Tying Knots in the American Tapestry : Race: We may have more ways to identify ourselves in the next census. This spells trouble for policy decisions.

Race-based political redistricting, having drawn the attention of the Supreme Court, is shedding new light on the growing tension between group entitlements and the rights of individuals. The court’s taking on one case last spring and two more in the next term also underscores the power of one federal agency, the Office of Management and Budget, to set standards for arranging individuals into racial and ethnic groups.

Well into the next century, our ethnic climate will reflect two developments now unfolding: First, how the 2000 census classifies the people it counts, thereby defining the threads of the nation’s ethnic tapestry; second, how the court’s redistricting decisions apply those categories in defining groups for purposes of entitlement.

Preparing for the next national head count, the Census Bureau is now surveying Americans about their individual ethnic and racial identities, asking respondents, in effect, “Who are you?” and “What are you?” This inquiry into national self-identification will add detail to the tapestry. OMB, however, has the final word on who or what counts as a “minority.” The racial and ethnic categories it establishes through its soon-to-be-revised Directive 15 determine how people are “counted” into groups for voting rights, affirmative action and other official purposes.

The Supreme Court’s latest decision heightens the importance of this official standard-setting prerogative. Distinctions that OMB dictates in the mid-1990s will shape the 2000 population count, and those distinctions will endure politically, possibly hardening and perpetuating the separateness of groups. At stake is the direction in which ethnically based distinctions could carry the nation, as the Voting Rights Act refashions the political landscape through redistricting.

The central issue here is: What classifications of people are pertinent to public policy? The gender distinction is, because real differences exist. (For example, women outlive men.) Differences tied to racial and ethnic distinctions are far less clear-cut. Furthermore, is the authenticity of those distinctions corrupted once individuals realize that they can gain preferences by choosing particular identities? The incentive to do so exists wherever “minority” racial and ethnic identity is linked to legal preferences of any kind, whether through the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action or other means premised on group membership.

Today’s emphasis on groups parallels that of earlier eras when individual rights and qualities were subordinated to group membership (with race and gender the main lines of division). Now the focus is on distinctions that are finer, more numerous, and more open to debate. At the same time, membership in a given “minority” group means not exclusion but entitlement. The stakes remain as always: privilege and resources, including political empowerment.

A highly controversial aspect of ethnically based districting is its reinforcement of ethnic separatism. Each district is premised on the notion that common interests are linked exclusively to ethnic identity. Several Supreme Court justices expressed their discomfort with racially determined districts, which, they said, “amounts . . . to nothing short of ‘political apartheid’.”

Threatening to complicate this territorial issue is the prospect of ever more detailed racial and ethnic categories. With more categories, more claims of ethnic separatism are possible, and recognition of each claim complicates any kind of preferential system. Furthermore, lumping together ethnicities that are substantially distinct--for example, classifying Cambodians, Koreans and Samoans under the single category of “Asian/Pacific Islander”--may not produce a genuine ethnic community of interest. The sematic possibilities, however, will be irresistible to politicians struggling to create majority coalitions.

Semantics may not fit political realities. Do “people of color” who are African Americans (say, the Rev. Jesse Jackson) and Caribbean Americans (say, Gen. Colin Powell) constitute a cohesive “minority” whose rights have been abridged? Is the term “Anglo” (racially white persons of non-Hispanic origin) appropriate to Americans of Turkish extraction? Where do the children of multiracial unions fit into these distinctions?

Findings from the Census Bureau’s new survey may increase our understanding of how individuals think about themselves in terms of ethnicity, ancestry, and race. How society should use this information, and toward what ends, remains problematic.