12Spring  2010 Features

Another decade, another census. It’s our decennial national exercise to enumerate the population and paint a picture of America by the numbers. It’s also our op-portunity to evaluate where the changing calculus of race and identity intersects with the distribution of power. It was a challenge in1790, it remains a challenge today.

At only 10 questions—fewer than the popular party game—the 2010 Census is one of the shortest on record, with the juicy details about what we earn and the preva-lence of cell phones now relegated to an ongoing Ameri-can Community Survey. But many of the questions that remain on the core census speak to the evolving and

decidedly untidy relationships between our individual identities and our rights as citizens.

!e census, as historian and census scholar Margo Anderson notes, begins and ends not with science and math, but with politics and culture, and nowhere is that more evident than in questions of race. “Politics always comes "rst,” Anderson reminds us. “!e framers of the constitution had to decide how to allocate representation among constituents. Once they decided to have people as the basis of a House of Representatives, they had to "gure out who were the people at the time.”

Counting        OnRaceby

Kim  Fellner

!e Census Tells Us Whom we Name, What we Claim, How we Frame

13Spring  2010 Features

Following the shameful compromise of the constitution-al convention, our "rst census in 1790 counted slaves, but tabulated them at three "fths of a person for the purpose of apportionment. As Anderson says, “!ere’s a big discrepancy between being a person and a member of the polity.”

!at fateful three-"fths decision and the legacy of slavery have haunted the census into the present. In the paint-by-numbers pictures that were popular when I was a kid, the outlines of the image were pre-drawn and each shape had a number that corresponded to a Crayola crayon color; the pinky beige crayon was named “#esh.” When it comes to matters of race, the census resembles those pictures—it draws the outlines that predetermine the picture and then tells you what colors to use. !e prob-lem is that we have a hard time coloring in the lines and the story is quite often in between. Among the many determinations to be made:

classi"cations (Negro, Black, African-American? Spanish surname or Hispanic or Latino?)

self-enumeration by mail? Sampling or no?)

Black and Asian counted as Black or Asian, or both, or neither?)

or more detailed data? Acknowledge a same sex marriage or reclassify as roommates?)

redistribute power and determine policy in the politi- cal and public arenas. (How are demographics ma- nipulated in redistricting decisions? Where do you build the next school or senior center? How much federal safety net subsidy goes where?)

!ese questions are decided, and the outlines of the picture drawn and periodically re-drawn, via a compli-cated alchemy involving multiple institutions. !ink of an hourglass, with the sands of politics running through. !e census is the neck of the hourglass, where demo-graphic methodology, scienti"c knowledge, population shifts and social conventions all mix, sometimes angrily. And where a bureaucracy of public servants either fends o$ or yields to the interests of constituencies jousting for

power to determine what trickles down to the bottom.

!e Census Bureau has many masters: part of the Department of Commerce, it’s overseen and funded by Congress, and now uses standardized classi"cations issued by the White House O%ce of Management and Budget. !e Bureau operates from a handsome model of Green architecture in Suitland, Maryland, housing a cadre of political appointees and more than 4,000 civil service employees to carry out the will of these masters. When I visited the Bureau in December 2009, career sta$ers were wrestling over same-sex marriage. !e Bush administration had prohibited counting same sex marriages—the rationale was that it would violate the Defense of Marriage Act—but a recent Obama adminis-tration directive countermanded that.

Coming so late in the preparation process for 2010, the ability to implement the revision would be highly convo-luted. As one sta$er explained: “In past censuses and the 2010 Census, if a person selected ‘husband/wife’ but the other questionnaire responses indicated the person and the householder were of the same sex, then the Census Bureau would edit the response, and they would be re-ported and tabulated as same-sex unmarried partners.

“However, in 2010, the Census Bureau will also sepa-rately report such data unedited; that is, if the person in-dicates the relationship to the householder as “husband/wife” and the two are of the same sex, then they will be tabulated (only for this separate tabulation) as a same-sex married couple. It is unclear what the exact terminology used will be.”

It’s hard to see how the terminology could be clear.

Anderson noted that decisions like this have always been complex, arbitrary and often profoundly unjust. “If [enumerators] perceived that you were in a same sex relationship, they sometimes simply changed the sex of one of the people,” she says. “And there was a time when you couldn’t have a woman head of the household if there was an adult male in the house; for example, if the household included a mother and an adult son, they’d change the data to make the son the head of the house-hold. It’s only the explosion of single-parent households that eventually makes it a possible status.”

14Spring  2010 Features

In Shades of Citizenship, Melissa Nobles a political sci-entist at MIT, emphasizes that censuses have not just re#ected prevailing structures of race and identity but created them. Far from being value-neutral, “Census bureaus are political actors that help to make race a political reality and do not simply count by it. Race, in turn, is not a self-evidently meaningful and objective marker. It is rather a shifting set of ideas that themselves create boundaries of membership, assign meaning and value to such memberships, and invariably shape the distribution of political power and the experiences of national citizenship.”

For the better part of our census history, race was in the eye of a beholder. !e census-taker came to your door and, as often as not, decided race based on appearance.Both the classi"cations, and the assignment of people into those categories, were breathtakingly subjective. !e “mulatto” category put in its "rst appearance in 1850 and persisted in all but one census through 1920. In 1860 and 1870, all Asians were categorized as Chi-nese. In 1930—and only in 1930—there was a separate category for Mexicans, although in prior censuses Mexi-cans were enumerated as white—unless, of course, an enumerator decided they were Black, Indian or other.

But the harshest categorization was the “one drop rule,” where a drop of black blood categorized one as black or non-white—although blood has nothing to do with it. !e racial pseudo-science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries held that blacks and whites were two distinct races, with the former vastly inferior to the latter and both in danger of serious genetic weakening through racial mixing. In a comparison of the U.S. and Brazil-ian census histories, Nobles notes that Brazil chose to categorize by color rather than by race. While the Brazil-ian elite, too, was convinced of white/light superiority, it condoned interracial relationships in the hope that, over time, the population would fade to white; by contrast, white supremacists in the U.S. feared that everyone would become black.

The  Eye  of  the  Beholder  

A  Decade  of  Enlightenment

And that sentiment remained for decades. !e instruc-tions to census enumerators for the 1930 census essen-tially codi"ed the Jim Crow understanding of race, and remained in e$ect until 1960. It would be 1967 before the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, and the last 16 anti-miscegenation laws were overturned. But by then, the ground had shifted.

In the thinking and organizing of the 1960s that vastly expanded our global understanding of civil and human rights, three events converged to shake up the racial foundations of the census.

collection system to collecting the census by mail.

American landscape.

immigration quotas, opening up the country to a far more racially diverse pool of immigrants.

!e move to mail meant that instead of enumerators de-termining the race of respondents, individuals were able to self-identify. “Believe me, there was no intention of self-de"nition,” Margo Anderson says. “!e Bureau was trying to save money by using the postal service. And they knew there was enumerator error on everything, so they were also trying to get a more direct connection, eliminate the middle man. I’m sure you’ve heard of curbstoning,” chuckles Anderson. “!e enumerator gets tired, sits down on the curb and "lls out the form based on the racial pro"le of the neighborhood.” Now, you

15Spring  2010 Features

were what you said you were. Self-enumeration coupled with Civil Rights Movement changed identities. For instance, the number of people self-identifying as Ameri-can Indians nearly tripled between 1970 and 1990, far exceeding any growth accounted for by birth rates or migration.

In perhaps the greatest transformation to hit the census, the revolution in civil rights brought systemic change through the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and other civil rights legislation. !e uses of census data on race now included a method to track and remedy the unfair allocation of political representation and eco-nomic resources; no longer did the "gures represent only what had been denied but also what could be demanded.

In 1977, to facilitate the civil rights monitoring process, the O%ce of Management and Budget, adopted Statis-

Evolution is, by de"nition an unending process, both past and future embedded in the present. Consider two moments in census history.

In 1890, the Civil War that ended slavery is 25 years in the past, but Jim Crow laws have codi"ed segregation of the races throughout the South and elsewhere. !at

From Mulatto to Multiracial

tical Policy Directive No. 15, which standardized "ve categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Paci"c Island, Black, Hispanic, and White. !e Hispanic category—ethnic rather than racial—allows for additional identi"cation by one of the other racial categories. Rather than being primarily used to reinforce the status quo, the stats on race were now also a weapon to overturn it.

And "nally, the Immigration Act of 1965 fostered a wave of immigration far more racially diverse than any that had preceded it. Between 1966 and 2000, for instance, 22.8 million people, from every continent, entered the country. And by 2000 Hispanics were on their way to outpacing blacks as the largest minority grouping in the country. !e black/white paradigm was on its way to becoming history.

year, in the name of science, the U.S. Senate orders the Census Bureau to categorize the country’s population as white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian. !e Census instructions caution enumerators to exercise extreme care in drawing the dis-tinctions among categories of black: “!e word ‘black’ should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who have from three-eighths to "ve-eighths black blood; ‘quadroon,’ those persons who one-fourth black blood; and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood.” Imagine eyeballing and assess-ing those fractions! Although the Bureau dismisses the resulting data as suspect and useless, some of it surfaces in reports for decades.

Fast forward a century: In the 1990s, a small but grow-ing constituency of activists from multiracial families pushes a demand for a “multiracial” census classi"ca-tion. Racial justice organizations, most signi"cantly the NAACP, vigorously oppose the e$ort, fearing a loss of power and accuracy in enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights protections, although a few leaders, like Rep. John Conyers, see multiracialism as an emerg-ing civil rights frontier.

Meanwhile, for reasons of their own, conservative legisla-tors like Newt Gingrich and a%rmative action foe Ward Connerly, who oppose protections and set-asides based on race, leap on board to promote the new category. !e 2000 Census o$ers a compromise: Respondents can self-identify by marking one or more races but, for the purposes of civil rights enforcement, any white/minor-

16Spring  2010 Features

ity mix will be o%cially counted as part of the minority. Civil rights groups reluctantly accede, and the multira-cial proponents reluctantly accept, although some note that the “one drop of black blood” paradigm has once again prevailed as the primary de"nition of race.

In Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial Amer-ica, Kim Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, details the organizing and political maneuvering that led to the 2000 Census Bureau decision, and continues as practice in the 2010 census.

On its face, the demand for a multiracial classi"cation was simple but, as Williams explains, the implications zinged to the heart of how racial justice activists have organized their politics. While the “mark one or more” (MOOM) compromise kept the monoracial framework of civil rights enforcement, the change forced activists to revisit and re-imagine the landscape of race and remedy that have prevailed since the 1960s. After all, although the issue was hijacked by conservative law-makers, mul-tiracialism itself was "rmly rooted in our own liberal to progressive communities.

Williams says we’re moving simultaneously in two dif-ferent directions, where there are very sharp ideas on race and, at the same time, those lines are blurring, and we are well into some new realities. !e growth of the Asian and Hispanic/Latino populations have reshaped our communities, our politics, and, both literally and "guratively, our complexions.

!e Hispanic category revealed that race can be very #exible. In 2000, nearly half of all Hispanics identi"ed as white and nearly half identi"ed as “some other race,” often writing in “Mexican” or some other Hispanic descriptor. Although fewer than 3 percent of census respondents took advantage of the “mark one or more”

option to describe multiracial status, nearly 5 percent reported as “some other” race. Williams observes that the number of people identifying as “some other” race has more than doubled, making it the fastest-growing race in the country,—and most of those (95 percent) were Latino.

Also, from 1960 to 2000, Williams notes, the number of interracial marriages rose from 150,000 to almost 1.5 million. “Viewed from one perspective, such mar-riages are still rare. Considered from a di$erent angle, it nonetheless de"es common thinking about race in this country to hear that, according to demographer Joshua Goldstein, about one in seven whites, one in three blacks, four in "ve Asians, and more than nineteen in twenty American Indians are closely related to someone of a di$erent racial group.”

As Margo Anderson comments, “Monoracialism is very hard to defend in the U.S. today. And it makes sense that the discussion is coming up now, when we have the "rst generation of children reaching adulthood in the post-Loving world. Before that, you had to be on one side of the color line or the other. !ere are certain so-cial statuses that are impossible. Having a complex racial ID wasn’t legal and made you a social outcast. !at’s no longer so true.”

!e fungible nature of race was evident in the re#ections of many of my younger colleagues. For instance:

My work associate, who is Asian Indian on both sides of her family, con"ded that her primary identi"cation was American, and she considered herself classi"ed as “other.”

Nicole Davis’s family heritage is Black, white, Chinese and Native American. “I don’t actually identify as Chi-nese or Native American,” she said. “For my father that would have been important, but I’m not sure if it is for me. I’m almost never perceived immediately as black, so I feel it’s more important for me to claim that part of my identity. For my mother, as a white woman raising mixed kids, she thankfully never encouraged us to ignore our identity, but she also didn’t she see us as black. Even my black father thought it was strange that I would identify as black, or as both black and mixed.”

Davis, who is in a same-sex marriage, sees some parallels between the complexities of categorizing one’s racial sta-tus and one’s gay marital status. “If my partner and I "ll

17Spring  2010 Features

out insurance forms, we check married,” Davis says, “but there’s no way to translate it into something meaningful. Our money is together, but we can’t "le taxes together, so our tax forms will look really strange. Bureaucracies can’t "gure out how to deal with that reality.

Like many of her multiracial peers, Davis is keenly aware of the political implications of her identity choices. “In my more idealistic side, I would like to move in the direction of the way things should be, but in my more practical side, I think I have to deal with policies as they really are. I think that’s why I simply identi"ed as black in the last census. For those who are mixed Asian and Latino, for example, the choice might be even more complicated, you might want to decide which minor-ity group was more in need. !e decision is weightier, especially when someone else gets to decide how to use the data.”

“It’s ultimately a political choice, and I choose politi-cally,” says Daniel Hosang, who teaches at the University of Oregon and has just completed a book on race and ballot initiatives in California. He could identify as part Asian, part white, part Caribbean, but generally identi-"es as Asian American. “Pure race never existed and still doesn’t,” he observes. “And race never operates on its own; it gets its power from reinforcing economic and so-cial power, and you really can’t talk about it independent of that. If we want to talk about broad problems, race is an essential part of the diagnosis, the miner’s canary that Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have so eloquently

written about. Race is part of helping us understand the broader crisis. !e data is always imperfect and contra-dictory, but it’s also absolutely necessary.

“!e compromise of 2000 seems to be the one that makes sense for the moment,” thinks Hosang. “MOOM re#ects the zeitgeist of the moment, not just our racial moment but the cultural trend of self-creation and re-creation. But it doesn’t trade o$ civil rights.”

!at is also the viewpoint generally, if somewhat re-luctantly, held by census scholars like the ones I inter-viewed. !e classi"cation of race is clearly unscienti"c and feels old-school, but the stranglehold of systemic discrimination is too much with us to abandon racial classi"cations.

“Class-based analysis is the only other feasible way that’s even been talked about to remedy discrimination,” says Kim Williams, “but even class has a racial element that supersedes it; consider the black couple that earns the same income as a white couple, but is still forced into certain less desirable housing situations. And the multi-racial category doesn’t get at the reality that a black and white mixed-race couple in Georgia is in a greatly dif-ferent situation than an Asian and white couple in San Francisco. It’s an unfortunate conundrum, but without the racial data, you have what one colleague called racial disparity without a paper trail. We can get rid of racial stats only when we don’t need them anymore.”

18Spring  2010 Features

Melissa Nobles concurs. “No one will say the racial cat-egories make scienti"c sense. So now we have to actu-ally discuss what they mean and why they’re important. Race is a category that uses physical appearances as its calling card, but unfortunately, political life is organized around it. It’s real because we make it real in our social practices.”

To validate that observation, you need look no further than the political decisions made at the Census Bureau itself. William Frey, a demographer with the Univer-sity of Michigan Population Studies Center, told the New York Times in 2006, “!e 300 millionth [Ameri-can counted] will be a Mexican Latino in Los Angeles County, with parents who speak Spanish at home and with siblings who are bilingual…. !is is a far cry from the 200 millionth person who was born in the late 60s – probably a white son to middle-class suburbanites in Los Angeles or New York City and di$erent from the 100 millionth person born in the late 1910’s, perhaps to a white ethnic city family in New York City or rural family in upstate New York or Pennsylvania.”

When the actual event occurred on October 17th, 2006, in the heart of the Bush era, !e New York Times docu-mented a host of potential candidates for the 300 mil-lionth citizen, almost all of them some mix of races and ethnicities. But the response of the Census Bureau was a far cry from its celebration around the 200 millionth in 1967. “!e head of Bureau feared that there would be too many questions about whether the baby had been born to undocumented parents,” said one long-time insider, “and there was a lot less fanfare.”

Likewise, when the Census in Schools program asked for lesson plans that utilize census data, a recommendation for a unit on slavery was soundly rebu$ed. “We were told that it wouldn’t #y because they don’t teach those lessons about slavery in Texas. Our job is to re#ect the information that exists, but the decision was the triumph of political and marketing decisions.” Or as another sta$er put it, “Sometimes I feel like the South won the Civil War, and we’re always having to deal around that.” As Melissa Nobles dryly observes, “Census as a mirror is di$erent from census as an instrument to "ght discrimi-nation.”

Personifying our transitional moment, we now have President Obama, our "rst avowed multiracial president. “It’s somewhat pried us away from the biological race instinct,” says Kim Williams. “When he says, ‘My wife

Michelle has the blood of slaves and slave owners,’ well that’s powerful. It moves us away from the idea of racial purity, and all the work around genomes and DNA test-ing does the same.”

But, Williams notes, “It seems that all we can really handle is the binary. Almost everyone who marks more than one marks only two. In the end, President Obama’s story is Kenya and Kansas.” And, as the President has clearly stated, and the racist reactions have accentuated, no matter that he’s multiracial, he is also our "rst black president. As Melissa Nobles suggests, “Ending segre-gation, that’s going to be the next frontier of the 21st century.”

!e essence of our dilemma around race and the census is that we do not live in a dichotomous world but in a racial and global ecosystem; and we have not yet "gured out how we can organize against systemic injustice based on race while properly re#ecting a multiracial reality. Margo Anderson has referred to the census as “a Janus-faced instrument, looking backwards and forwards.” Each transition speaks to the collision of forces in that hourglass funnel between the political input and the political outcome, and to the new understanding that emerges to nudge our history of race and rights a little further up the evolutionary ladder.