I’m curious: What race would you expect a person to be if that person recorded their race as “American” on their census form?

I ask because there is a Loudoun County blogger who recently invited readers to share their stories of “close encounters with the census.” I’m not going to link to this person, because 1) the political portion of her blog is nothing but an outlet for anti-Obama and anti-government paranoia, devoid of any reputable source material, and 2) it upsets her. Instead, I will link to this parody.

Here is the comment she used to illustrate, without a trace of irony, the sort of story she was looking for:

I filled in our census form and mailed it in. I made sure to put “American” for the race of all in my family. We got a call over the weekend to “verify that the information is correct”. My husband ruined my good fun because he was asked if anyone was black or latino and he says “No” and then the person asked “so you’re white” and my husband responds “yes”. ugg… I wish I had answered the phone.

A bunch of other people then chimed in, saying they had put down “American” as their race, too.Now, to be fair, there are legitimate and compelling reasons for objecting to the way race as a category was handled in the current census. None of them were to be found in this post, but they do exist. One is the use of offensive, anachronistic language, which the Census Bureau answers essentially by saying that part of the generation that used that language is still living, and it’s the job of the Bureau to get accurate information, not police language. It’s also true that there is no such thing as “race” in a literal sense. Individuals can’t be reliably categorized by race using some objective biological measure, so it’s fair to ask: Why do it at all? However, it matters who is doing the asking.

The idea of writing “American” in the race box seems to have its origin in a post on NRO’s The Corner by Mark Krikorian (he’s the anti-immigrant crank who claimed that Haiti is “screwed up” because it “wasn’t colonized long enough,” and that there isn’t enough pressure in American society for “Anglo-conformity”). It’s part of the general conspiracy-theory nonsense about the census, with one prominent claim being that the Constitution only requires enumeration, and that any questions beyond the number of people living in a residence are an illegal intrusion by the government.

Here is what the Census Bureau says about the collection of other demographic information:

Census information affects the numbers of seats your state occupies in the U.S. House of Representatives. And people from many walks of life use census data to advocate for causes, rescue disaster victims, prevent diseases, research markets, locate pools of skilled workers and more.

And they provide specific examples of how the data can be used in community organizing:

“Low-income families have clearly been targeted in this study.” The Organic Consumers Association used census data to lobby the Environmental Protection Agency to halt testing dangerous chemicals on low-income children in Florida. The testing was eventually stopped due to the petition.

This seems to be the issue. You might ask, for whom would “advocating for causes” and “more” on the basis of demographic characteristics like gender, ethnicity, family composition or income be a problem? For those who have an interest in denying the facts of ongoing discrimination, the first line of defense is to make discrimination difficult to prove. If you can prevent collection of the data that would make it possible to detect and demonstrate systematic discrimination against a community, voila! It doesn’t exist. It’s no surprise that this disinformation is being peddled by those resentful of losing “their” country, an Archie Bunker world in which white = normative, and everyone else is “other.”

Here is just a small sample of reasons, items that happened to land in my inbox just over the last three days, to think that we might still need to be monitoring systematic discrimination on the basis of that fiction we call “race.”

• “Black or White: Kids on race,” a series currently running on Anderson Cooper 360, reports the conclusions of a new study of children’s attitudes about race. Both white and (to a lesser degree) black children express overwhelming bias toward whiteness.
• The Texas Board of Education, among other revisionist changes to history textbooks, would like the slave trade to be renamed “the Atlantic triangular trade.” Because that’s so much more appealing, don’t you think?
• The new Republican Senate nominee for Kentucky, Rand Paul, believes that the market should have been allowed to determine whether or not Woolworth’s lunch counters must serve non-white citizens.
• In one of Loudoun County’s high income gated communities, two African-American women were reported as “suspicious” for taking a walk in their neighborhood, and were then stopped and investigated by Sheriff’s deputies a few blocks from their own house. One of the women reports that she was asked if they were “coming off service.”

There are people – some of them in our own community – who very much would like everyone to forget the standard argument against passage of the Civil Rights Act: That private business owners should be free to determine which members of the public they serve, and that losing this freedom was a violation of their First Amendment rights (history is now repeating itself, with this exact argument being deployed against passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act). They would like everyone to think that racism is somehow created by people identifying, analyzing, talking about and working to combat racism and its pervasive effects. Such is the sanctimonious, smug ignorance of people who actually think they are being “color-blind” when they write “American” as a synonym for “white.”