Mixed Race Studies

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

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