By Major W. Cox
Controversy reigns since the government issued the rules late in 1997 for enumerating the American citizenry in Census 2000. Many Americans are disappointed with the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB is the government agency responsible for the census) decision to keep the current, categories. The government’s official categories established in 1977, are white, black, American Indian/Eskimo, Asian/pacific Islander, and Hispanic.
Much of the controversy centers around classifying multiracial Americans, individuals born of mixed racial heritage. These individuals had lobbied the presidential commission on the census for a "multiracial" category. That will not happen: there will be no multiracial category. They had a small victory, however, the government conceded to allow individuals with a multiracial heritage the option of checking as many of the "official" categories as may apply.
OMB’s decision not to include a multiracial classification on the 2000 census did not please many Americans. It certainly didn’t please Charles Michael Byrd, a writer with a mixed racial heritage. He dubbed the governments’ new "check all that apply" rule for the census a politically correct version of the one-drop rule (the one-drop rule used during slavery established how little Negro blood determined slave status).
Byrd believes, "Individuals who can claim African heritage and who check the ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ box on the 2000 Census…even if they checked a second or third box…will be reported solely as ‘black’ or ‘African-American’."
Powerful civil rights organizations lobbied the commission for race classifications in the 2000 Census to remain unchanged. The leaders of these organizations fear a "multiracial" classification would weaken and hamper enforcement of the body of current civil rights law. Many of these laws enacted to protect individual civil rights are linked to current census race classifications. The Voting Right’s Act, for example, codifies the current race classifications in enforcement of voting right’s law.
It is unclear how a change in the official government racial categories will effect civil right’s law. Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Shaw v. Reno (more about Shaw follows later in the column), many lower court decisions involving civil right’s law are reflecting the spuriousness of government racial categories. More often today, court decisions in these cases reflect the goal of the Fourteenth Amendment in prohibiting government’s use of skin-color race categories as a classification descriptor in any of its functions.
This is not the first time for controversy to surround the census race classifications. The United States government has never been absolutely certain how to classify the nonwhite citizenry. After slavery, the government categorized former slaves into different categories. They classified some former slaves, those with one white parent, as mulattos. They classified others as quadroons or octoroons, meaning one fourth or one eighth black ancestry respectively. They classified former slaves without any white blood as blacks.
In a political move at the turn of the century to accommodate the U.S. Supreme Courts’ Plessey Decision and the Jim Crow laws that decision spawned, the government combined all these categories. Since that time, descendants of former African slaves have been classified by the United States government at various times as Blacks, Coloreds, Negroes (with ‘N’ or ‘n’), Afro-Americans or African-Americans (with and without a hyphen) and Black Americans. American society in general tolerated a longer and more vulgar list of classifications, categories, names, badges and labels for Americans with African heritage.
Article I of the U.S. Constitution categorized three classes of citizens as follows; "free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifth of all other persons." There is no mention of skin-color race categories anywhere in the United States Constitution.
As a matter of record, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writing for the majority Supreme Court in Shaw v. Reno, (a 1993 N.C. redistricting case) opined: "Classifications of citizens solely on the basis of race are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."
Continuing she wrote, "Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society. [They] … may balkanize us into competing racial factions. They reinforce the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals should be judged by the color of their skin."
The end of the government’s policy of segregating Americans into bogus racial groups and laminating each of us with an OFFICIAL classification every ten years is near.
I look forward to this day, early in the next century, when we all become members of the same category … just a plain AMERICAN.
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Originally Published: 22 January 1998, Montgomery Advertiser
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