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<center>
<h2><font color="#000000">LEXIS-NEXIS� Academic</font></h2>
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<center><font color="#000000">Copyright 2000 The <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">New
</b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff9999; COLOR: black">York</b> Times Company</font><br>
<font color="#000000">The <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">New
</b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff9999; COLOR: black">York</b> Times</font></center>
<center><font color="#000000"> View Related Topics</font></center> <center><font color="#000000"><b>February</b>
12, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final</font><br>
<font color="#000000">Correction Appended</font></center>
<p><br>
<font color="#000000"><b>SECTION:</b> Section A;Page 1;Column 1;National Desk</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>LENGTH:</b> 1625 words</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>HEADLINE:</b> Despite Options on Census, Many to
Check 'Black' Only</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>BYLINE:</b> By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO</font>
<p><b><font color="#000000">BODY:</font></b><br>
<font color="#000000">This year's <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">new</b>,
racially inclusive census might have seemed tailor made for <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff66; COLOR: black">Michael
</b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">The son of a white Jewish father and an
African-Bermudan mother, Mr. <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>
lives in Harlem with his wife, Sharron Williams, a black woman whose Caribbean
background melds African and Indian influences. Creating their own cultural road
map as they go, the couple embrace the range of their heritages and those of
friends, marking Passover, for example, with an African-American Latino seder.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">But when the census invites Mr. <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>,
for the first time, to name all the races that describe him, he will do what he
has always done, and claim just one: black. Checkingmore than one race, he
contends, would undermine the influence of blacks by reducing their number as a
distinct group and so most likely diluting public policies addressing their
concerns.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">The census forms that will be mailed to most Americans
in April -- the count began last month in Alaska, where the winter chill tends
to keep people at home and easier to tally -- offers a nod to the nation's
increasing diversity. No longer will the Census Bureau instruct respondents to
"select one" race to describe themselves. Instead, it will tell them
to mark one or more of 14 boxes representing 6 races (and subcategories) that
apply -- white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, other
Asian and Pacific Islander -- or to check "some other race."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">But like Mr. <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>,
many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to
do so, demographers and census officials say.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Part of the reason, according to demographers, is
habit: Americans are simply unaccustomed to the option. More profoundly,
however, the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race, in
which interpretations of history, politics and experience frequently overshadow
the simpler matter of parentage.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Thirty years after Loving v. Virginia struck down the
last laws barring interracial marriage, the <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">new</b>
change in the census and the ensuing controversy have become a barometer of the
complexity of American attitudes toward race, and their contradictions. With the
6 racial categories offering 63 possible combinations of racial identity, which
government demographers will tabulate as distinct groups, the census could
provide a remarkably meticulous racial profile of American society.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">On one side of the debate stand those who see the
revision as a tactic to divide blacks at a time when affirmative action and
other remedies to discrimination are under attack. Opposing them are multiracial
Americans who resent having to identify with just one part of their heritage.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Apart from his perception that the change could
diminish blacks' influence, Mr. <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>,
a 38-year-old professor of environmental policy at Rutgers University, said that
claiming a multiracial identity would link him to a bitter, freighted history of
privilege for blacks who could cite some white lineage.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">"Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and
black?" Mr. <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b>
said. "Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black? He practically
looked white."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">The decisions people make, while personal, will echo
through public policy. The Justice Department uses racial data from the census
to analyze voting patterns and evaluate redistricting proposals under the Voting
Rights Act. The department's special investigations division uses such data to
look into accusations of racial profiling by law-enforcement officers. And city
and state planners study the information to direct help to needy communities and
predict population trends.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">"It's hard to come up with an area of our work
where we wouldn't have, at one point or another, a need to have census
information broken down by race," said Anita S. Hodgekiss, deputy assistant
attorney general for civil rights.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">But the Justice Department has not determined how it
will classify people who check more than one race, Ms. Hodgekiss said.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">The racial data the census provides is so crucial to
developing civil rights policy and directing government aid that some groups
like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are urging
people of both black and white parentage to identify themselves as only black.
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has made a similar request
of people who are part white and part Asian.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">The impact of the change remains hazy, however, since
it is not known how many people will claim more than one race. In census dress
rehearsals in a variety of locations around the country in 1998, only 2 percent
of those surveyed checked more than one race, said Jorge del Pinal, a spokesman
for the Census Bureau.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Demographers are bracing for an avalanche of data,
while others predict a raft of court cases challenging redistricting.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">"God help us," said Joseph J. Salvo, director
of the <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">New </b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff9999; COLOR: black">York</b>
City Planning Department's population division, who sits on a national committee
advising the Census Bureau about the coming count. "This is being worked
out as we go."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist at Pepperdine
University, polled 250 college students who had one black parent and one white,
and found that those reared in middle-class or affluent white neighborhoods
tended to identify as biracial, while those who had grown up in black
communities generally considered themselves black.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">How will nonblacks of mixed race answer the census?
There is little more than anecdotal evidence. But some experts note that
checking options like Asian and white, or American Indian and Pacific Islander,
does not carry the same historical baggage that mixed-race blacks confront in
deciding whether to say they are part white.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Scott Wasmuth, who is white and has a Filipino wife,
said that when he filled out the census in 1990, he ignored the one-race-only
rule that then prevailed and checked both white and Asian to describe his
daughters. This year he will do the same. "People are beginning to say,
'I'm a mixture, and I don't have to choose one or the other,' " he said.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Bertrand Wade, a 34-year-old industrial electronics
technician from Brooklyn, wishes he could avoid descriptions altogether. His
father is half-black and half-white, and his mother is East Indian and white.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">When applications ask his race and none of the boxes
fit, Mr. Wade said, "the first thing I feel is excluded; then sometimes I
feel that I should not be in a position where I have to state my race." He
said that on the census, he would check all the boxes that describe his
heritage.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Charles Byrd, who runs a Web site called Inter Racial
Voice, said, "What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid
boxes altogether."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">On the 1990 census, about 10 million Americans seemed
to agree. They did not identify themselves as members of any race, said Margo J.
Anderson, author of "The American Census: A Social History" (Yale
University Press, 1988). Another quarter-million, ignoring the instructions,
identified themselves as belonging to more than one race.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Ms. Anderson said that ever since the first head count,
in 1790, the census had played an important if subtle role in reflecting
preoccupations and shaping social thought. It is only in the last century,
though, that the government has devised questions to identify the country's
ethnic makeup. In the 1910 census, for instance, the government asked people
their mother tongue, looking for Yiddish as the answer in order to tally the
number of Jewish immigrants.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">"The changes in questions always come about
because of the social issues of the day," Ms. Anderson said.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Susan Graham, head of Project Race, a civic group that
unsuccessfully pushed for a separate "multiracial" box for the census,
said she wanted a single category that would accurately define her children.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">"Think of when you open a newspaper and see pie
charts," she said. "We wanted a slice of the pie that says
'multiracial.' "</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Ms. Graham, of Tallahassee, Fla., is white and married
to a black man. When she testified before Congress, she brought along 14 pages
detailing crimes against interracial families. Without a single statistical
category for interracial people, she argued, those crimes remain obscured in the
thicket of hate crimes generally.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Some opponents of the change describe it as a passport
to denial, and a reflection of prejudice. "The only reason it isn't fair to
make them choose one race is because of what it means to be black in
America," said Wendy Thorpe-Cruz, who is black and teaches multiculturalism
in a high school equivalency program in Harlem.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Ms. Thorpe-Cruz, 43, said she had felt the sting of
racism every day -- from white women who clutch their purses when she passes,
from white men she once dated who dared not introduce her to their parents.
"In order to understand why people are asking for the biracial category,
every white person would have to be black for a year," she said.</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Ben Karp, the founder and director of the Chai Society,
an "intellectual salon" for blacks and Jews at Yale, acknowledged a
gap between his ideal, "a world in which there are no boxes," and his
decision to identify himself as exclusively black on the census. Mr. Karp, whose
father is white and Jewish and whose mother is black, said, "It's a
contradiction we're forced to live with."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">Mr. Karp noted that in America, the label
"black" on people who are only partly so tends to incorporate other
races in their lineage, including white and Native American, while
"white" means the absence of other races. Socially, he said,
"black Americans get identified with their poorest members -- success is
seen as the exception."</font>
<p><font color="#000000">He looked up, leaned forward and said, "I am also
the black experience."</font><br>
<p><font color="#000000">http://www.nytimes.com</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>CORRECTION-DATE:</b> February 16, 2000, Wednesday</font>
<p><b><font color="#000000">CORRECTION:</font></b><br>
<font color="#000000">An article on Saturday about a change that lets census
respondents assign themselves to more than one race misstated the name of a Web
site run by Charles Byrd, who expressed hope that a time would come when race
did not matter. It is Interracial Voice, not Inter Racial Voice.</font><br>
<br>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>GRAPHIC:</b> Photos: <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff66; COLOR: black">Michael
</b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #a0ffff; COLOR: black">Gelobter</b> and his
daughter, Troy, in their Harlem home. On the census, he will check one race:
black. (Marilynn K. Yee/The <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">New
</b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff9999; COLOR: black">York</b> Times); Kerry
Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist, found that the race with which mixed-race
collegians identified varied with their childhood community. (Misha Erwitt for
The <b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #99ff99; COLOR: black">New </b><b style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff9999; COLOR: black">York</b>
Times)(pg. A10)</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>LANGUAGE:</b> ENGLISH</font>
<p><font color="#000000"><b>LOAD-DATE:</b> February 12, 2000</font><br>
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<p>Found at:</p>
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