Census and the complex issue of race.by Ellis CoseRacial classification have always been a part of the American culture. The country has pursued for the rejection of racial identification but, its laws still adhere to the notion of racial inequality.© COPYRIGHT 1997 Transaction PublishersRacial classification has always been a serious- if maddeningly imprecise - business, determining who gets access to which wing of the American dream. Slave or freeman, citizen or alien. "Tell me your color," America proclaimed, "and I’ll tell you your place."The nation has long outgrown the days when slavery was a color-coded calling and naturalization was restricted to "aliens being free white persons," but the legacy of color consciousness remains. Too often our culture embraces the notion - even as our laws reject it - that all races are not equal. Nowhere is that assumption more apparent than in our accepted definition of race. For whereas one drop of "black blood" is generally considered sufficient to render one black, whiteness is not so easily bestowed.Many people are now suggesting that the time has come to reject racial definitions rooted in slavery (and in the drive to re-create a sharp black-white divide that miscegenation had, in some respects, erased). Isn’t it time, some critics ask, to rethink, and perhaps dismantle, a racial categorization system whose primary function is to separate and divide? What’s the point, they ask, in forcing people into black, white, yellow, or red boxes that cannot possibly accommodate America’s growing racial diversity, particularly when the black box is fundamentally different from the others, carries the full baggage of slavery, and defies all common sense? Why, they ask in effect, must a person with any degree of black African ancestry be forced to pretend that no other racial heritage counts?The questions come most insistently and most urgently from those who make up what has been dubbed the "multiracial movement" and who resent being asked to deny a major part of who they are. Though the issue of racial classification is important to multiracial persons of all conceivable backgrounds, it has assumed a particular importance for those whose heritage is, to some degree, black. For unlike Americans of other races, blacks have largely been defined by the so-called one-drop rule: the presumption that a small percentage of black ancestry effectively cancels out any other racial claim.Sorting out the matter of racial identification is not the only, or even the most important, task facing the U.S. Bureau of the Census as the decennial census approaches. Correcting the chronic undercounting of certain groups is, in some sense, a larger problem. But the issue of racial categorization may well be the most explosive issue on the table. People have strong feelings about how they are grouped, particularly when it comes to race; and often people’s sense of where they belong is very different from the place where others tend to put them.Race is such a subjective and squishy concept that there is no objective way of determining who is right. Moreover, as philosopher and artist Adrian Piper has observed: "The racial categories that purport to designate any of us are too rigid and oversimplified to fit anyone accurately." At a time when the very idea of racial categories is under assault, the Census Bureau is charged with carrying out what may well be an impossible task.Piper’s own sense of the absurdity of America’s concepts of distinct racial groups arises from being a "black" person whom many people assume to be "white." She seemed so white to her third-grade private school teacher that the woman wondered whether Piper knew that she was black. Piper, of course, is only one of a long line of people who have found their appearance to be at odds with what America insisted that they were.In 1983, for instance, an appeals court ruled that a Louisiana woman must accept a legal designation of black, though by all outward appearances she was white. The woman, Susie Guillory Phipps, who was then forty-nine, had lived her entire life as a white person. Upon hearing the court’s decision, she told a Washington Post reporter: "My children are white. My grandchildren are white. Mother and Daddy were buried white. My Social Security card says I’m white. My driver’s license says I’m white. There are no blacks out where I live, except the hired hands." Phipps had discovered that the state considered her black on obtaining a copy of her birth certificate in order to get a passport. Her attempt to change the designation eventually led her to court. A genealogist who testified for the state uncovered ancestors Phipps knew nothing about and calculated that she was 3/32 black. That was sufficient to make her black under a Louisiana law decreeing that a person who was as little as 1/32 black could not be considered white.That Louisiana law was unique in this modern era in writing racial classifications into law, but the acceptance of the notion that "black" encompasses virtually everyone with black African ancestry is widespread. It is embodied not only in census data but in civil rights law. Consequently, many people who care about such laws find Society Sep-Oct 1997 v34 n6 p9(5) Page 1- Reprinted with permission. Additional copying is prohibited. -G A L E G R O U PInformation IntegrityCensus and the complex issue of race.the matter of re-examining racial categories (especially of who belongs in the "black" category) to be unsettling.Not that anyone believes that the current categories - spelled out in Office of Management and Budget Directive No. 15 - reflect the true diversity of who Americans are. The population of the United States, as even defenders of the present system will acknowledge, consists of much more than four racial clusters (American Indian or Alaskan native, Asian or Pacific islander, black, white) and one relevant ethnic group (Hispanic). An array of spokespersons for an assortment of ethnically or racially interested organizations have proposed that the current categories be changed, or at least expanded. They have made arguments for Middle Easterners to be seen as something other than white, for Hawaiians to be grouped with Native Americans, and for Hispanics to be made into a separate racial (as opposed to ethnic) group. The most intriguing argument, however, comes from those who insist that the Census Bureau should sanction a