Former Census Director Prewitt

EDITOR’S CHOICE: A lot of commentators assumed that the Obama triumph would put on end to much of the debate on race. But the opposite has happened and the issue is more toxic than ever. The NAACP calls the entire country in general and the Tea Party in particular racist. The New Black Panthers say only whites can be racists and that if Blacks “kill white babies,” it is justified. A Boston cop has to undergo an “Obama teaching moment,” for simply doing his job which involved a black man. Now Obama calls Arizona racist for enforcing immigration policies already approved by the Feds, and is suing the entire state. Many Americans want to know why the census asks exhaustive questions on ethnicity in what is supposed to be a color-blind, melting-pot society. Many citizens refuse to reply at all and others can’t even figure the questions out – for example is my daughter who is half Irish-American and half Pakistani-American an “Asian or Pacific Islander?”

Kenneth Prewitt who ran the Census Bureau and the 2000 head count for Bill Clinton, explained July 14 in USA Today how the arcane process came about, and offers some new ideas on how to simplify the debate a bit. But as a good liberal Democrat, he admits that “Policy responses to disparities in employment, education, health and incarceration call for statistics on groups being left behind. Diversity goals in universities and businesses use Census categories.” So the census is now driven by the priority on “income redistribution” mantra this administration is trying to force down our throats. Among its first actions was to try to move the Census Bureau into the White House. That is after all, why the Tea Party exists in the first place – to argue for responsible spending and less, not more government,  and not for a platform that bases everything on race, which this gang that can’t shoot straight is doing with reckless abandon in Arizona and across its agenda. Here is Prewitt’s census primer:

PUZZLING: The successful 2010 Census left millions of Americans puzzling over its race question. Many disliked declaring any race; others were uncertain which box fit them; some wondered why the government even asked their race. In fact, the question does not work well, and we can do better. But first, how did we get here?

Eighteenth century science ordained a hierarchical ordering of five human "races." At America's founding, given legal and demographic realities, it counted three in its first Census in 1790: White, Black, and Red. It added a fourth race in the mid-19th century when, driven by hysteria over the "yellow peril," the distinct Chinese and Japanese nationalities blurred into the catch-all Asian race, which then became the Census home for additional Asian nationalities.

DISCRIMINATION: Mid-20th century civil rights policies that statistically measured racial discrimination needed to accommodate people from the Caribbean and Mexico, so the strange Hispanic/Non-Hispanic ethnicity-but-not-a-race question was shoehorned into the mix. Multiculturalism in the 1980s put pressure on Census categories, especially on behalf of a multiracial choice, leading the 2000 Census to introduce the mark-one-or-more option.

Out of this history came our current classification, which uses color (White and Black); civil status (Native American enrolled tribe); nationality (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and six more) summarized as two umbrella races — Asian and Pacific Islanders; and Hispanic ethnicity (with three nationalities listed).

WHY RACE? But, asks the public: "Why does the government insist on sorting and counting us by race?" There is no simple answer because assorted purposes — each reasonable on its own terms — have been yoked to an archaic classification. These purposes trace to our history and to contemporary conditions.

The tragedies of black slavery and Indian genocide left inequalities that racial justice policies are still trying to erase. Policy responses to disparities in employment, education, health and incarceration call for statistics on groups being left behind. Diversity goals in universities and businesses use Census categories. How new Americans are assimilating is a further question answered with Census statistics.

IRRITATING:  Beyond specific policy uses of Census data, citizens see in the Census an opportunity to express pride in their heritage. President Obama emphasized his African heritage by checking only one Census box, rather than recognizing his dual black and white parentage. Social justice, social disparities, social assimilation and social pride are all folded into a Census question based on the five 18th century "races" of Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White and a question insisting that there are only two ethnicities in America: Hispanic/Non-Hispanic. No wonder the questions puzzle and irritate.

Some demand that the questions be dropped altogether, expecting this to magically produce a color-blind society. But when discrimination penalizes groups because of their color, ancestry or immigrant status, a nation committed to fairness will not choose to be statistically ignorant of these facts.

A SIMPLER WAY: The next Census, however, doesn't have to repeat today's questions. It should simply ask: What national origin, ethnicity, tribe, language group or ancestry do you consider yourself to be? (List all those important to you.)

This open question finally erases the 18th century racial hierarchy, dispenses with the slippery term race itself, easily allows self-expression and can happily embrace multiple identities. This question doesn't assume that a recently arrived Ethiopian belongs to the same race as 10th generation descendents of enslaved people from Africa's Gold Coast.

It doesn't put fifth generation Chinese Americans into the same race box as first generation Vietnamese. It doesn't count an Argentinean who speaks only English the same way it treats a Mayan immigrant. From the open-ended responses, answers can be categorized in the various ways that make sense depending on public purposes at hand, even re-constructing the five 18th century races if that is desired.

OPEN-ENDED: This open-ended question should be paired with questions on immigration status: Where were you born, and where were your parents born? This question, combined with the one above, tells us how immigrant status interacts with national origin, ethnicity or language group, so that we can eliminate barriers as 21st century newcomers follow the path marked out by Italians and Irish a century ago, or Germans and Swedes a century earlier.

Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the Obama White House will initiate a serious national conversation about today's patched together racial classification. "Too political," they will conclude. But America's universities, think tanks, advocacy organizations and news media can supply the intellectual work we need to ensure that carefully designed questions will provide information relevant to the public purposes that justify asking the questions in the first place. And if one day everyone simply writes "American," the color-blind society will have arrived by public choice.

A statistical portrait of how different groups are faring remains necessary both to erase the inequities of historical racism and to prevent discrimination as the recently arrived strive to participate fully in their new country — but only if we draw the portrait more carefully than that produced by the 2010 Census.

Kenneth Prewitt, Director of the 2000 Census,  is professor of public affairs at Columbia University.