Census Sense
And nonsense.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity
March 7, 2001 1:55 p.m.

he top headline in today’s Washington Post is “Hispanics Draw Even With Blacks In New Census.” The article says that the number of Americans who describe themselves as Hispanic grew by nearly 60 percent over the last ten years, and now totals 35.3 million, which is about 3 million more than the Census Bureau had predicted.

Whether there are now more Hispanics than blacks is a tricky question. The new census for the first time allowed people to check off more than one racial box, and the Post also reports that a “higher-than-expected number of blacks … included themselves in more than one race.” If you count the blacks who checked off more than one box, then there are still more blacks than Hispanics; but if you don’t, there aren’t. The Post also points out that “Hispanics can be of any race,” so comparing the tally for blacks versus Hispanics is analytically dubious.

The figures also indicate that about 3.6 times as many black children younger than 18 were reported as belonging to more than one race than was the case among African Americans 50 and older. This makes sense. Earlier census data had found that, over the last 20 years, the number of marriages between blacks and whites has more than quadrupled (white-Hispanic and white-Asian marriages are even more common). Amitai Etzioni points out: “In 1990, 84 percent of all married black people over the age of 65 were in both-black marriages, but only 53 percent of married blacks under 25 were.”

Indeed, the multi-race option was added to the census form in large part because of pressure from the increasing number of those who are either in multi-race marriages or are the product of them. Multiracial and multiethnic newborns now make up almost 15 percent of the births in California (behind Hispanics and whites).

The Post’s statement that “Hispanics can be of any race” is emblematic of a larger problem. Race is a dubious construct, especially in America, where there is so much intermarriage and so many of us have mixed ethnicities. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson refuses to use the word race now, unless it’s in quotation marks. And the concept of ethnicity — which he prefers — is only a little better. USA Today this week, also reporting on census data (collected in a March 2000 survey), pointed out that “wide differences exist for subgroups within the Hispanic population” in level of education. Thus, 23 percent of Cuban Americans age 25 or older have at least a college degree, versus 17.4 percent for Central and South Americans, 13 percent for Puerto Ricans, and 6.9 percent for Mexican Americans.

The same kind of discrepancies exist in the category “Asian and Pacific Islanders.” For instance, 51.1 percent of Native Hawaiians are born out of wedlock, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, versus only 9.7 percent of Japanese Americans and 6.4 percent of Chinese Americans.

There are, likewise, significant socioeconomic disparities among different subgroups of African Americans (e.g., West Indians), and the disparities within the group we label “white” are perhaps greatest of all. For instance, the percent of college graduates for the white category overall is 22.0 percent and the overall white median family income is $35,975, according to a table of 1990 data in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s American in Black and White, but this ranges from Cajuns (11.8 percent and $28,640) to Latvians (49.6 percent and $54,806). As the Thernstroms also point out: “the socioeconomic gap between Jews and Christians today is greater than the gap between blacks and whites.”

Ironically, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week called for Georgia to expand the definition of preferred “minority” subcontractors to include Hispanics. The editorial acknowledged “the fear among some African-American state legislators that black businesses would lose if Hispanics gain minority status in Georgia.” It also agreed that an earlier proposal was defective because “it would have allowed anyone of just about any ethnicity to qualify as an ethnic minority.” (The Post, too, acknowledged the friction that has sometimes surfaced between the growing Latino population and African Americans.)

But it is hard to read all these new figures and conclude anything except that it is futile at best and most likely dangerous and destructive for the government — federal, state, or local — to try to classify its citizens according to blood and then treat them better or worse on that basis. Futile, because, as we have seen, these categories are increasingly meaningless. Dangerous and destructive because they create resentment among those not preferred, as well as a perverse incentive for ethnic minorities — and especially their “leaders” — to assert and believe that they are victims and failures.

America is a nation of immigrants, and it is a nation of many ethnicities, too. Preferential treatment was a bad idea when there were relatively few Americans who were neither black nor white; as America becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic, official discrimination becomes even more untenable. The larger and more numerous our different racial and ethnic minority groups, the more risky balkanization becomes.

Let’s return to the Post’s headline. As Hispanics overtake blacks in numbers, are we to give both preferences, or just blacks, or neither? We really cannot equate the history and circumstances of the two groups, even if we view each as homogeneous, and it is hard to see why, if Hispanics are entitled to preferences, then Asians and Cajuns aren’t, too. But if we give only blacks preferences, then we will be discriminating not only against whites, but against other racial and ethnic minorities that are growing in size and political clout. That is not tenable either.

The only sensible solution is for the government to treat all Americans equally, and for all of us to judge one another as individuals. And the good news is that this is what our Constitution already requires, and what the American Creed has always held.