Rainier Spencer, the director of the Afro-American studies program at University of Nevada-Las Vegas, is the author, most recently, of "Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix."
The Education Department’s provision on “mixed race” violates both the letter and spirit of federal policy set in 1997 and 2000 regarding, respectively, the non-acceptability of a multiracial category and the establishment of strict rules regarding how multiple-race responses are to be counted.
The change endangers the accurate monitoring of civil rights compliance in education. Despite the important gains of the civil rights movement, much discrimination still exists, albeit in less overt forms. Civil rights compliance monitoring -- the use of racial statistics to uncover suspicious patterns in education, housing, employment, etc. -- is our very best means of detecting covert and institutional discrimination. It is the reason for all those “check boxes" for racial identity that no one loves.
By placing students who check more than one box in a “two or more races” category, the Education Department’s provision surreptitiously and illegally creates a multiracial category in education. It does this not because of the questions asked of respondents, but in a backdoor way, through the tabulation results of students who check more than one box.
The government rejected a multiracial category because such a category would provide nothing useful, as no relevant medical, social, educational or housing data are obtained when ethnic and racial differences are collapsed and, in effect, rendered meaningless. The "two or more races" label would put people who are black and white, and who are Asian and Native American, for example, in the same category. This system would make it impossible to compare new statistics to the huge stores of historical data.
People, including students, are not discriminated against on the basis of being mixed-race, but rather on the basis of being one part of that mixture The federal race categories, crude as they might be, allow us to track how people are treated based on how they are perceived by others. The dangerous result of the Education Department’s provision will be two-fold.
On one hand, the “two or more races” category will provide no useful data for compliance monitoring; while on the other, real racial discrimination against some students will go untracked by the compliance monitoring apparatus because students who check more than one box will not be placed in the categories that are in fact motivating their unjust treatment.
Even though race is a fiction, racism remains real, and can be tracked most effectively by the federal race categories that are expressed, you might say, in the language of the racist. To hinder this ability to track racial discrimination for the sake of instituting what is essentially a multiracial category is unconscionable.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Why Race Still Matters
Anthony P. Carnevale is a research professor and the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
The U. S. Department of Education’s practice of counting Hispanics of all races as singularly Hispanic blurs our understanding of socially significant differences. This policy is most harmful to black Hispanics because of the unique persistence of discrimination and disadvantage among African Americans.
This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics—or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses.
As much as we would all like to believe that we have put race behind us, the evidence clearly shows that race still matters. I come to this conclusion reluctantly. While I was vice president of the Educational Testing Service, we spent a substantial amount of time and money trying to find a class-based substitute for race-based affirmative action. However, as much we tortured the data, it would not confess that the educational opportunity problem was about economic class or language barriers rather than race.
Our research since then at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce continues to show that being Black still has independent and powerful negative effects on educational opportunity, quite separate from language and class barriers.
This policy has another unintended consequence. By counting both white and black Hispanics to be simply Hispanic, the Department is implicitly making Hispanic ethnicity into a race.
The resolution of this bureaucratic hiccup is relatively simple. Local educational institutions collect data on both the race and ethnicity of students, and the data reported should be as nuanced as the data collected.
The U. S. Department of Education’s practice of counting Hispanics of all races as singularly Hispanic blurs our understanding of socially significant differences. This policy is most harmful to black Hispanics because of the unique persistence of discrimination and disadvantage among African Americans.
This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics—or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses.
As much as we would all like to believe that we have put race behind us, the evidence clearly shows that race still matters. I come to this conclusion reluctantly. While I was vice president of the Educational Testing Service, we spent a substantial amount of time and money trying to find a class-based substitute for race-based affirmative action. However, as much we tortured the data, it would not confess that the educational opportunity problem was about economic class or language barriers rather than race.
Our research since then at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce continues to show that being Black still has independent and powerful negative effects on educational opportunity, quite separate from language and class barriers.
This policy has another unintended consequence. By counting both white and black Hispanics to be simply Hispanic, the Department is implicitly making Hispanic ethnicity into a race.
The resolution of this bureaucratic hiccup is relatively simple. Local educational institutions collect data on both the race and ethnicity of students, and the data reported should be as nuanced as the data collected.
Race, Poverty, and Educational Equity
Gerald Torres is a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin. He is former president of the Association of American Law Schools.
The debate over new Department of Education rules for how schools and colleges count students by race and ethnicity reveals a tension between students of mixed racial background who want their entire background to count and those Hispanic/Latino students who must ignore their racial complexity in order to count their ethnicity.
In issuing the new regulations concerning racial and ethnic data collection, the department confronts two aspects of changing life in the United States. First is the continuing reality of racially identifiable educational inequality. Second, the younger generation of Americans is less likely to feel confined by rigid racial categories and thus may be harder to identify.
Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded.
To get a handle on possible solutions we need to know who is going to school where, how those schools are performing and whether performance is linked to the demographic make-up of the student body. To address these problems the Education Department has to be able to track the characteristics of the students as well as the schools.
American society has, however, become more racially and ethnically complex and this is where the new survey questions come in. Latinos are the prototypical multiracial grouping. There are Latinos who identify as “white,” some who identify as “black” and many who identify themselves as “mixed” or mestizaje. However, there are issues that are common to Latinos regardless of racial identity. Just to be clear, I am not saying that the racial categories that have dominated the American social imagination have no impact on the lives of Latinos. Rather I am saying that Latinos often stand at the intersection of many of these categories.
The department has opted for an ethnic definition that is commonly treated as if it were a racial definition (see for example the definition of “white” under the guidelines). Does giving priority to Latino ethnicity over race for “non-white”/"non-black" social groupings make sense? For Latino ethnicity the answer seems to be yes, because of the complex and inclusive racial mix that is at the heart of the ethnic definition. Moreover, it makes sense for Latinos in the historical context of American racial politics and perhaps for the educational evaluations the department needs to make as well.
The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?
This resistance to racial ascription is part of the reality that is exposed by the questionnaire. But perhaps it points the way to who we are becoming.
The debate over new Department of Education rules for how schools and colleges count students by race and ethnicity reveals a tension between students of mixed racial background who want their entire background to count and those Hispanic/Latino students who must ignore their racial complexity in order to count their ethnicity.
In issuing the new regulations concerning racial and ethnic data collection, the department confronts two aspects of changing life in the United States. First is the continuing reality of racially identifiable educational inequality. Second, the younger generation of Americans is less likely to feel confined by rigid racial categories and thus may be harder to identify.
Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded.
To get a handle on possible solutions we need to know who is going to school where, how those schools are performing and whether performance is linked to the demographic make-up of the student body. To address these problems the Education Department has to be able to track the characteristics of the students as well as the schools.
American society has, however, become more racially and ethnically complex and this is where the new survey questions come in. Latinos are the prototypical multiracial grouping. There are Latinos who identify as “white,” some who identify as “black” and many who identify themselves as “mixed” or mestizaje. However, there are issues that are common to Latinos regardless of racial identity. Just to be clear, I am not saying that the racial categories that have dominated the American social imagination have no impact on the lives of Latinos. Rather I am saying that Latinos often stand at the intersection of many of these categories.
The department has opted for an ethnic definition that is commonly treated as if it were a racial definition (see for example the definition of “white” under the guidelines). Does giving priority to Latino ethnicity over race for “non-white”/"non-black" social groupings make sense? For Latino ethnicity the answer seems to be yes, because of the complex and inclusive racial mix that is at the heart of the ethnic definition. Moreover, it makes sense for Latinos in the historical context of American racial politics and perhaps for the educational evaluations the department needs to make as well.
The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?
This resistance to racial ascription is part of the reality that is exposed by the questionnaire. But perhaps it points the way to who we are becoming.
'Check One' Didn't Work
Susan Graham is the executive director of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally).
The first time they register for school is when most children see forms with questions about their race and ethnicity.Multiracial children have been made to choose between the races of their parents under the “check one” mandate on forms in our country.
All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.
We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts.Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group.
In 1990, my son was listed as white on the U.S. Census, because they assigned the race of the mother, and black at school because his kindergarten teacher picked a race for him on his first day of school based on her “knowledge and observation” of him. At home, he is multiracial.
On the 2000 Census, my son could check more than one race and is called “a person who checks more than one race.” If he were still in school, he could check more than one race, and would be put in the category called “two or more races.” He is still multiracial at home.
The new guidelines are a positive move, but they still do not reflect appropriate, respectful, dignified terminology for children of more than one race. California is out in front of the federal government on this one. They offer this wording on enrollment forms: “If your child is multiracial, you may select two or more races.” It does not disturb any data and recognizes multiracial students for who they truly are. Any school in the country can and should do the same.
The first time they register for school is when most children see forms with questions about their race and ethnicity.Multiracial children have been made to choose between the races of their parents under the “check one” mandate on forms in our country.
All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.
We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts.Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group.
In 1990, my son was listed as white on the U.S. Census, because they assigned the race of the mother, and black at school because his kindergarten teacher picked a race for him on his first day of school based on her “knowledge and observation” of him. At home, he is multiracial.
On the 2000 Census, my son could check more than one race and is called “a person who checks more than one race.” If he were still in school, he could check more than one race, and would be put in the category called “two or more races.” He is still multiracial at home.
The new guidelines are a positive move, but they still do not reflect appropriate, respectful, dignified terminology for children of more than one race. California is out in front of the federal government on this one. They offer this wording on enrollment forms: “If your child is multiracial, you may select two or more races.” It does not disturb any data and recognizes multiracial students for who they truly are. Any school in the country can and should do the same.
The New Color Wheel
Eric Liu is the author of several books, including, "The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker."
Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We’ve always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting. Even today, our ability to put 300 million Americans into a four-color-plus-Hispanic system is a testament to the power of concept to block perception.
But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.
This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans),
where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade – and where lighter is still usually seen as better.
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter ofcelebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white – which his genes certainly entitled him to do – his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.
As mixing accelerates and racial blocs erode, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. will have to build more coalitions of, well, colored people – people with experiences of disadvantage conferred by color. This won’t be easy. It’s just inevitable.
And ultimately, the checking of multiple race boxes will clear some fog. As race falls apart, it becomes harder to avoid talking about class. We have to reckon with the gross concentration of wealth and poverty that has been compounded by race but is also broader than race. So let us, in love and intermarriage, continue to blow up our boxes. But let us, in our politics, face up to how opportunity is colored – and learn to see each other at last.
Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We’ve always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting. Even today, our ability to put 300 million Americans into a four-color-plus-Hispanic system is a testament to the power of concept to block perception.
But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.
This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans),
where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade – and where lighter is still usually seen as better.
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter ofcelebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white – which his genes certainly entitled him to do – his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.
As mixing accelerates and racial blocs erode, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. will have to build more coalitions of, well, colored people – people with experiences of disadvantage conferred by color. This won’t be easy. It’s just inevitable.
And ultimately, the checking of multiple race boxes will clear some fog. As race falls apart, it becomes harder to avoid talking about class. We have to reckon with the gross concentration of wealth and poverty that has been compounded by race but is also broader than race. So let us, in love and intermarriage, continue to blow up our boxes. But let us, in our politics, face up to how opportunity is colored – and learn to see each other at last.
Identity and Demography
Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Until I went to junior high school I was interracial. I would say, if asked, “my mother is white and my father is Negro.”Or “I come from a ‘mixed’ family.”
When my family moved to Hollis, Queens in 1956, the neighborhood changed with our arrival.When we first moved in, Italians, Jews, Albanians, Armenians and Portuguese lived in small,tidy two-family attached houses on both sides of the street. By 1964 there were almost no whites still living on our block except my mother. As the demographics changed, so did our zipcode. We were now in St. Albans, part of the burgeoning black migration from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant to southeast Queens.
In junior high school I became black. I attended Junior High School 59, a magnet school that attracted Jewish students from Laurelton and Italian kids from Cambria Heights. The white students were friendly during the school day, but it was in riding the bus home with the other black students that I felt most welcome. We rode the bus together to an increasingly segregated St. Albans neighborhood. And it was in St. Albans that I felt fully accepted.
When I applied to college I don’t recall any box-checking exercises involving race. I do remember being asked whether any relatives had attended the particular college in question. My application to Radcliffe College stands out for this reason. Radcliffe had a separate admission system for girls who, if they attended, would graduate with a Harvard degree.
My father had been admitted to Harvard College but he dropped out after two years. As a black man in 1929, he was not permitted to live in the dormitories. He was also denied financial aid when he showed up in person to apply. He was told it was because he had failed to submit a photograph with his application. Harvard had a quota for black students, and its quota had obviously already been met.
Box checking, quotas, or some upscale version of the “one drop” rule do not explain the challenging issues of race in the U.S. One’s individual gene pool, in 1964 and 2011, is less important than the ethnicity, race, and yes, the economic and social class of the people who live in the neighborhood in which one is raised and to whom one feels ultimately accountable. Today, race is less about biology and much more about demography.
Thus, for me, the real question is not which box you check, just as the real question for my father was not whether he had failed to submit a photograph. The real question is much more closely related to the experience I had attending Junior High School 59. I did not change my “bloodline” between elementary school and junior high school. What changed for me was the existence of a community in which I felt accepted and to which I ultimately felt responsible.
Until I went to junior high school I was interracial. I would say, if asked, “my mother is white and my father is Negro.”Or “I come from a ‘mixed’ family.”
When my family moved to Hollis, Queens in 1956, the neighborhood changed with our arrival.When we first moved in, Italians, Jews, Albanians, Armenians and Portuguese lived in small,tidy two-family attached houses on both sides of the street. By 1964 there were almost no whites still living on our block except my mother. As the demographics changed, so did our zipcode. We were now in St. Albans, part of the burgeoning black migration from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant to southeast Queens.
In junior high school I became black. I attended Junior High School 59, a magnet school that attracted Jewish students from Laurelton and Italian kids from Cambria Heights. The white students were friendly during the school day, but it was in riding the bus home with the other black students that I felt most welcome. We rode the bus together to an increasingly segregated St. Albans neighborhood. And it was in St. Albans that I felt fully accepted.
When I applied to college I don’t recall any box-checking exercises involving race. I do remember being asked whether any relatives had attended the particular college in question. My application to Radcliffe College stands out for this reason. Radcliffe had a separate admission system for girls who, if they attended, would graduate with a Harvard degree.
My father had been admitted to Harvard College but he dropped out after two years. As a black man in 1929, he was not permitted to live in the dormitories. He was also denied financial aid when he showed up in person to apply. He was told it was because he had failed to submit a photograph with his application. Harvard had a quota for black students, and its quota had obviously already been met.
Box checking, quotas, or some upscale version of the “one drop” rule do not explain the challenging issues of race in the U.S. One’s individual gene pool, in 1964 and 2011, is less important than the ethnicity, race, and yes, the economic and social class of the people who live in the neighborhood in which one is raised and to whom one feels ultimately accountable. Today, race is less about biology and much more about demography.
Thus, for me, the real question is not which box you check, just as the real question for my father was not whether he had failed to submit a photograph. The real question is much more closely related to the experience I had attending Junior High School 59. I did not change my “bloodline” between elementary school and junior high school. What changed for me was the existence of a community in which I felt accepted and to which I ultimately felt responsible.
Take the Politics Out of Race
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The new Education Department ruling is trying to move us beyond the infamous "one drop" rule -- that one drop of black blood makes you black. In fact millions of Americans come from multiple races and ethnicities, and they should never be asked to choose one over another.
Civil rights leaders don't like this ruling because they are in the business of documenting racial disparities. In our culture mixed-race children do not carry the same level of entitlement as blacks. Giving them their own category reduces the number of blacks and, thus, the level of entitlement that civil rights groups can argue for.
Identity politics is a cynical and dehumanizing business that, in the end, helps no one. Better to eliminate all such categories and leave race and identity in the private realm.
The new Education Department ruling is trying to move us beyond the infamous "one drop" rule -- that one drop of black blood makes you black. In fact millions of Americans come from multiple races and ethnicities, and they should never be asked to choose one over another.
Civil rights leaders don't like this ruling because they are in the business of documenting racial disparities. In our culture mixed-race children do not carry the same level of entitlement as blacks. Giving them their own category reduces the number of blacks and, thus, the level of entitlement that civil rights groups can argue for.
Identity politics is a cynical and dehumanizing business that, in the end, helps no one. Better to eliminate all such categories and leave race and identity in the private realm.
The "Two or More Races" Dilemma
Introduction
An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a "two or more races" category.
But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.
Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?
An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a "two or more races" category.
But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.
Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?
Friday, February 18, 2011
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