Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC

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Impact framing

D rule claim

Memmi 2K (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165)

The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.

Their turns case arguments are why nothing ever changes

Omolade 84 (Barbara, sociologist and educator, dean at calvin college, women of color and the nuclear holocaust, WSQ v12 n2, LB)

To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament must overcome its reluctance to speak in terms of power, of institutional racism, and imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and peace have been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, "How can we talk about struggles against racism, poverty, and exploitation when there will be no world after they drop the bombs?" The struggle for peace cannot be separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other struggles concerned with human life and change. In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of color throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuld it in our, own image. The "death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for "survival at any cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in GuineaBissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our people.

Epist da

Be skeptical of their evidence – their authors are victims of absurdist constructions

Webster 2k – Prof CSU Los Angeles, http://multiracial.com/site/index.php/2000/06/01/twenty-one-arguments-for-abolishing-racial-classification/, 6/26/15 BRoche

Races are a categorization of certain biological characteristics. Indeed, the concept of race refers not to persons but arbitrarily selected anatomical attributes. It follows that persons do not belong to races. Black people and white people are not conceptually identifiable, although there are persons with varying shades of skin color, facial form, hair type, shape of skull, and innumerable other characteristics. Thus the idea of race relations is a misnomer. Instead of exposing the absurdities in the practice of racial classification, on that basis, refuse to conduct research on race relations, social scientists are generally content to claim that race is a social construct. This facilitates continuing research on and conservation of "race relations." In this sense, there are no liberal and conservative perspectives "race." The entire project of race relations studies, organization, and policies is eminently conservative of an absurdity.

At: but science !!!!

Racial categories have no scientific basis

Change and Dodd 01 (Heewon Chang has a PhD in Education and Anthropology and is a professor at Eastern University. Timothy Dodd is a professor at Eastern University “International Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity: An Annotated Bibliography” 2001. Web. http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/chang_dodd.html) JG

Classification of humans into distinct racial groups claims to draw on scientific facts. This endeavor is a facade lacking genuine scientific validity for at least two reasons. First, racial classification assumes that pure phenotypes exist. This premise is difficult to prove, even if one accepts the conjecture that pure phenotypes had existed in the early stage of human existence. Biological intermixing between people of apparently different phenotypes complicates today's "scientific" attempt to sort people out purely by phenotypic traits. Second, any claim that racial differences are based on biological differences ignores the fact that people with identical physical attributes are often classified differently and hold different social positions in societies. Brazil's complicated racial categories based on skin shade (Stam 1998) do not coincide with the black-white-colored paradigm sustained in South African apartheid racial discourse (Deng, 1997). Koreans and Japanese who can be easily classified into the same racial category are considered two different "races" by Japanese due to their notion of differing "blood" affinities (Dikkster, 1997; Min, 1992). Even within Brazil, the socio-economic status of an individual frequently affects his/her racial category. This is reflected in the popular ideology, "Money whitens," whereby a darker-skinned person may become "white" based on economic status (Hanchard, 1994; Reichmann, 1999; Twine, 1998). Both of these problems are apparent in Mexican society where scholars have noted that it is often impossible to distinguish between Indians and Mestizos phenotypically. Instead, individuals of both groups are more commonly categorized according to social and cultural traits.

At: census good

The Census is problematic because it attempts to make subjective categories of identity objective, which constructs a form of reality that reifies state control

Kertzer 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

The validity of defining cultural identity in the census As the discussion has so far amply demonstrated, the formulation of census questions and categories is inextricably embroiled in politics. This raises the question of whether the collection of census data on cultural categories can have any scientific validity. Does the politicization of the census represent the undermining of an exercise that should be left in the hands of scientific experts? Social science does not speak with one voice on the matter, due in part to conflicting disciplinary assumptions and a certain compartmentalization of research. The assertion that statistical science can stand above politics assumes that the object to be enumerated “exists previous to and outside of statistics” (Labbé 2000). From this perspective, the task of the statistician, and thus of the census expert, is to establish methodological rules protecting data collection from imprecision and sundry distortions, thereby attempting to describe with the greatest accuracy the object under study. The problem with this approach is that, by focusing mainly on the technical aspects of measurement, it takes for granted the existence of the category itself. This is unproblematic when categories refer to objective markers such as “age. ” But to assume that categories denoting cultural affiliation can be enumerated as objectively as age is to assume that identities can be reduced to an essential core within each individual, a core that exists outside of politics. The notion that cultural categories can be reduced to an objective core, called “statistical realism” by Labbé, is dangerously close to the primordialist notion of timeless identities, much discredited in recent social science, particularly among anthropologists. Nonetheless, statistical realism appears to have many adherents among demographers. Labbé relates the case of an ambitious project undertaken by the French Institute of Demography, aiming at assessing the reliability of all available demographic data in the Balkans. One of the issues concerns the underregistration of Romas (Gypsies) in the last Hungarian census. The project apparently does not question the criteria used to define the category “Roma” in the first place and whether someone of Roma descent could not legitimately declare him or herself as “Hungarian” (Labbé 2000). The same mindset characterized the European experts sent to Macedonia in 1994 to devise and conduct a special census aimed at verifying whether ethnic Albanians had been undercounted in the 1991 Macedonian census, as Albanian activists claimed they had been. The experts “thought they were going to be overseeing the technical aspects of a statistical exercise, ” but were instead shocked by the level of political passion their very exercise reignited, and baffled by the sheer ethnographic complexity of the area (Friedman 1996, 94). How is a Macedonianspeaking Muslim to be counted? As the experts discovered, two diametrically opposed views existed on the matter, and statistical realism was of little help to adjudicate the issue. Anthropologists emphasize the fact that identities are social constructions, that is, intrinsically dependent on social incentives and political projects, as opposed to deriving from some unalterable kernel that could be discovered in an ideal “state of nature. ” Some conclude from this that identities are “not real” and therefore inappropriate for enumeration, or for political recognition, for that matter. Others, however, point out that while identities have no reality independent of people's perceptions, the belief by social actors that their identities are real is itself a social fact. In other words, identities are socially “real, ” inasmuch as socially significant acts are based on ideas of identities (Labbé 2000). For instance, while there is no objective “Macedonian” identity, there is little doubt that social movements and political parties exist whose action is based on the belief in such an identity. The social import of these movements and parties is certainly “real” and, at the same time, likely to affect how individuals define themselves. In this vein, enumerating identities is akin to sorting out how people subjectively define themselves vis-à-vis others. As Bulmer claimed, during a debate on the merits of introducing a race/ethnicity question on the British census: The use of “race” (and the term itself is unsatisfactory and even misleading) in the context of social research refers to the way in which members of a society perceive differences between groups in that society and define the boundaries of such groups, taking into account physical characteristics and skin colour… What the ethnic question is trying to do is to find out in as objective a manner as possible how members of British society identify themselves. (Bulmer 1980: 5) In other words, the census sets its goal as that of objectively assessing the state of subjective identities. As has already become clear from our discussion of contemporary Western cases, however, the categorization of subjective categories by census-makers is more often than not a matter of political negotiation, rather than objective assessment.

U.S. Census is a privacy risk

EPIC 2K (Epic.org is the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “The Census and Privacy, 2000, https://epic.org/privacy/census/) JG

The risks that accompany the electronic compilation personal information include re-identification, which is the practice of linking individuals identities to anonymous census records; marketing solicitations; and even more serious consequences of political abuse. The use of information to identify individuals rather than for the statistical collection of information offers room for abuses of privacy and confidentiality.∂ Risks regarding privacy and confidentiality are not new issues for the Census. According to Thomas S. Mayer, privacy interests have evolved from the very first census in 1790. In the history of the American census, these privacy concerns have regulated the confidentiality of released information and the privacy considerations of individuals. Recorded protest in 1870 up until 1960 reflect the constitutional issues resulting from the requirement for US residents to provide sensitive personal information. Questions on the census about diseases, mortgage values, and other items have raised many risks.∂ The census forms the most inclusive federal database of American citizens. The information it contains is protected under law from disclosure, yet with the advent of technology many of the traditional legislative protection are inadequate. The recent use of computers has dramatically altered the structure of the US census. It has allowed the Census Bureau to retain information in an efficient format, while also challenging the traditional methods of information collection. Along with this growing technology, the potential harm has grown exponentially. Technology has allowed the collection of information to move at remarkable speeds and the protection of such information remains a struggle.

At: ethnicity

Our aff only deals with race, which is legally distinct from ethnicity in conversations about the census

Kertzer 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 the United States, as mentioned earlier, a question on race has appeared in all censuses since 1790. A growing number of categories supplemented this original distinction between White and Black over the years. Indians (in the sense of Native American) and Chinese appeared in 1870, Japanese in 1890, Filipino, Hindu and Korean in 1920 (the last two categories disappearing in 1950), Mexican in 1930 (and only in that year), and Hawaiian, Aleut and Eskimo in 1960. In the 1970s, buffeted by changing political winds, having to respond to civil rights legislation, and facing increasingly vocal “ethnic” or “racial” lobbying groups, census officials found they had less and less control over the categorization system that they administered. In 1977, Directive No. 15 of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) enunciated a policy for distinguishing races and ethnic groups in all federal statistics including, of course, the census (Nobles, this volume). As a result, several “racial” categories were added to the 1980 census: Korean, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, Guamanian, and Samoan. A separate question on Hispanic ancestry was also added to the census, as mandated by the OMB directive, thanks to intense lobbying from Hispanic groups (Choldin 1986). Twenty years later the categories were largely unchanged. As in Britain and Canada, these categories became linked to specific anti-discrimination legislation: in this case, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, requiring that the decennial redrawing of congressional districts produce a fair representation of selected minorities (Jenkins 2000). American census-makers have also, in recent years, been tackling the question of ethnic origin. Previous to 1980, the only question about origin had to do with the country of birth of the respondent and their parents, never venturing beyond the second generation. That question is useful to gauge the current wave of immigrants but is a poor indicator of ethnic identity, since most countries of origin are multiethnic. Thus, a study conducted at the turn of the century showed that only 2 percent of the “Russian” immigrants to the United States, i.e., immigrants from (Imperial) Russia, could be classified as ethnic Russians, the great majority being either Jewish or Polish (Petersen 1987: 219), or claimed as such by leaders of Jewish and Polish ethnic organizations in the U. S. 9 The 1980 census marked the first time an attempt was made to attach an ethnic label to every member of the population, regardless of how long a person's ancestors had been in the country. Before that, data on ethnicity were only gathered indirectly, by combining information on place of birth and language (McKenney and Cresce 1993: 176). The census language data, however, were unreliable because the questions were poorly formulated and frequently altered (Crawford 1992: 126). Beginning in the 1970s, the rise of “multiculturalism” created pressure on enumerative bodies to pay attention to the “ethnic” make-up of the population. The US Census Bureau began to experiment with a question on “ancestry. ” As happened in Canada, whether an ethnic group was listed or not as an example in the ancestry question made a huge difference in the number of respondents identifying with that particular group. Thus, the number of Americans of Slovak, Croat, and French Canadian ancestry more than doubled between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, while the number of Cajuns increased sixty-fold – all four categories which were not listed in 1980, but were in 1990 (Passel 1994). On the other hand, no significant popular resistance to ethnic enumeration, in the genre of the “Count Me Canadian!” campaign, arose in the United States (Goldscheider, this volume). In Australia, another of the historic countries of immigration, similar developments were observed. In preparing for the 1991 census, a government committee found that more than the indirect indicators of place of birth, religion, or language used at home – the questions previously used in Australian censuses – were needed to properly distinguish an ethnic group. Committee members concluded that such was the complexity of ethnicity (involving a sense of history, of cultural tradition, of being “racially conspicuous, ” etc.) that a specific ethnic question should be asked. Among their arguments was that third and subsequent generation immigrants to Australia could not be distinguished by these indirect indicators, while people born in British colonies who themselves came from British stock were being erroneously assigned to the ethnic category of the colonized (Cornish 1993: 308–11). Even though the concepts of race and ethnicity tend to be used in a confusing manner in contemporary censuses of the Western countries of the former British Empire, census categories of “race” and “ethnicity” are kept separate (except in Britain) because they serve different political purposes. While the enumeration of “races, ” or “visible minorities, ” is directly linked to the politics of entitlement, the enumeration of “ethnic groups” is linked to a renewed pride in one's ancestry, generally without individual benefits. (In Britain, as we saw above, the largely racial classification is actually called “ethnic”.) Non-White recognized minorities, such as “Japanese, ” can benefit from policies of implicit or explicit positive discrimination, while Whites of a minority ethnic background, such as Ukrainians, cannot. A key question is whether such political distinctions are sustainable in the long run.

At: people should choose

Self-identification fails – still recreates the boundaries of distinct categories by relying on certain directions and labels

One other relatively new element of censuses should be considered in this context: the move from census forms filled out by enumerators to those filled out by the respondents themselves. The notion that only the individual has the right to decide which identity category he or she should be placed in is a powerful force in the world today. This can be viewed as part of the western ideology of modern individualism, which Handler (1988: 51) refers to – following Macpherson – as “possessive individualism. ” The idea here is that people demonstrate their individuality through making choices for themselves; their identity is something that they themselves produce, and so own. 13 Self-identification for the census, however, has its practical, and sometimes ideological, limits. As tabulated results can list only so many entries, some identities get either lumped in an “Other” category or subsumed into existing ones. The latter occurs when an identity is unrecognized by census authorities. As Abramson explains in his chapter, in the last Soviet census of 1989 there were almost seven times as many self-identified “nationalities” (823) as recognized ones (128). Thus, even when self-identification is allowed, the recoding of people's responses into a smaller set of categories plays a large role in the statistical representation of groups. This move to place the respondent in charge of filling out the census form only became possible when and where literacy became universal, and so is still not found in many countries of the world. However, where people now compile their own form, racial and ethnic categorization must cope with a much more chaotic hodgepodge of self-labeling processes. Even, for example, if directions indicate that an individual of mixed “Indian” and “Negro” “blood” should identify with the category reflecting the greatest proportion of “blood, ” many individuals who identify as native American simply list themselves as native Americans. This reminds us, once more, that what is measured by the census is a particular kind of politicized social construction of reality.

Self-identification cannot solve within the black/white paradigm of limited racial categories

Trucious-Haynes 01 (Enid Trucious-Haynes is a professor of law at Brandeis School of Law of the University of Louisville, and has a J.D. from Stanford Law School, “Why ‘Race Matters: LatCrit Theory and Latina/o Racial identity” 2001. La Raza Law Journal Vol. 12: 1.) JG

Self-identification for many Latinas/os includes experiences not recognized within the dominant Black-White paradigm for racial discourse in the United States. For example, some Latinas/os possess a racial identity intertwined with their cultural identity.' Some segments of the Latinas/os community already understand their racial position within the U.S. Black-White paradigm, despite their multidimensionality in terms of color, race, language, culture, national origin, citizenship status and other ictors.'9 Those who perceive their racial identity as intertwined with their cultural identity, may recognize a broader concept of racial identity than the seemingly narrow racial categories in the United States under the Black-White paradigm.' A broader, more contextualized understanding of racial identity may lead to more inclusive racial discrimination remedies and a broad-based effort to combat subordination in U.S. society

At: race category good

Race categorization not needed on census

Prewitt 13 (Kenneth Prewit is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. His books include The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization. He served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001. What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans Print. 2013. GoogleBooks.) JG

I will urge that a race question not appear on the decennial census form. To justify this recommendation I emphasize that the fundamental, constitutionally mandated task of the census is to count every American once, only once, and in the right place. What is needed for this purpose ate the number of people in the household, the address of the household, and such additional questions as allow the Census Bureau to determine if the information given is accurate. Race and ethnicity are not needed for this constitutionally mandated task. Yet simply inspecting the form leads to the conclusion that the government wants to know more about my ethnicity and race than anything else, including things I might think to be more important: am I healthy? a veteran? married? employed? Those questions left to the ACS and other surveys. In this way, the census sends a message.

Race question not key on U.S. census

Anderson 10 (Tom Anderson, MBA, MEA, founded Anderson Analytics and appointed the “Uncrowned Father of Web 3.0 Marketing Research” by Research Business Report in 2009. “Refusing to Answer Census Race Question” 3/19/10, http://www.tomhcanderson.com/2010/03/19/refusing-to-answer-census-race-question/) JG

While I completely understand that ‘race’ may have been more important given our unfortunate history with slavery and segregation, today I feel it has become far less important. I rather prefer the approach of countries such as France where citizens are never asked ethnicity or religion in order to prevent discrimination.∂ As a consumer behavior researcher, I would be the first to ask race in a client survey if I believed it would help with planning/selling products. However, in reality the ethnic question has become less and less relevant in consumer/market research each year. While race/ethnicity does correlate somewhat to income and education, these latter two questions are far more important than race. Interestingly, Income and Education are missing from the census form.∂ The fact is that in the America of 2010 the main hindrance to social mobility is not race/ethnicity but socio economic. We are far more likely to be able to predict someone’s chances for success in life given the income and education level of their parents than their ethnicity. I think the ultimate example of course would be President Obama.∂ The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, if your parents are poor and uneducated, then you are very likely to also be poor and uneducated. By focusing on race instead of these socioeconomic factors we are hiding the true problems in the USA.∂ Beyond this the whole idea of race is racist in and of itself. And even when you ask the question, the answer is totally arbitrary. How do you think Obama would/should answer the question?

Millions possess mixed ancestry and change their racial category over their lifetime

Morin 15[Rich Morin – senior editor at Pew Research Center, “Among multiracial adults, racial identity can be fluid”, Pew Research Center, 6/16/15, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/16/among-multiracial-adults-racial-identity-can-be-fluid/] JG

Is race purely about the races in your family tree? A new Pew Research Center survey of multiracial adults suggests there’s more to racial identity that goes beyond one’s ancestry.∂ The survey of 1,555 multiracial adults found that three-in-ten say they have changed how they viewed their racial identity over the course of their lifetimes.∂ About one-in-five multiracial Americans, including about a third of all black mixed-race adults, have dressed or behaved in a certain way in an attempt to influence how others see their race.∂ Taken together, these findings suggest that, for many multiracial Americans, racial identity can change over the life course. It is a mix of biology, family upbringing and the perceptions that others have about them.∂ According to our survey, fully 21% of mixed-race adults have attempted to influence how others saw their race. About one-in-ten multiracial adults have talked (12%), dressed (11%) or worn their hair (11%) in a certain way in order to affect how others saw their race. A similar share (11%) say they associated with certain people to alter how others saw their racial background. (The survey did not ask respondents to identify which race or races they sought to resemble.)∂ These efforts to change or clarify how others saw their race varied widely across the largest multiracial groups. Among black multiracial groups, 32% have looked or acted in ways to influence how others perceived their racial background. That includes 42% of black and American Indian biracial adults, 33% of those with a white, black and American Indian background, and 20% of white and black biracial adults.∂ Some Mixed-Race Groups More Likely than Others to Try to Change How People See Them. A quarter of white and Asian biracial adults say that, at some point, they have tried to look or behave a certain way to influence how people thought about their race. Among the largest biracial subgroup – white and American Indian adults – only about one-in-ten (11%) say they have done this. A third (34%) of Hispanics who report two or more races also say they have made an effort to change the way people saw their race.∂ In addition to looking or acting in ways to shape how others saw their race, about three-in-ten multiracial Americans say they have changed how they view their racial identity over time.∂ Some 29% of mixed-race adults who now report more than one race for themselves say they used to see themselves as just one race. But among those who have parents or grandparents of a different race, an identical share have switched their racial identity: 29% say they once saw themselves as more than one race but now see themselves as one race.∂ The Census Bureau also found that more than 10 million Americans changed their race or Hispanic origin in 2010 from what they had reported in the 2000 census.∂ About the Pew Research survey: These findings are based on a nationally representative survey of 1,555 multiracial Americans ages 18 and older, conducted online from Feb. 6 to April 6, 2015. The sample of multiracial adults was identified after contacting and collecting basic demographic information on more than 21,000 adults nationwide. Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points and larger for subgroups.

Historically, static concepts of race have been used to reinforce institutional racism

Zimmer, 12-24-14 [Carl, Lecturer & Fellow at Yale University, Visiting Scholar at New York University, former Senior Editor @ Discover Magazine, winner of science writing awards from the National Academies of Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pan American Health Organization and American Institute of Biological Sciences, former fellow at Guggenheim and Alfred Sloan Foundations; New York Times, 12-24-2014; “White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier, “ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html?_r=0]

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white. The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.” There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas. So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law. People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black. In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people.

The census also recreates categories of ethnicity

Goldscheider, 2 - Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of the Population Studies and Training Center (Calvin, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” “Racial categorization and censuses” Ethnic categorizations in censuses: comparative observations from Israel, Canada, and the United States 2002)//jml

Censuses and other official documents gather information to carry out a variety of political, economic, and social objectives. In counting and categorizing residents of the state, the census has to cope in an official way with who is defined as a member of the society and how they should be identified in the count. Issues of counting are elementary but not simple. Who is counted as a legitimate resident of the state (e.g., how are non-legal residents and temporary workers treated in official statistics) and what does residence mean (is it limited to de facto residents or are those temporarily living elsewhere included among the state's population) appear on the surface to be straightforward questions, but are at the center of some of the most complex and politically torturous issues facing old and new states. In the global world where movement between states is increasing and taking on new forms, where returning “home” has become more routine, where cases of escape and resettlement can be counted in the millions annually, questions about who are the legitimate residents to be counted in censuses and how they should be classified and categorized are not only technical bureaucratic questions. Membership in a state involves decisions in the formation of policies. Do particular policies apply only to citizens? Who has representation in local or national governments? Who has rights and entitlements? Questions of how to categorize persons (by simple categories such as age, gender, and marital status – in what category do we place cohabitants? – or even more complex ethnic origin or racial categories, our current focus) always involve decisions that are implicitly political and anchored in ideology and norms. There are no simple, objective census questions, even though researchers often analyze the answers to census questions as if the information in the census were unbiased and objective. Turning the question on its head, official documents reveal the formal construction of categories and groups, and the political contexts in which they are shaped. Often the official constructions reinforce a particular view of groups within society and convey a “theory” of groupness. What would we know about ethnicity if we only had the census definition or categories? If our only text about ethnic divisions and categories in a society came from official documents, what would be missing? Historically, if all we knew about ethnicity was derived from census categories and classifications, our understanding of the political, cultural, and social meanings of ethnicity would be severely limited and, indeed, largely distorted. Census definitions of ethnicity tell us more about the construction of ethnic categories within political ideologies than the reality of ethnic divisions. I focus in this chapter on several illustrations of how these official constructions of ethnic group membership have developed in censuses and other official data collection systems. I draw upon examples from Israel, Canada, and the United States, with some references to European countries. There are, of course, ethnic issues in the statistical collections of most countries. 1 I review illustrations from these three countries not for how ethnic differences are salient in differentiating their populations, in perpetuating inequalities or reinforcing ethnic cultures. Rather my goal is to address the following questions: what do we learn about the construction of ethnic group categories from official data in these countries? Are we constrained in our understanding of ethnicity when we focus exclusively on these official constructions? What is the “theory” underlying what the census categories mean? If we only knew ethnicity from census definitions and categorization, what kind of ethnicity would we be describing? I also want to briefly address how the construction of ethnic categories in the census may define the nature of groups and may reinforce one among several conceptions of ethnic categories.

Census racial categories are antiquated

Fernández 14 (Belén Fernández is the author of “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” and a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine. 4/22/14, “Junk data in census makes us a nation of ‘others’” http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/u-s-census-bureaulatinosraceethnicity.html) JG

We are becoming a nation of write-ins. So found a report released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. When filling out census forms in 2010 (the year of the last national population tally), more people than ever before did not choose one of the race options provided; they chose “some other race.”∂ The report, part of a years-long project to re-examine the census’ racial and ethnic categories, underscores the extent to which demographic changes in the U.S. have outpaced our methods of documenting them.∂ The bureau’s concerns about the unrepresentative nature of its census categories appear to be well-founded. Approximately one-third of the 47.4 million respondents who self-identified as ethnically Hispanic also self-identified as “some other race.” A full 96.8 percent of all people claiming to be “some other race” were Hispanic.∂ The Pew Research Center’s summary of the report noted, “The ‘some other race’ option … was never intended to be a category selected by so many respondents. The category was added to the 1980 census form to capture the small numbers of people who did not select one of the official race categories. But since then, it has grown to become the third-largest race category in the census.”∂ To understand why this may be so, let’s take a look at the census form (PDF). The race question is preceded by the ethnicity question, which asks if you are “of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin.” (The broad-stroke distinction that is usually made between ethnicity and race is that race is biologically determined while ethnicity takes more cultural factors into account. For example, I might be racially classified as black but ethnically identify as Arab or Cuban.) The questions are accompanied by a note: “For this census, Hispanic origins are not races.”∂ One would think, of course, that a country as diverse as the U.S. would provide more ethnic options than Hispanic/Latino/Spanish or not-Hispanic/Latino/Spanish, but these are — inexplicably — the only two. (Persons who select the first category are given a space to further identity themselves by country.) The racial identity options are similarly puzzling in their apparent arbitrariness; they include “white,” “black, African Am., or Negro,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Filipino,” “Vietnamese,” “Guamanian or Chamorro” and “Samoan,” along with several others. The “other Asian” category comes with instructions to “print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian and so on,” and self-identified “other Pacific Islanders” are told to “print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan and so on.”∂ What the census questions suggest is that race may coincide with national origin if you’re Laotian or Fijian but not if you hail from one of the 21 Spanish-speaking countries in the world. In other cases, skin color designates race — but not if you’re brown.∂ Behind the times∂ The U.S. government “periodically alters race and ethnicity questions to keep up with shifts in the social fabric of the nation,” according to the optimistic wording of a 2013 USA Today article. How well it actually keeps up is debatable. It was not until 2000 that census respondents were permitted to check more than one box for race. The article speculates that the racial category “‘Negro’ may finally be dropped in 2020.”∂ Survey methodology, too, is far from cutting-edge. Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, argues in his book, “What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans,” that “21st century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date”— referring to racial divisions proposed in 1776 by German scientist Johann Blumenbach. The U.S. is, Prewitt writes, “the only country in the world firmly wedded to an 18th century racial taxonomy” in which were embedded “theories of a racial hierarchy: There were not just different races but superior and inferior races.”

AT: Racial Profiling Good

Racial profiling fails – 7 reasons

Head No Date (Tom Head holds a Ph.D in religion and society from Edith Cowan University, as well as an M.A. in humanities from California State University. He is also a Civil Liberties activist and academic specializing in the history of ideas. “Why Racial Profiling is a Bad Idea” CivilLiberty.com, http://civilliberty.about.com/od/lawenforcementterrorism/tp/Against-Racial-Profiling.htm) JG

The hardest thing about advocating reform of racial profiling practices, at a policy level, is convincing political leaders that it isn't just a "politically incorrect" or "racially insensitive" practice, but rather a destructive, ill-conceived, and ultimately ineffective law enforcement technique. This means looking hard at what racial profiling does, what it doesn't do, and what it says about our system of law enforcement. We need to be able to explain what, specifically, is wrong with racial profiling.∂ - ∂ 1. Racial profiling doesn't work.∂ One of the great myths about racial profiling is that it would work if only law enforcement agencies could use it--that by not using racial profiling, they're tying one hand behind their backs in the name of civil rights.∂ This simply isn't true:∂ An ACLU lawsuit uncovered police data indicating that while 73 percent of suspects pulled over on I-95 between 1995 and 1997 were black, black suspects were no more likely to actually have drugs or illegal weapons in their cars than white suspects.∂ According to the Public Health Service, approximately 70% of drug users are white, 15% are black, and 8% are Latino. But the Department of Justice reports that among those imprisoned on drug charges, 26% are white, 45% are black, and 21% are Latino.∂ 2. Racial profiling distracts law enforcement agencies from more useful approaches.∂ When suspects are detained based on suspicious behavior rather than race, police catch more suspects.∂ A 2005 report by the Missouri attorney general is testimony to the ineffectiveness of racial profiling. White drivers, pulled over and searched on the basis of suspicious behavior, were found to have drugs or other illegal material 24% of the time. Black drivers, pulled over or searched in a manner that reflected a pattern of racial profiling, were found to have drugs or other illegal material 19% of the time.∂ The effectiveness of searches, in Missouri and everywhere else, is reduced--not enhanced--by racial profiling. When racial profiling is used, officers end up wasting their limited time on innocent suspects.∂ 3. Racial profiling prevents police from serving the entire community.∂ Law enforcement agencies are responsible, or generally seen as responsible, for protecting law-abiding citizens from criminals.∂ When a law enforcement agency practices racial profiling, it sends the message that whites are assumed to be law-abiding citizens while blacks and Latinos are assumed to be criminals. Racial profiling policies set up law enforcement agencies as enemies of entire communities--communities that tend to be disproportionately affected by crime--when law enforcement agencies should be in the business of protecting crime victims and helping them find justice.∂ 4. Racial profiling prevents communities from working with law enforcement.∂ Unlike racial profiling, community policing has consistently been shown to work. The better the relationship between residents and police, the more likely residents are to report crimes, come forward as witnesses, and otherwise cooperate in police investigations.∂ But racial profiling tends to alienate black and Latino communities, reducing the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate crime in these communities. If police have already established themselves as enemies of a low-income black neighborhood, if there is no trust or rapport between police and residents, then community policing can't work. Racial profiling sabotages community policing efforts, and offers nothing useful in return.∂ 5. Racial profiling is a blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.∂ The Fourteenth Amendment states, very clearly, that no state may "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Racial profiling is, by definition, based on a standard of unequal protection. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be searched by police and less likely to be treated as law-abiding citizens; whites are less likely to be searched by police and more likely to be treated as law-abiding citizens. This is incompatible with the concept of equal protection.∂ 6. Racial profiling can easily escalate into racially-motivated violence.∂ Racial profiling encourages police to use a lower standard of evidence for blacks and Latinos than they would for whites--and this lower standard of evidence can easily lead police, private security, and armed citizens to respond violently to blacks and Latinos out of a perceived "self-defense" concern. The case of Amidou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who was killed in a hail of 41 bullets by the NYPD for attempting to show officers his driver's license, is only one case among many. Reports of suspicious deaths involving unarmed Latino and black suspects trickle out of our nation's major cities on a regular basis.∂ 7. Racial profiling is morally wrong.∂ Racial profiling is Jim Crow applied as a law enforcement policy. It promotes the internal segregation of suspects within the minds of police officers, and it creates a second-class citizenship for black and Latino Americans.∂ If one has reason to know or believe that a specific suspect is of a certain racial or ethnic background, then it makes sense to include that information in the profile. But that isn't what people generally mean when they talk about racial profiling. They mean discrimination prior to the introduction of data--the very definition of racial prejudice.∂ When we allow or encourage law enforcement agencies to practice racial profiling, we are ourselves practicing vicarious racial discrimination. That is unacceptable.

Racial profiling especially for terrorists fails – empirics prove

Schneier 10 (Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of several books on computer security, including Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. NYTIMES.com “Profiling Makes Us Less Safe” 1-4-10 http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-difference/) JG

∂ There are two kinds of profiling. There’s behavioral profiling based on how someone acts, and there’s automatic profiling based on name, nationality, method of ticket purchase, and so on. The first one can be effective, but is very hard to do right. The second one makes us all less safe. The problem with automatic profiling is that it doesn’t work.∂ Terrorists can figure out how to beat any profiling system.∂ Terrorists don’t fit a profile and cannot be plucked out of crowds by computers. They’re European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern, male and female, young and old. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British with a Jamaican father. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Timothy McVeigh was a white American. So was the Unabomber. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Palestinian terrorists routinely recruit “clean” suicide bombers, and have used unsuspecting Westerners as bomb carriers.∂ ∂ Without an accurate profile, the system can be statistically demonstrated to be no more effective than random screening.∂ ∂ And, even worse, profiling creates two paths through security: one with less scrutiny and one with more. And once you do that, you invite the terrorists to take the path with less scrutiny. That is, a terrorist group can safely probe any profiling system and figure out how to beat the profile. And once they do, they’re going to get through airport security with the minimum level of screening every time.∂ ∂ As counterintuitive as it may seem, we’re all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn’t needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we’re going to be more secure against terrorism.∂ ∂

Racial profiling is bad and fails – especially in counter-terror measures

Al-Marayati 10 (Salam Al-Marayati is executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a public policy organization that focuses on U.S.-Muslim world relations, Middle East peacemaking, counter-terrorism and faith-based initiatives. NYTIMES.com, “Get the Intelligence Right” 1-4-10, http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-difference/) JG

Profiling communities in counter-terrorism efforts is ineffective. Focus on one particular ethnicity or country of origin, and the terrorists will recruit from somewhere else. Many terrorism suspects came from within the United States and European Union countries. Profiling does not help against individuals with names and ethnic backgrounds like Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, David Headley and Michael Finton.∂ Treating all Muslims as suspects undermines our efforts to gain intelligence on terrorists.∂ We shouldn’t be profiling the very communities we need information from to catch the bad guys. Umar Abdul-Muttallab’s father gave us such information to prevent the Dec. 25 terror plot.∂ Yet the message we’re now sending is: we will profile you for your courageous and just effort. We ignored the father when he wanted to help the United States and now we punish him for our mistakes. We are dismissing our assets and leveraging our weaknesses in our attempt to counter violent extremism. That lack of logic will resonate among all global citizens, not just Muslims.∂ We need to focus less on tactics, and more on developing intelligence against terrorists. Our strategies put us in a defensive mode that focuses too much on what terrorists did last time. Technologies, and worse, ethnic and religious profiling, are expensive in terms of our civil liberties, privacy and money. They are also easily defeated by terrorists.∂ There is no foolproof technology preventing terrorists from smuggling dangerous items on board a flight. An undercover investigation in 2006 by the Government Accountability Office found airport screeners failed to detect bomb making materials 21 out of 21 times.∂ This glaring problem along with the airport profiling of potentially hundreds of thousands of people every year will create more busy work that lacks precision and effectiveness. Fixing the bureaucratic incompetence behind information failures requires strong executive and Congressional leadership, not throwing away our precious liberties and limited resources.

Racial profiling is ineffective and unconstitutional

German 10 (Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent, is policy counsel for the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union and the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist. NYTIMES.com, “Wrong and Unworkable” 1-4-10, http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/will-profiling-make-a-difference/) JG

The recent attempted airline attack screams loudly for better security measures from our government. But the government’s plan to subject citizens of certain countries to enhanced security does not fit the bill. It is a pretext for racial profiling, which is both ineffective and unconstitutional.∂ Racial profiling is a shortcut based on bias rather than evidence. There simply is no reliable “terrorist profile.” Take, for instance, the Belgian woman who became a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2005; or “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and London subway bomber Germaine Lindsay, who were both British citizens of Jamaican descent. Terrorists do not come in a particular color or from a particular place.∂ Racial profiling is also unworkable. Once aware of national profiling, terrorists will simply use people from “non-profiled” countries or origins, like FBI most-wanted Qaeda suspect Adam Gadahn, an American. What will we do? Keep adding more countries to the list of 14 until we’ve covered the whole globe?∂ Some people want to target Muslims, figuring some are bound to be “radicalized.” But what do we go by? Name? Appearance? The vast majority of Arab Americans, for instance, are not only innocent of sympathy for terrorism, they’re actually Christian. To profile Muslims you’d have to target blacks, Asians, whites and Hispanics (remember Jose Padilla?). How could that work, and would it really help identify those who are intending harm or would it simply divert resources that could be better used on investigations?∂ Finally, and not inconsequentially, racial profiling is wrong, un-American and unconstitutional. It is institutionalized racism. And when we abandon our principles, we not only betray our values, we also run the risk of undermining international and community support for counterterrorism efforts by providing an injustice for terrorists to exploit as a way of justifying further acts of terrorism.∂ After each terrorist event over the last several years, including the most recent, we have found that the government had ample empirical evidence to suggest the individuals involved posed a threat. Plots that have been thwarted were uncovered by the hard work of connecting the facts with raw intelligence. That’s what works. We need to direct resources to investigations based on facts rather than bias.

Narrative

So, what are you?" I don't know how many times people have asked me that. "Are you Puerto Rican? Dominican? Indian or something? You must be mixed."

My stock answer has rarely changed:

"My mom is from Jamaica but grew up in New York, and my father was from North Carolina but grew up in Boston. Both black."

My family has lived with "the question" for as long as I can remember. We're "exotics," all cursed with "good hair" and strange accents—we don't sound like we from da Souf or the Norwth, and don't have that West Coast-by-way-of-Texas Calabama thang going on. The only one with the real West Indian singsong vibe is my grandmother, who looks even more East Indian than my sisters. Whatever Jamaican patois my mom possessed was pummeled out of her by cruel preteens who never had sensitivity seminars in diversity. The result for us was a nondescript way of talking, walking, and being that made us not black enough, not white enough—just a bunch of not-quite-nappy-headed enigmas. My mother never fit the "black momma" media image. A beautiful, demure, light brown woman, she didn't drink, smoke, curse, or say things like "Lawd Jesus" or "hallelujah," nor did she cook chitlins or gumbo. A vegetarian, she played the harmonium (a foot-pumped miniature organ), spoke softly with textbook diction, meditated, followed the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, and had wild hair like Chaka Khan. She burned incense in our tiny Harlem apartment, sometimes walked the streets barefoot, and, when she could afford it, cooked foods from the East. To this day, my big sister gets misidentified for Pakistani or Bengali or Ethiopian. (Of course, changing her name from Sheral Anne Kelley to Makani Themba has not helped.) Not long ago, an Oakland cab driver, apparently a Sikh who had immigrated from India, treated my sister like dirt until he discovered that she was not a "scoundrel from Sri Lanka," but a common black American. Talk about ironic: How often are black women spared indignities because they are African American?

"What are you?" dogged my little brother more than any of us. He came out looking just like his father, who was white. In the black communities of Los Angeles and Pasadena, my baby bro' had to fight his way into blackness, usually winning only when he invited his friends to the house. When he got tired of this, he became what people thought he was—a cool white boy. Today he lives in Tokyo, speaks fluent Japanese, and is happily married to a Japanese woman (who is actually Korean passing as Japanese!). He stands as the perfect example of our mulattoness: a black boy trapped in a white body who speaks English with a slight Japanese accent and has a son who will spend his life confronting "the question."
That was Robin Kelley in 1999 (robin, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), Polycultural Me, http://www.utne.com/politics/the-people-in-me.aspx, LB)

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