The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has rejected adding a "multiracial'' box to the 2000 census form for people of mixed racial heritage.
Instead, these Americans will be able to choose more than one racial classification on the census and other federal forms.
Some civil rights groups opposed both the "multiracial'' category and the checking of more than one racial classification because they are concerned about how the federal government will tabulate census data. To many, race on the census form has become more of a social-political construct than an anthropological one.
So for purposes of the Voting Rights Act, the OMB will allow someone who checks black and another race to be treated as "black or African-American'' for the sake of politics. This goes against the intent of checking more than one category, which is to not be pigeonholed, and is a throwback to racist laws of the past.
It used to be that Americans of mixed parentage had to identify with one parent only, usually the mother, or they had to check "other,'' which nearly 10 million Americans did in the 1990 census. The new form gives people more choices and should have nothing to do with the Voting Rights Act.
Over the past 20 years, racial data from the census has been a factor when drawing up legislative district boundaries. But court decisions are outlawing these race-based districts, and counting a mixed-race person as "black'' will have little impact in the future enforcement of voting rights.
Counting people as "black'' when they have a nonblack parent is a return to the old racist "one drop rule,'' which said that one drop of black blood made a person black. But now some civil rights advocates would support such a means of identifying people - one that this census was supposed to eliminate - for the sake of more numbers.
Civil rights laws designed to protect black Americans will still be enforced, regardless of whether they check one box or four. And while race was taken into account in the first census in 1790, its primary purposes are still periodic reapportionment of the House of Representatives and monitoring people's wealth and progress, as well as forecasting the nation's future needs.
It was not designed to create a racial spoils system.
The OMB should drop its intent to adopt a political "one drop rule'' when counting black voters. It has no grounds physically and shouldn't be allowed for political purposes either.
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