Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC
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- The census is a form of racial ordering that creates processes of assimilation into the categories of whiteness
- This statitization of racial identity furthers state control and reinforces racial domination
- Slavery impact
- Slavery impact 2
CaseAdvantageImpacts*The census creates a perception of the world that brackets off individuals into neat identity classificationsKertzer and Arel, 2 - * PhD, Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University **PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada (David and Dominique, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” 2002)//jml In short, the use of identity categories in censuses – as in other mecha- nisms of state administration – creates a particular vision of social reality. All people are assigned to a single category, and hence are conceptualized as sharing, with a certain number of others, a common collective identity. This, in turn, encourages people to view the world as composed of distinct groups of people and may focus attention on whatever criteria are utilized to distinguish among these categories (Urla 1993). Rather than view so- cial links as complex and social groupings situational, the view promoted by the census is one in which populations are divided into neat categories. Appadurai’s (1993: 334) comment is apropos here: “statistics are to bod- ies and social types what maps are to territories: they flatten and enclose.” In Europe, national statistics-gathering was developing in the nine- teenth century as a major means of modernizing the state. International congresses were held where the latest statistical and census developments were hawked to government representatives from across the continent. Knowledge was power, and the knowledge of the population produced by the census gave those in power insight into social conditions, allowing them to know the population and devise appropriate plans for dealing with them. As Urla (1993: 819) put it, “With the professionalization and regularization of statistics-gathering in the nineteenth century, social statistics, once primarily an instrument of the state, became a uniquely privileged way of ‘knowing’ the social body and a central technology in diagnosing its ills and managing its welfare.” Such language, not coincidentally, brings to mind Foucault, and his view of the emergence of a modern state that progressively manages its population by extending greater surveillance over it. In examining state action in the construction of collective identities, we enter into the com- plex debates over what is meant by “the state.” The state itself is, of course, an abstraction, not something one can touch. Such a perspective impels us to examine the multiplicity of actors who together represent state power, and discourages us from the view that “the state” necessarily acts with a single motive or a single design. An inquiry into censuses and identity for- mation, then, requires examination of just which individuals and groups representing state power are involved, and how they interrelate with one another as well as with the general population. Pioneering research of this sort has been done on the impact of various advocacy groups. Espe- cially valuable work has been done on the Census Advisory Committee on Spanish Origin Population in formulating the “Hispanic” category in the 1980 US census (Choldin 1986). Similarly important work has been done on the role of ethnographers, geographers, and party activists in devising an official list of ethnic “nationalities” for the first Soviet census of 1926 (Hirsch 1997). Sorely needed are more ethnographic efforts at examining the workings of state agencies of various kinds – from legis- latures to census-takers – in their interactions with each other and with the people under their surveillance.3 That the kind of counting and categorizing that goes on in censuses is an imposition of central state authorities, and thereby a means of extending central control, has long been recognized. Indeed, ever since the first census-takers ventured into the field, struggles between local people and state authorities over attempts to collect such information were common. Such was the case in mid-eighteenth-century France, when various at- tempts to collect population data by the central government had to be abandoned. Opposition came not only from a suspicious populace but also from local governments. Each feared that the information was be- ing gathered to facilitate new state taxes (Starr 1987: 12–13). These first population enumerations were typically identified with attempts to tax (often newly acquired) populations, as well as to conscript them for labor or military service. The census is a form of racial ordering that creates processes of assimilation into the categories of whitenessMezey, 3 – Professor of Law at Georgetown University (Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1701-1768 (2003) Northwestern University Law Review, 2003)//jml But protecting traditional race categories and race-based rights and at the same time allowing for a radical rethinking of identity does not come without costs. One cost may be the very thing the traditional civil rights groups feared most from a single multiracial category: movement of more minorities away from a single racial identity and potentially toward white- ness. Of course this is not just the result of individual choice, but occurs through the reclassification of bodies based on changes to the categories. In discussing the oft-cited projections that the United States will be a minority- majority country by 2060 based on current immigration trends, john powell notes that he is skeptical "that we will categorize those immigrants such that the majority is non-white. When we talk about changing demographics we must remember that we are in control of how we categorize our popula-tion. Racial ordering is not a natural phenomenon." If history is any in- dication, enough people will be allowed to claim whiteness that the country can maintain a white majority, with its attendant white power and privilege, and the nation as currently imagined can be preserved. There is already a good deal of flexibility in the white category even as it is currently defined, as a person "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa," '64 and there is reason to expect this definition will continue to change with time. Even if it does not, racial performance will undoubtedly continue to inform our legal definitions.365 Immigrants, much like they did one hundred years ago, are changing the meaning of whiteness. There were 28 million foreign-born residents of the U.S. in 2000; two-thirds reported that they were white. 66 Not only are American race categories somewhat meaningless to many immigrants, but to the ex- tent they have meaning it is abundantly clear that immigrants "equate 3'67 whiteness with opportunity and inclusion." Furthermore, the His- panic/Latino category, an already ambiguous ethnicity, is another possible gateway to whiteness. In 2000, nearly half of all Hispanics classified them- selves as white. 68 But of course, the OMB did not undo the basic race categories nor did it create a separate multiracial category. Hence, another important cost in its final decision is to those who understand themselves as multiracial and who feel that they exist in liminal spaces on official forms, in the national imagination, and in communities and even families. This nonrecognition is acknowledged and perhaps exacerbated by the Census Bureau when it re- 3'69 fers to multiracial people as "The Two or More Races Population." By not fundamentally changing the categories by which we understand and struggle with race, the check-all-that-apply decision continues to discipline and discount those who do not fit within them. This statitization of racial identity furthers state control and reinforces racial dominationNobles, 2 - Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science at MIT (Melissa, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” “Racial categorization and censuses” 2002)//jml Race as discourse To count by race presumes, of course, that there is something to be counted. Intellectuals, political elites, scientists, and ordinary citizens have considered race an elemental component of human identity, of what it means to be human. The weight of scientific thought about race can hardly be overestimated, especially in census-taking. As the historian Nancy Stepan observes, the modern period of 1800 to 1960 was one in which European and American scientists were “preoccupied by race” (Stepan 1982: x). There have been, and still are, popular understandings of race and of proper racial identifications. These popular understandings are sometimes directly at odds with elite and scientific understandings. They are, as often, informed by them, with variation. Given then that race was (and continues to be) thought elemental to human identity, it would seem no surprise that the census counts by race. The connection between race and census-taking would seemingly end there. Every human body has a racial identity, and population censuses count bodies, so racial data are obtained through the counting of bodies. But if we question the supposed rigid quality of race and explore its evident plastic qualities, the way is opened to better explaining what race is and to understanding the role of the census in creating it. The scholarship that refers to race in one way or another is vast and continues to grow. However that portion of it that examines the concept of race itself is less voluminous, though still substantial. An intellectual consensus exists today whereby most agree that racial categories have no biological basis. This is true even as persons still commonly refer to individuals and groups on the basis of similar and dissimilar physical characteristics, and use the term 'race' and its accompanying discourse, however incoherent, to substantiate these distinctions. With racial categories believed to have no biological basis, the task for scholars has shifted to defining, explaining, describing, and analyzing race. The resulting theories vary as widely as the disciplines. According to the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, race is “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests referring to different types of human bodies” (1994: 55). The historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham understands race to have various faces: race, then, is a “social construction”; “a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves”; “a myth”; “a global sign”; and a “metalanguage” (1992: 251–74). The philosopher David Theo Goldberg argues that race is an “irreducibly political category, ” in that “racial creation and management acquire import in framing and giving specificity to the body politic” (1992: 563). The American Anthropological Association today views race as a concept with little scientific validity, burdened by its association with racist practices, and less useful than ethnicity in capturing the “human variability” of the American people. According to the legal scholar Ian Haney-Lopez, the law constructs race legally by fixing the boundaries of races, by defining the content of racial identities, and by specifying their relative disadvantage and privilege in American society (1996: 10). Literary critic Henry Louis Gates sees race as the “ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application” (1986: 5). Historians of ideas have traced the development of racial thought in various countries and different historical epochs (Jordan 1968; Horsman 1981; Gould 1981; Barkan 1992; Skidmore 1993). Political scientists view race as a tool, used both by white elites, to insure white domination, and by blacks and other nonwhites, as a potential weapon to resist such domination by blacks and other nonwhites (Hanchard 1994; Marx 1998). We are a long way, indeed, from seeing race as fixed, objective, and in significant ways, deriving its existence from human bodies at all. Race stems from and rests in language, in social practices, in legal definitions, in ideas, in structural arrangements, and in political contests over power. This chapter builds on certain trends of this theoretical work. It treats race as a discourse, meaning that race is a set of shifting claims that describe and explain what race is and what it means. Although this discourse has various sources in religion, law, and science, it is the latter – science – that has been the most influential in census-taking in the United States and Brazil. Indeed, the influence of scientific thinking argues against viewing racial discourse as merely a tool to be manipulated by elites or masses. While it is true that political and intellectual elites were largely responsible for creating and promulgating scientific racial thought, they did so not only to manipulate and control; rather, they thought that they were adhering to nature's laws of human diversity. However, because scientific investigation results from human endeavor, it is inevitably shaped by larger political, social, and cultural processes. Racial discourse, then, does not exist without its various agents or its institutional channels. Scholars are right in stressing race's discursive nature. Yet their theoretical formulations run the risk of obscuring the institutional sites of its construction, maintenance, and perpetuation. Census Bureaus are such sites because they help to create, maintain, and advance racial discourse. As we will see, in both countries racial discourse and racial categorization on censuses have focused on the ideas of “whiteness, ” “blackness, ” and “mulattoness. ” However, racial discourse has been applied to other groups as well. In the United States, elite concerns about other “nonwhite” people – the Chinese, Japanese, and especially Native Americans – were also reflected and advanced by the census, although to a far lesser degree. Twentieth-century Brazilian censuses did not enumerate indigenous persons separately (with an indigenous category) until the 1991 census. Racial discourse supplies the boundaries of racial memberships and their content, and is itself context specific. It therefore varies from one national setting to the next. In nineteenth-century colonial Malaysia, for example, race pertained to the broad grouping of Europeans, Malays, Chinese, Indians, and others (Hirschman 1986), and by 1901 censuses counted them as “races” (Hirschman 1987). In Guatemala, Ladinos and Mayas are the two major racial groups. Twentieth-century Guatemalan censuses have supposedly charted the decrease in Mayas, thereby making Guatemala a “whiter, less Indian” nation, according to its political elites (Lovell, Lutz 1994: 137). Likewise, the relation of such discourse to census-taking may vary in its particularities, but the general pattern holds: census-taking reflects, upholds, and often furthers racial discourse. Slavery impactWander et al. 93 (Philip Wander has specialized in slavery, Native American, and foreign policy rhetoric. He has a Ph.D from University of Pittsburgh and is a presidential professor at Loyola, 1993. http://www.geraldbivens.com/rd/wander-roots-of-racial-classification.pdf) JG At first there were white and black slaves who suffered alike from the overwhelming English and European passion for material and spiritual expansion. A closer look at U.S. colonial history reveals the move from racial classification to racialization—as slave and black become synonymous. According to some scholars, this move was due to two unique characteristics of the American colonial experience. The first was the prevailing attitude toward property. For centuries, Europeans held a firm belief that the best in life was the expansion of self through property and property began and ended with possession of one’s body (Kovel, 1984, p. 18). However, this law was violated by New World slavery, and it differed in this way from other slave systems. The slave owners, in proclaiming ownership of the bodies of the slaves, detached the body from the self and then reduced his self to sub-human status (justified by the racial categorization system). Slave property became totally identified with people who happened to have black skin, the color that had always horrified the West (Kovel, 1984, p.21) Slavery impact #2Wander et al 93 (Philip Wander has specialized in slavery, Native American, and foreign policy rhetoric. He has a Ph.D from University of Pittsburgh and is a presidential professor at Loyola, 1993. http://www.geraldbivens.com/rd/wander-roots-of-racial-classification.pdf) JG The roots of racial classification emerge from the naturalistic science of the 18th and 19th century. During this time, scientific studies extended the classifications of humankind developed by zoologists and physical anthropologists by systematically measuring and describing differences in hair texture. skin color, average height, and cranial capacity in various races. These studies reflected a naturalist tradition—an assumption that the physical world had an intrinsically hierarchical order in which whites were the last and most developed link in "the great chain of being. (Webster, 1992. p. 4.)… How were these categories used socially and politically? To answer these questions. we must examine the historical contexts in which this scholarship occurred This scholarship occurred during a period of global expansion by European powers and of westward expansion in the United States. The research on racial categories supported these efforts--often aimed at subjugating nonwhite peoples (Fusser Rosenberg, 1999: Omi & Winant, 1994). Anthropologists and Egyptologists found evidence of cultural, social, technological, and spiritual inferiority of nonwhite races throughout human history. These conclusions were corroborated by colonial officials and newspaper reports that described and discussed the inferiority of non-whites in colonies and potential colonies throughout the world. By using the research findings described above, race theory helped to explain and justify the expansion and colonizing by white peoples, their subjugation of nonwhite peoples in Africa, Asia. and the Orient, and the continuing domination of nonwhite peoples—slaves, peasants, aborigines, and the poor at home. 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