"I'm sure everything will end up in court," says Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University. "Whenever you have something where resources are involved, you can imagine people arguing about it." Civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, fear that if enough African-Americans choose the multiracial over the single-racial option, they could weaken majority-minority voting districts set up in accord with the Voting Rights Act.

While recent lawsuits and legislation have reduced the role of race and ethnicity in public policy, there are still plenty of race-conscious statutes on the books. Federal policy under legislation like the VRA, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid to bilingual education is based on the percentage of a certain racial group in a given place. Also, lawyers in employment discrimination suits will sometimes try to prove that a firm is biased by comparing the number of blacks in particular jobs with the percentage in the local population. Any such lawsuits could be affected if a large number of African-Americans identify themselves as multiracial.

The counting of multiracial Americans could also affect the data many counties use to monitor the racial makeup of jury pools, as well as complicate the tallying of hate-crime statistics.

Curiously, it's the keepers of health and vital statistics in states like California who may have the hardest time adapting to our increasingly multiracial reality. "I've applied to get a bunch more staff [to process the data]," says Jane McKendry, who heads the Center for Health Statistics for the California Department of Health Service. "But I don't know if I'll get them."

She admits that the department still does not know how it will classify data on mixed-race people. For instance, they have not decided what to do with an infant mortality case involving a self-described "white-black" woman -- whether it should be added to white or black infant mortality rates. "Race means a lot of things in health," says McKendry. Black infant mortality is twice as high as white in many cities, for a complicated tangle of medical, economic, cultural and perhaps biological reasons, and race-targeted strategies have brought down the mortality rate in black sections of Oakland, Calif., Baltimore and Savannah, Ga. Such strategies could be harder to pursue without an accurate count of the black population.

McKendry fears that data on multiracial Americans could get lost in a useless "mishmash" category, and that it will be hard to draw comparisons between pre- and post-2000 data. But she also speculates whether all this confusion could one day cause health professionals to wash their hands of race and concentrate solely on access to care for all Americans -- which wouldn't be a bad thing.

But, truth be told, most demographers do not expect many Americans to avail themselves of the new multiple race option, at least not this first year. In 1998, the Census Bureau ran a dress rehearsal in three sites around the country and the overwhelming majority of respondents ticked off one of the standard categories. In Columbia, S.C., only .08 percent of respondents selected more than one racial category. In Menominee County, Wis., only 1.2 percent of respondents did. But in Sacramento, Calif., 5.4 percent of respondents selected more than one race on the questionnaire.

The dress rehearsal indicates that intermarriage is a largely regional phenomenon. "There are going to be a lot of empty [bubbles] in North Dakota," says Frey, whose research has shown that the much ballyhooed ethnic diversification of America will mostly occur in the 10 states -- California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii -- that have become gateways to contemporary immigration.

The confusion about the census seems fitting, because it matches our racial reality much more than four neat little categories. It will also provide a welcome opportunity to reconsider the way we look at race in America. For starters, the multiple-race option undermines the logic of the so-called one-drop rule, the notion that any person with any amount of African-ancestry must be considered black.

While no one is naive enough to think that official recognition of multiracialism means that Americans will suddenly stop seeing race as a question of either/or, this still amounts to a significant first step. For instance, although the vast majority of African-Americans share some white ancestry, it is doubtful that many black Americans will label themselves as multiracial on the 2000 census. But if race is a social construct -- as social scientists love to remind us -- then it can also be deconstructed. The loosening of strict, mutually exclusive categories begins to allow for a more fluid conception of race.

After the 2000 census, the danger will be the tendency to "reassign" multiracial Americans to the old categories, or create new racial labels to "make sense" of our diversity. The more Americans identify themselves as multiracial, the less the strict categories of race will make sense in the end. But that won't keep people from trying to parse America up into four or five familiar pieces.

In 1998, for instance, the number of applicants to the University of California who flat-out declined to state their racial/ethnic backgrounds jumped a phenomenal 190 percent in one year. But university admissions officers dug into the students' SAT records to try to deduce their ethnic backgrounds without their consent.

Over the next few years and perhaps decades, there will be a heightened battle between the old and new ways of seeing race. A victory for multiracialism may not portend a new era in which all Americans are joined in a raucous chorus of "We are the World," but it would free us to concentrate on what is rapidly becoming this nation's primary demographic divide: class.

"The government really shapes whole issues of identity," says Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. "Over time, people will begin to answer [the race question] in more complex ways." Before the changes in this year's census, the federal government had essentially refused to properly acknowledge mixed-race Americans, the living and breathing solutions to racial tensions. The establishment of the multiple-race option was a clear recognition of a significant demographic trend.

Does all this mean that America is beginning to shed the remnants of a segregated and sordid racial past? Not necessarily. But at least now we can begin to visualize the melting pot we Americans have claimed to desire for so long.

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