So according to this douchbag, even asking about the demographics of the nation's populace is "illegitimate and none of the government's business". What the fuck? Has this moron ever cracked open an atlas of the world? The census exists to gather accurate data about the nation, not to fuel your wishful thinking that "there is no such thing as race, there is no such thing as race, there is no such think as race!!!". You expect the government to know our religions, our incomes, who we live with... but apparently knowing our ethnicity is where you draw the line. It couldn't be that not being allowed to talk about race makes people more racist. And his cop out at the end where he tries to weasel out of lying on a government form by asserting people should answer with a non-existent "American" race just tickles me pink. Yeah, that's not just as dishonest at all, is it?Sending a Message with the Census [Mark Krikorian]
John: I haven't gotten my letter from the Census Bureau yet asking me to make sure I fill out the questionnaire. But when I do fill it out, I'll use it to send a message.
Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it.
Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
So remember: Question 9 — "Some other race" — "American". Pass it on.
And if you are wondering where I got this, apparently over 100 people like this in Google Reader. Does anyone else have any stories of people getting too sensitive about race for their own good they want to share?
), so you get perfectly black or asian kids who are culturally more Catalonian than I am (I come from a different part of Spain), and from a census point of view their ethnicity should be mostly irrelevant, since they are the children of local families, and should be theoretically undistinguishable from whatever natural children they might have had.
