{"id":15517,"date":"2011-08-08T21:54:57","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T21:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15517"},"modified":"2011-08-08T21:57:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T21:57:32","slug":"being-counted-is-crucial-in-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15517","title":{"rendered":"Being counted is crucial in the U.S&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>My academic research is on racial categories in national censuses.\u00a0 When I first started reading about the push to get a \u201cmixed-race\u201d category on the U.S. census in the 1990s, I was absolutely on the side of the multiracial movement. I thought the census should recognize our identities, no matter how complicated they may be.\u00a0 <strong>Then I kept reading and realized that the multiracial activists were only concerned with recognition and didn\u2019t care that it potentially came at the expense of civil rights agendas.<\/strong>\u00a0 Being counted is crucial in the U.S.\u2014and elsewhere.\u00a0It is linked to money, political power, grassroots mobilization and even community cohesion.\u00a0 Having a separate mixed-race category threatened all that\u2014and the hard-fought victories of the civil rights movement.\u00a0 The multiracial organizations that testified before Congress in the 1990s were mostly white mothers of multiracial children who did not want their children to have to choose one race over another.\u00a0 But they failed to recognize what else was at stake\u2014though the census was once an instrument used to manage and control racial populations, it now has a political power that racial minorities can access and use to advance their claims.\u00a0The entire U.S. civil rights regime rests on the idea of discrete racial categories. One group\u2019s recognition could lead to another\u2019s oppression.\u00a0<strong> But the mixed-race activists didn\u2019t care\u2014they went on to argue (unsuccessfully) for their cause and even struck alliances with Republicans, including <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Newt_Gingrich\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Newt Gingrich<\/strong><\/a><strong>, whose ten steps for better race relations in the U.S. included adding a multiracial category to the census and doing away with affirmative action.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Debra Thompson, \u201cThe language and the Ethics of Mixed Race,\u201d In\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=10509\" target=\"_blank\">Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out<\/a><\/em>, edited by\u00a0Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010), 267.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My academic research is on racial categories in national censuses.\u00a0 When I first started reading about the push to get a \u201cmixed-race\u201d category on the U.S. census in the 1990s, I was absolutely on the side of the multiracial movement. I thought the census should recognize our identities, no matter how complicated they may be.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,8,26,394,20],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-15517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-debra-thompson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15517","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=15517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}