There are not three or four or five races, each in its own census box; there are multiple combinations, permutations, mixtures. Millions of young Americans know and accept this, and they are increasingly impatient with a census that isn’t better at recognizing it.

Chapter 8 brings us closer to the present, introducing pressures that challenge the role of statistical races in today’s policy environment. One pressure is multiraciality as exemplified in the “mark one or more” census option introduced in 2000. This option is a profound criticism of two centuries of American racial counting. There are not three or four or five races, each in its own census box; there are multiple combinations, permutations, mixtures. Millions of young Americans know and accept this, and they are increasingly impatient with a census that isn’t better at recognizing it. A second pressure pulling in a similar direction is diversity as a policy goal, now widely embraced from the military to the corporation to the university. The complexities of the diversity agenda destabilize the racial classification. The third pressure is the color-blind movement. This is in response to the dilemma of recognition, a phrase indicating that making race groups beneficiaries of policy can itself intensify group identities. There is strong political sentiment that this contradicts basic American individualistic values—freedom, choice, mobility, and merit-earned rewards. In dismay over racial group–based policy, opponents are advancing color-blind proposals in law and politics.

Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 10-11.

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