Brent Staples: On Race and the Census ... Struggling With Categories That No Longer Apply
Imagine the Census Bureau announcing that it would end the practice of asking people to identify themselves by race beginning in 2010. Black elected officials and their allies in the civil rights community would fight the proposal tooth and nail by arguing that racial statistics were necessary for enforcing civil rights laws — especially the Voting Rights Act — and that dropping race from the census would dilute black political strength. Enemies of affirmative action would jump for joy, believing that they had finally won.
But these antagonists aren’t the only factions in the fight. A growing number of demographers and historians who are fully sympathetic to the civil rights struggle would probably be happy to see the word “race” disappear from the census as well. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether.
This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched battle over a proposal that would have added a “multiracial” category to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated American life and a different sense of identity that’s clearly on the rise among younger Americans.
Most Americans think of racial categories as objective, even benign, descriptions that are part of the social fabric. But the historian Margo Anderson writes that official statistics on “race” or “color” were inaugurated into the federal statistical system in the early 19th century. By then the government had embraced the view that people of African descent were from genetically inferior ancestral groups and could never escape subordinate status.
Armed with this view, the Census Bureau became the fountainhead of 19th-century racist dogma. The bureau reported, for example, that free black people were disproportionately insane, thus supporting the view that slavery was the only suitable status for them. It actively promoted the eugenicist view that Americans of African descent were so inferior and ill equipped to survive that they would eventually become extinct....
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But these antagonists aren’t the only factions in the fight. A growing number of demographers and historians who are fully sympathetic to the civil rights struggle would probably be happy to see the word “race” disappear from the census as well. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the system of racial classification that has dominated national politics and the census for nearly two centuries is so fraught with imprecision — and so tainted by racist ideas that have been disproved by science — that it should eventually be dropped altogether.
This view has been percolating among census historians for years. But it has gained traction since the 1990s, when there was a pitched battle over a proposal that would have added a “multiracial” category to the 2000 census. A compromise allowed people to check more than one box for race. But that change only fueled the debate by revealing a conflict between the fixed racial categories that have long dominated American life and a different sense of identity that’s clearly on the rise among younger Americans.
Most Americans think of racial categories as objective, even benign, descriptions that are part of the social fabric. But the historian Margo Anderson writes that official statistics on “race” or “color” were inaugurated into the federal statistical system in the early 19th century. By then the government had embraced the view that people of African descent were from genetically inferior ancestral groups and could never escape subordinate status.
Armed with this view, the Census Bureau became the fountainhead of 19th-century racist dogma. The bureau reported, for example, that free black people were disproportionately insane, thus supporting the view that slavery was the only suitable status for them. It actively promoted the eugenicist view that Americans of African descent were so inferior and ill equipped to survive that they would eventually become extinct....