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Title: Back in the box: The Dilemma of Using Multiple-Race Data for Single-Race Laws

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2001

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Abstract: In March 2000, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that mixed-race people who mark both White and a nonwhite race will be counted as members of the nonwhite group for purposes of civil rights monitoring and enforcement. Although the rule is easy to understand and to implement, it is also controversial. In effect, the OMB allocation procedure is a modern application to all minority groups of the historical one-drop rule under which a person with any black ancestry was considered legally black. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges that OMB's allocation procedure may face in civil and voting rights cases. We then use results from the 1990 U.S. census and from the 1998 census dress rehearsal to estimate how many people will be subject to racial reallocation and how this could change the aggregate socioeconomic characteristics of racial groups.We find that while multiple-race responses make up only a small fraction (about 3.7 percent) of the national population, reallocation could influence the racial classification of up to 10 percent of some state populations. Local level variation means that in some small areas the proportions of multiple-race respondents subject to reallocation will be even higher. In general, multiple-race respondents tend to have socioeconomic characteristics in between those of white and nonwhite groups. Allocation of mixed white-nonwhite individuals to the minority group tends to raise the socioeconomic profiles of the black and American Indian population, but to lower the socioeconomic profile of Asian Americans. The allocation rule, while protecting the overall minority count, will reassign a substantial number of people who have traditionally identified with the white population. This extension of protection may prove controversial and pose an additional challenge to civil rights, voting rights and other race-based policies, which already face heavy criticism.

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Authors: Goldstein, J.R.; Morning, A.

Conference Name: "Multiraciality: How Will the New Census Data Be Used?" (Jerome Levy Economic Institute / Bard College)

Publisher Location: Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Race and Ethnicity

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