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The Race Trap
A Federal task force got it half right when it recently recommended that the Census Bureau abandon the idea of adding a multiracial category to census forms and other Government documents. The task force said that such a classification would ''add to racial tensions and further fragmentation of our population.''
But the panel simply solved one problem by creating another when it suggested that people of mixed ancestry be permitted to define themselves as ''members of more than one race.'' This suggestion, if carried out, will only intensify and reinforce our misguided obsession with racial categories.
Indeed, the Census Bureau should drop its attempt to classify Americans by race. After all, why do we need a ''race'' category when we already have an ''ethnic'' one on the forms?
The bureau already allows people to categorize themselves as they choose -- for instance, as Chinese-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans or Ukrainian-Americans.
Ethnic categorization is a far more accurate measure of our population, and it is one that doesn't reinforce racial tensions or prejudices. Moreover, getting rid of racial categorization helps rid America of our biggest myth: that race is a meaningful, valid classification.
Let's start with the obvious. Nearly all social scientists, except for those on the fringes, reject the view that ''racial'' differences have any objective or scientific foundation. In other words, a ''white'' person is no different biologically from a ''black'' person. This fact is the official position of the Federal Government and Census Bureau.
But if ''race'' is scientifically meaningless, then why do we cling to this concept politically?
One standard explanation is that even though racial categories are not meaningful in a scientific way, many people still believe in them, and use them to justify their racist beliefs and actions. Thus, racial categories help the Government measure how racism affects the country demographically, in areas like housing, education, health care and income. And they help monitor progress in civil rights.
But if people are prejudiced along racial lines, they are also prejudiced along ethnic lines. So why measure both racial and ethnic prejudice? Isn't that redundant?
Countering this is an argument put forward by many African-Americans and other minorities. It is often said that African-Americans, Asian-Americans and brown Hispanics cannot hide or conceal their appearance, whereas Irish, Jews and other white ethnics can. Thus, according to this theory, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians are both ethnically and racially different. And, as the theory goes, prejudice based on racial, as opposed to ethnic, differences is much more devastating.
This belief, however, does not stand up to historical and sociological scrutiny. When no outward physical differences exist, people have had no problem inventing them. To outsiders during the Nazi era, German Jews seemed very similar to German gentiles, but the Nazis, and indeed nearly all Germans, considered the Jews to be a biologically different race.
Today, ''racially'' similar Serbs, Croats and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia battle one another, as do Tutsis and Hutus in central Africa and Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. These conflicts are based on prejudices that are similar to those of the typical lynch mob in the Deep South.
Americans need not go beyond their own borders to see the meaninglessness of the ''race'' category. We easily forget that as late as the beginning of World War II, Jews in the United States were considered a separate ''race'' by many Christian Americans.
Irish-Americans can tell a similar story about their ancestors. Until the early decades of this century, the Irish Catholic ''race'' was stereotyped in Britain and the United States as subhuman, lazy and violent in both scientific and popular writings. The Irish, like the Italians -- another group previously considered as ''nonwhite'' -- had to struggle hard for their reclassification into the white ''race.''
In addition to perpetuating old racial categories, the Census Bureau is also busily inventing new ones, the most absurd being the recently constructed race called ''Asian.'' This category is at best a pan-ethnic term meant to include everyone from Filipino-Americans to Korean-Americans to Pacific Islanders.
Having learned from the census form that a person is Japanese-American, Chinese-American or Pakistani-American, what useful information is gained by the additional data that he or she belongs to the ''Asian'' race? None whatsoever. The Asian category only reinforces and legitimizes the notion of race as a separate, meaningful entity.
Why can't the Census Bureau use its ethnic data to tell us about demographic trends instead?
Distinguishing between race and ethnicity is an ingrained part of America's racial ideology. The racial categories maintained by the Census Bureau can only perpetuate the idea that there is such a thing as racial purity and that people in the United States have essential biological differences.
Thus the liberal social science community, the political leaders of minority groups and the Federal Government are all standing in the way of the very cause they seek to promote -- racial reconciliation.
And the Census Bureau's task force, by recommending that Americans be allowed to classify themselves as members of more than one ''race,'' only adds to the country's racial fragmentation -- a polarization that it so badly sought to ameliorate.
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