One Drop-Still - A racialist's Census

National Review, April 17, 2000 by Stephan Thernstrom

'THE United States is the only country in the world in which a white woman can give birth to a black baby but a black woman cannot give birth to a white baby." Not long ago, when the civil-rights movement was unquestionably on the side of the angels, liberals were fond of pointing that out, with a mixture of dismay and smugness. How stupid! they said. You were deemed black if either of your parents was black. Indeed, you were deemed black even if your only black ancestor was one great- grandparent-the infamous drop" rule made it so.

That rule was essential to the either-or logic of the Jim Crow system, in which being only part-black was as inconceivable as being part- pregnant. Nor was there room for people with other racial identities; those who were not white were thrown into the category of-as the Census Bureau traditionally termed it-"Negroes and other races." Under this system, if you recognized the remarkably mixed ancestry of a Tiger Woods, what public school would you assign him to? Where would you have him sit on the bus?

Jim Crow is now dead, but its legacy lives on in current racial- classification practices. Ironically, though, it is now those on the left, who are pleased to call themselves liberals, who insist that we all belong in rigid, mutually exclusive, color-coded compartments. Their views, alas, are reflected in the decisions made recently about the Census of 2000, now in mailboxes throughout the country.

In the past, the Census Bureau was not totally oblivious to the reality of the American marital melting pot. To the question about "ancestry or ethnic origin" that appeared in both the 1980 and 1990 Censuses, it was allowable to give as many as three answers. You could report your ancestry as German, Italian, and Irish, or as Polish, Greek, and Swedish. But when it came to identifying yourself racially, no such latitude was given. The "races" of the United States were assumed to be mutually exclusive categories, and you could name only one.

This rigid rule came under growing criticism in the 1990s because of the spectacular surge in intermarriage between Americans of different "races." In some Asian groups-not so long ago categorized as "Orientals" and forbidden to marry non-Asians in some states-a majority of current marriages are to non-Asians, mostly whites. Fully half of all American Indians today are married to non-Indians. Even black/white intermarriages, once illegal in all southern states and taboo in all but the most cosmopolitan communities, are by now far from uncommon. More than one in eight African Americans who married in 1994 had white spouses, and that figure is doubtless higher by now. The rapid growth in the number of children born of racially mixed unions, and the resentment of their parents at being forced to put the child in just one racial box, forced the planners of the 2000 Census to recognize the new reality. It would now be possible, they announced, for racially mixed Americans to identify with more than one racial group when they fill out their forms.

In the infighting that led up to the decision, the battle to preserve the old, mutually exclusive conception of race was led, not by white dinosaurs, but by the major civil-rights organizations. If a significant proportion of African Americans reported themselves as partly white, they worried, it could mean fewer affirmative-action slots at colleges and universities, fewer jobs for black applicants, a smaller share of public contracts set aside for black-owned businesses, fewer safe black seats on city councils, in state legislatures, and in Congress. All of these programs take proportional representation as the goal, so a decline in the total numbers of a minority group means a reduced entitlement.

In a 1995 Vanderbilt Law Review article, an African-American attorney pursued the implications of the new "civil rights" position on this issue to its appalling but logical conclusion. Since race was now being used to award societal benefits, and properly so, he argued, it was necessary to devise new legal tools to prevent "racial fraud." Whites would have a much better chance of getting into the school of their choice or of finding a desirable job if they claimed they were black. To prevent that, the author called for a stricter racial-classification system for all Americans, with "fines and immediate job or benefit termination" for those who "falsified their racial identity." What was needed was a new body of law that recognized the "permanent importance" of racial divisions.

Of course, many of our states had such laws before; these laws were essential to the Jim Crow system. For example, a 1924 Virginia statute required statewide racial registration and provided a year in jail as the penalty for making a "false" report of oneracial identity. Obviously, this was designed to discourage blacks from attempting to "pass" as white. One of the arguments advanced by the plaintiffs in Plessy v. Ferguson was that Homer Plessy was entitled to sit in the "white" railroad car because he was white, being only one-eighth black. But the Supreme Court was not impressed, declaring that it was up to the state of Louisiana to decide "the proportion of colored blood necessary to constitute a colored person." To be one-eighth black in Louisiana was to be black-that was that. It is breathtaking to find old ideas about "blood" now resuscitated in a respectable law review, and by an African-American scholar. The fear now is that whites will try to "pass" as black. We have come a long, long way from the days of the Brown litigation, when Thurgood Marshall insisted that "classifications and distinctions based upon race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society."