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Show Standard-Examiner 16A Saturday. August 10, 1996 Standard-Examiner Our View Mars awaitsus, but in the meantime... e cynics were fast out of the blocks this week when finally threw it under an electron it was announced that What did they find? Evidence of single-celled microbes resembling earthly bacteria - and other evidence suggesting the presence of there may have been life on Mars countless eons ago: NASA wants more money, they said. Well, NASA may indeed want more money, just as all of us do. “f But they’re missing the point: THERE WAS LIFE ON MARS! As children, we watched movies about Martian invasions. There was even a TV sitcom called “My Favorite Martian.” We laid awake nights reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” then nodded off into a slumberfilled with visions of navigating the “ca- nals” criss-crossing the red planet’s surface. reed How do we know there was life : on Mars? A hunk of Martian rock was blasted off the surface of the planet some 15 million years ago by an errant asteroid. It flew into i space and, about 13,000 years ago, ; 4 plunked down in Antarctica. In 1984, someone foundit and NASA microscope. water. All in all, pretty amazing stuff. The claim will be endlessly reviewed and re-reviewed by skeptical scientists, as it should be. But, wow, think of the possibilities: the rock is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, about the time we had single-celled life on this planet. Hmm, could that mean maybe Bradbury was right? MARTIANS!? OK, we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves. Still, cynics be damned: NASA will send more probes to Mars for more detailed study than ever before, and we TELLIME ka. hope they have the moneyto doit right. The single-celled life may have evolved into multi-celled life before Mars became the lifeless lumpit is now. There, friends, would be a story even the cynics couldn’t resist. OVER RNSING|| [THEMIIMOM WAGE "SO CENTS?,, et ing‘intouchwiththeEditorial ages Fas numberfor letiers ~625-4508 _ 3 _ Guest Commentary authorscan obtain advance 7 S approval and mules by calling Editorial Poge Editor. o4 ee STKE FE SRV ESS FPL ere aA? o.oo G = POINT/COUNTERPOINT A multiracial category on governmentformsjustplain right Through the census and other methods of population data reporting, the United States has kept track of the racial makeup of the country’s population since 1790. Good and valid goals underlie this endeavor, the most obvious and important of which these days are civil rights enforcement and monitoring, and disease prevention and control. The first is necessary because of past injustice, and because we have not reached the utopian ideal of color blindness in private and public dealing. The second because, despite scientific debate about whether there actually are races, some diseases occur more frequently in some races than others. Unfortunately, at least since 1977, the method of collecting population statistics by race has been seriously flawed. In that year, an obscure regulation called OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 was enacted. It requires standardized collection and reporting of racial data by and to the federal government. In the computer age, ease of data collection be- unless she picked black or white. A job transfer a ery Rosser For Scripps Howard News-Service came, as it often does, more important than accuracy, and government questionnaires that include race became multiple choice affairs. Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaskan Native. If you live in this country, according to the government, you belong in one of those categories. Individuals with one parent in each of the four federally acknowledged races are confronted, when responding to their government’s questions about their race, with a choice: select one of your parents’ race to the exclusion of the other. Since school registration is one of the many times in life the government wants to know someone’s race, the requirement to make.this decision confronts children at an early age. Ashleigh Miller, whose mother is white and whose father is black, has already been through it twice. Last year in Florida a school official told her, and her mother, she could not be registered took: the family to Alabama for the 1996 school year. There, the black high school principal told them Ashleigh would be entered upon the records as white, because she looked white to the principal. Historically, persons of mixed race have had a hard time in this and many other cultures. Cultural norms and attitudes about race are deep-rooted and heartfelt. Resistance to cross-racial dating, mating and child-bearing remains a fact of life in this country. Not until 1966 were the last laws forbidding interracial marriage struck down by the Supreme Court. Two years ago a high school principal in Alabama announced that the prom would not go forward if interracial couples attended, and told one multiracial young woman that it was a mistake for her parents to have borne her. This year the elders of a Georgia church demanded that a newborn child be disinterred from the churchyard when they discovered that the father was. black. Attitudes change slowly, but given the unques- tioned role of the federal government in promoting and enforcing civil rights, it is not unreasonable to expect leadership from Washington on this subject. What many multiracial people are demandingis simple: they want their country to have the statistical tools to prevent discrimination against them, and to track their health risks. Groups with a variety of political agendas are resisting. What they forget, or ignore, is that rights in this country be- long to individuals and not groups. If it is worthwhile counting the population by race, it is worth doing it right. The federal government should amend all of its data-gathering methods and tools so that persons of mixed ancestry can respond to them honestly, with pride in their diverse heritage. All they ask is to be counted. They want to count. Gerry Rosser is a legal adviser to Project R.A.C.E., an advocacy group for the rights of multiracial children. He represents the plaintiff in litigation to compel government counting of the multiracial population. but an even more right answeris no racial categories atall With the next national census just four years off, Congress (which orders the counting) and many of the rest of us (who get counted) are focusing on how Americans “ought” to be racially categorized by the Census Bureau. At the moment, attention is centered on the possibility of “improving” America’s racial categories by adding a new box for people of multiracial identity. We'd like to suggest, instead, that Americans ought not to be racially categorized atall. Racial categories are a product of bad science and they frequently generate bad social policy. As it is now, all Americans must fit into one of six boxes on the Census Bureau form — White, Black, Asian and other Pacific islander, Native American, Hispanic, and Other “Other” would seem to cover all racial contingencies, but the Census Bureau is considering a number of additions, deletions, and reordering of the existing racial categories, particularly adding a multiracial option. On the face ofit, this seems a modest and indeed sensitive option, But there is @ Lawrence Hirschfeld and Kirk Cheyfitz For Scripps Howard NewsService good reason to believe it would be better to get rid of the racial and ethnic category questions altogether. Why does the census collect racial information at all? The most important reason, now that the Supreme Court has ruled that congressional redistricting should be blind to race, is that the government is still committed to finding and assisting people likely to have been discriminated against. Race is important here because it is a fairly good index of things relevant to discrimination — poverty, ill health, substandard housing, etc. But while race is a fairly good index of these things, it is an imperfect one. For example, if a government official goes looking for black people, he is certain to find a disproportionate number of people who are both poor and in relativély poor health, But it is very risky to use racial categories in this way because there is considerable danger that race will be seen as a cause of these social ills instead of just an index of them Consider poverty. One popular explanation, repeated recently in the infamous book “The Bell Curve,” is that people are poor because they are ill-equipped to succeed and that certain racial groups are particularly ill-equipped because of their genetic heritage. But race can't cause poverty in this way because race is not a coherent biological category. There is as much genetic variation within a racial category as there is between racial categories. Race doesn't exist in the way our common sense tells us it does, Odd as this may seem, it’s true. This doesn't mean that race and poverty aren't related, but they are related because of the way Census Bureau do its job. The census isn’t about identity; it’s about providing the government with information. And what the government needs is information on inequity not race. We completely agree that race is real psychologically and socially and that a multiracial identity plays an important role in many peoples’ lives. But it would be better and more to the point, if we need to count people who are poor orliving in bad housing, to look for poverty and substandard homes, not people whose life experience is multiracial, Getting rid of the racial questions would not society sorts people into racial categories. People aren't poor because they are Diack; rather, they only improve government programs, it would get the government out of the business of using and cause others have categorized them as black, Race is bankrupt biology. So it hardly seems worthwhile to redraw census categories just to more adequately map society's faulty view of human biological variation. Expanding or contracting the repertoire of census categories to better reflect a new sense of identity won't help the once misguided, problematic, and pernicious. are more likely to become and remain poor be- lending credence to a series of ideas that are at Lawrence A Hirschfeld is the author of “Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Con- struction of Human Kinds” and is associate professor of anthropology and of psychology at the University of Michigan. Kirk Chevfitz is a journalist at work on a book about race |