Someday, when race is more negotiable--more someone's description of his mood than his identity--historians may say it started with Census 2000.
This census, due for release as early as this week, is the first in which Americans were invited to mark one or more races, creating a total of 57 new categories with anywhere from two to six races, such as white-Asian or black-Latino-American Indian.
Experts estimate that only about 4% of Americans identified themselves as multiracial in 2000, but the implications are stunning. The census' formalizing of multiple-race answers undermines more than 200 years of law and tradition and explodes the most basic notion of race: that there are discrete bio-cultural groups of human beings.
The ensuing debate could overshadow the census' traditional function of establishing the numbers upon which political reapportionment, federal revenue allotments and mass marketing are based.
"Once you have opened up the census in this revolutionary fashion there's really no natural limit, no natural boundaries between the races," said Kenneth Prewitt, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau until he stepped down earlier this year.
The multiracial movement in America has been growing for years, reflecting vast demographic shifts over the past four decades that belied traditional racial categories. In the 1990 census, the third-fastest-growing category was "Other," with 2 million people. Those statistics galvanized multiracial lobbying efforts.
"It just became impossible to deny that people have origins in more than one race," said social historian Joel Perlmann.
But the multiple-race census was opposed by groups like the NAACP and the Japanese Citizens League, who have argued that the destabilization of racial categories could weaken civil rights enforcement efforts.
The greatest impact of Census 2000 will be felt at the local level, especially in states and cities that have diverse and well-integrated communities. A Princeton University study found that multiracial residents represent 8% of Hawaii's population and 10% in Oklahoma, where there are large numbers of multiracial American Indians.
A 1999 census survey of some 14 million Americans found the proportion of residents who checked more than one race was 3.3% in San Francisco, 3.8% in New York's Bronx borough and 4.5% in Yakima, Wash. In a Census Bureau "dress rehearsal" for 2000 conducted in Sacramento, 5.4% said they were multiracial; in some tracts, they represented 11% of the population.
