Dangers in census move to include race query

I read recently that the next Irish census will probably, for the first time, ask people questions about which race they belong to. While this might seem a good and liberal idea, an experience this week has given me second thoughts.

I was in New York when a census form came through my door. According to the rules, everyone who happens to be in the US on a particular night has to be counted, so I sat down to tick the appropriate boxes. As I did so, I never imagined that this simple bureaucratic procedure would throw up such difficult questions. A note on the form says that it should take the average person about 10 minutes to fill it in. So far, it's taken me three days.

Most of the form is plain sailing. How many people are living in the apartment? Is it owner-occupied, rented or occupied free of charge? My name, sex, age, date of birth. No problem. I've filled out forms which gave me violent headaches for a week but this one seems to be a dawdle. And there are only two questions left.

The problem is that these questions are about race. The first asks whether "Person 1" (the person filling out the form) is or is not "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino". If you are, you can then tick a box for "Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano"; "Puerto Rican"; "Cuban"; or "other Spanish/ Hispanic/Latino".

This one is easy enough if you're Irish but what if you were from Madrid? Do they mean "Spanish" in the sense of people from Spain as well as people from Latin America?

But the really tough one comes next. The question asks: "What is Person 1's race?", which might seem simple enough. But even the statisticians, with their need to slot everyone into categories, had to recognise that this is an increasingly unanswerable question.

The instruction says: "Mark one or more races to indicate what this person considers himself/herself to be." The words which fascinated me here are "one or more" and "considers". For behind the apparently bland bureaucratic language, these little words open up a fascinating vision of the way racial categories are actually constructed. "One or more" is a terse acknowledgment that the notion of racial purity is deeply problematic in today's world.

Likewise, the need to use the word "considers" reflects something even more profound - that race isn't a matter of biology or genetics. It's a matter of who you think you are - of the imagination.

Try to imagine what race Michael Jackson considers himself to be and you begin to get a sense of the shades of grey which now apply to what used to be seen as a black-and-white issue.

The census form offers 15 racial categories: White, Black/African American/Negro, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian, Chamorro, Samoan, Other Pacific Islander, and "Some other race".

The injunction to tick "one or more" of these boxes on the basis of what you consider yourself to be is meant to take account of the reality that lots of people, especially in the US, have mixed ancestry. The US child of a Japanese-Korean mother and an English-Indian father is not just a statistical anomaly.

The US has something like 1.8 million mixed-race marriages and maybe 7.5 million children who are the products of cross-race unions. The Census Bureau had previously been inundated with calls from anguished parents whose children had been forced to choose the race either of their fathers or their mothers. The current form offers the respondent anything up to 63 variations on racial identity.

In fact, even this apparent flexibility doesn't allow everyone to give a comfortable answer to the question of race. Me, for instance. How am I to answer this question?

I know what I'm not. The Guamanian, Filipino or African American strands of my ancestry, if they exist, have been pretty successfully suppressed. So, that leaves me with the box marked "White".

But do I consider myself to be a member of something called "the white race"? Emphatically not. I know enough about history to know that "the white race" is a very recent invention, a political category constructed in the 19th century as a way of asserting the superiority of a certain kind of Anglo-American culture.

I also know that for a long time the Irish were explicitly excluded from it until they fought their way in, largely by distinguishing themselves from blacks. And if I don't believe that "the white race" exists as a valid expression of a genuine collective identity, how can I "consider" myself a part of it?

The only option left to me is to tick "some other race" and to specify "Irish". But Irishness isn't a racial category. It is a complex, ambiguous nationality with a number of ethnic identities. I could, I suppose, resort to some convenient fiction like "Celtic" but that seems to me as creepy as a German claiming to be part of the Aryan race.

Besides, I have no idea how much of my ancestry is English, Viking or Norman.

In the end, the only thing I can put on the form is "none of the above", which is hardly what the census takers want to hear, but which is certainly what I "consider" myself to be.

Ironically, a big part of the problem with the US census has to do with the legitimate anxiety of minority groups that they should be seen, literally, to count in society.

The Census Bureau initially wanted to include a category marked "multiracial". But black, Asian and Indian activists were afraid that this would lead to an understatement of their numbers, with all that might imply for the allocation of resources. So not only did they succeed in having the "multiracial" option dropped, but they have secured a guarantee that people who describe themselves as, for example, white and black, will be counted as blacks.

Weirdly, the old segregationist rule that people with one drop of black blood are blacks has been resurrected by the civil rights lobby.

More fundamentally, the whole notion of race is simply running out of road. As an intelligent description of real people it is becoming completely useless. As so often happens, Ireland's home-grown racists are taking up a concept just when it has finally become redundant. Our census takers should think very carefully before letting this intellectual zombie loose.

fotoole@irish-times.ie