counting

Veronica is pondering why there is only one box to check off.

On a personal level, it's a difficult question especially when they only allow you one box. Seems like the bureaucracy hasn't caught up with the legalization of interracial marriages yet.

Yet these boxes are at the center of just about every affirmative action discussion there is from admissions, to federal funding contracts, to the census. On one hand, why do we have to choose at all or why can't we choose as many as we want? Much of this comes down to number crunching and systems that assumed in the separation of races. Many of the affirmative action programs and other programs to promote diversity were based on these calculations, percentages and equations that were created at a time in history when there weren't that many interracial couples and there weren't that many interracial children relative to the whole. Fast forward a generation with the 2000 US Census being the first census to allow people to check off more than one ethnic group.

I was working with a Filipino Civil Rights Advocates at the time and it was then that I learned first hand how the US Census wasn't just about numbers, but how these numbers affected how and where the US government spent money, made decisions on priority and programming from education to public health. It affects how Congresspeople view the "importance" of Filipino World War II veterans, relative to the numbers of Filipinos living in their elected districts. There were concerns that the Census would not be "fair" since there were issues of communities distrusting government requests for information, and in particular that the Filipino community is second to Mexicans in terms of its illegal population. The legal relative is not going to count the illegal family that they are housing, whose kids go to the local school district. Then you have Hawaii where Filipinos often don't check Filipino (that's a whole other class/race issue there that's even more complicated). Would Filipinos count their unwed daughters with kids as "single moms"?

And with the ability to check multiple ethnicities, no one knew how the numbers would be weighted when people picked multiple ethnicities. Were they going to break it down in percentages and assume that if you checked off 4 boxes, then you were 25% of each? Would they count each box as one, thus have ethnic breakdowns that were greater than 100%? No one knew, and I don't know if anyone knows to this day how the government broke it down.

In the past, these numbers were key in proving discrimination, that if we compared the rate of hiring or admissions to the population as a whole, all things being equal the distribution would be the same. Well, that was the logic. And it did work at times, particularly in extreme cases. But life, rarely works on an even distribution.

So, the question comes up time and time again, are we ready? Are we ready to say that race and ethnicity don't matter the way Ward Connerly says we shouldn't even ask anymore? And if we don't ask, how do we create checks and balances to diversity? Or maybe we keep the boxes and allow people to check off as many as they want, but how will the calculations be worked out to create a "fair" system? Something where the numbers truly reflect the people they are counting.

And that brings us to the inherent problem, people are not numbers, we cannot quantify how your grandmother raised you, and the different holiday celebrations you have, and the multiple languages spoken in a household. We cannot measure how people judge you for being one ethnicity/race and not the other because your skin is not the right shade or your nose the right shape.

We are at a crossroads and have been here at some time. When Affirmative Action began, we said, the numbers do not lie, let's use the numbers to show us where there is discrimination. And now here we are a generation later and we're no longer sure what the numbers say nor how we get the numbers we really need. Because one plus one does not equal two any more. And the numbers have got us trapped.

On a personal level, we just don't want to be a number and we don't want to be placed in a box, but isn't that how our government sees us, right down to our SSN?

I don't have an answer to Veronica's question. It seems hard to "win." Check off "other" and statistically speaking be seen an "nothing," check off "one box" and not count a part of yourself, check off "more than one box" and have your choice made by part of the bureaucratic system.

Then again, this question is not just Veronica's question, it is really a question for all of us. Something we will have to decide as a society. The system is broke, folks, all of us will have to find a way to fix it.