Counting the mix

A bulletin from the White House Office of Management and Budget that was circulated a year ago provided guidelines by which census statisticians were to retabulate multiracial responses in a way that would not disrupt civil rights monitoring and enforcement. For example, someone who identified himself or herself as both white and black would automatically be retabulated as black in tables produced for civil rights enforcement. A person who chose black and Native American would be identified as Native American.

The guidelines were a partial victory for the NAACP and other early critics of the new categories. They allow mixed-race individuals to be "tabulated in a way in which we could still apply our existing civil rights laws," says the NAACP's Shelton. "That was our biggest concern, since our civil rights laws are predicated on the five categories that the census utilized prior to this particular census. They pretty much reflected our concerns."

It's possible that the White House guidelines will no longer apply, Shelton says. The directive requiring census takers to retabulate results to adhere to the original five racial categories was issued by the Clinton administration, and with a new administration in charge of the bureau, a single policy directive could overturn these guidelines.

But that's not a step President Bush is likely to take -- especially after alienating black voters during the election over voting irregularities in Florida. At this point, no one in Washington is calling for the directive to be thrown out.

Still, Shelton says, "we're concerned that it's a just a directive ... it isn't the law. There's a great deal of wiggle room." Shelton says the White House has not returned letters from the NAACP asking the White House to pledge to observe the retabulation directive.

Shelton does see value in the new multiracial categories, however. "In essence, people are able to self-identify, which will allow demographers and others looking at who we are in this country to try to address the problems we have in our society in full, living color, rather than things being reflected in black and white as they had been previously."

One peculiar finding in the initial data on African-Americans is that children under 17 are four times as likely to be identified as multiracial as are blacks over 50. Shelton attributes that dichotomy to two things. First, he says, it represents a forward shift in a society where the barriers to people getting together across racial lines are breaking down, and there are more multiracial black youth as a result. Second, "people who are older know more about how the stats are being utilized. They know that if the stats are confused, it won't be very clear about resources in the community that are taken into consideration." In other words, the numbers could lead to the erosion of the civil rights these elders marched behind Martin Luther King Jr. to obtain.

Even if a consensus emerges on the tabulation of the new multiracial categories, a more troublesome area of concern remains. The NAACP and other civil rights groups are still miffed by Commerce Secretary Don Evans' decision not to employ the statistical sampling measures favored by Democrats to plug the hole of the 3.3 million Americans estimated to have been missed by census takers in 2000. Evans defended the 2000 Census as the "most accurate in history." Indeed, the undercount was noticeably diminished from 1990, for which undercount estimates range from 4 million to 8.4 million.

Controversy over statistical sampling simmered throughout the '90s and continues today. Republicans have long shunned sampling efforts, describing them as a "scam." But critics charge that they don't support it for the same reason they don't support "motor voter" registration programs -- such efforts tend to help the underclass and minorities, folks who aren't as likely to support GOP causes. Much of the support for sampling in Washington petered out following a 1999 Supreme Court decision that banned the use of statistical sampling for redistricting. Hence there was little surprise at Evans' announcement.

"It's still shameful that they didn't use it," Shelton says. The Supreme Court decision spoke only to the issue of reapportionment. "Anything else was fair game. Wall Street uses statistical sampling, as does Madison Avenue. It's our biggest area of disappointment. It overshadows everything else. It makes you wonder whether they're jockeying for seats in Congress or whether they're actually thinking about the interests of the American people by measuring them as fully as possible."

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