one part of that mixture The federal race categories, crude as they might be, allow us to track how people are treated based on how they are perceived by others. The dangerous result of the Education Department\u2019s provision will be two-fold.<\/p>\n

On one hand, the \u201ctwo or more races\u201d category will provide no useful data for compliance monitoring; while on the other, real racial discrimination against some students will go untracked by the compliance monitoring apparatus because students who check more than one box will not be placed in the categories that are in fact motivating their unjust treatment…<\/p>\n

Rainier Spencer<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n

…But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today\u2019s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they\u2019d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans), where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade\u2014and where lighter is still usually seen as better.If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness \u2013 just a drop of it \u2013 does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America…Eric Liu<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n

…This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics\u2014or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses…Anthony P. Carnevale<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n

…All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts. Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group…Susan Graham<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n

…Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded……The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?…Gerald Torres<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire debate here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma The New York Times 2011-02-13 In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues. Introduction An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2895,8,26,20],"tags":[5449,5448,4260,5447,5445,45,5446,3887,2327],"class_list":["post-11905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-campus-life","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-anthony-carnevale","tag-anthony-p-carnevale","tag-eric-liu","tag-gerald-torres","tag-lani-guinier","tag-rainier-spencer","tag-shelby-steele","tag-susan-graham","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}