“In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
All American citizens will soon be receiving their questionnaires from the Census Bureau. One quarter of this year’s form consists of questions about race and ethnicity, something the government has no right or business to ask. Given the illegitimacy of these questions, National Review’s Mark Krikorian has an interesting proposal:
So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it.
Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the
2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
Krikorian explains this form of
political protest is better than simply providing a humorous or witty response:
The most common response from readers was that you should put "human" as your race, or even "100 yard dash." The problem is that those responses will be written off as cutesy, like answering "frequent" when asked about your sex, and won't be reported by the Census Bureau. "American," on the other hand, is clearly a political protest against government race laws, and
is included when the Bureau reports the results, or was in 2000. In fact, the number of people answering "American" grew from 12.4 million in the 1990 census to 20.2 million in 2000, "the largest numerical growth of any ancestry group," according to
Wikipedia.
Similarly, several readers suggested “native American” logically pointing out that they are, after all, native-born Americans. But that (like "Mixed") will simply be entered as an ethnic category rather than a political statement.
Krikorian concludes, “So remember: Question 9 — "Some other race" — "American". Pass it on.”
The message has been passed.
