Letter Writers Deride Labeling by Race

The letter was waiting for Sally Katzen when she arrived four years ago to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a part of the president’s budget arm responsible for finding a common language for things the government tracks, such as industries and racial minorities.

The size of a party invitation, the letter enclosed the photograph of a young girl, perhaps 6 or 8 years old. Her skin was very dark. Her features were Asian. The letter was from the girl’s mother.

The note is gone, but Katzen can’t forget the gist of the mother’s pained message: “This is my daughter. She is black, and she is Asian.”

Under federal rules, the child counted as only one of the following four groups--white, black, Asian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. Her mother wanted to know, “Why should my daughter have to deny part of her heritage?”

The categories, used on things like birth certificates and school enrollment forms, were laid down by Katzen’s predecessors in 1977. Their purpose was to help count minorities to satisfy civil rights laws. But the rules offered no category for the girl in the picture. She could be, statistically, only one thing or the other.

Katzen said the letter gave her “goose pimples,” and she asked her staff to look into it.

“In retrospect, I probably did not fully appreciate the significance of that decision,” she said.

In time, there would be hundreds of letters, and more family snapshots to make a point. Many letter-writers rippled with anguish and frustration. Some scolded. Others were just glad someone finally asked.

The letters contributed to the review, now drawing to a close, of the racial categories and the sole ethnic option, Hispanic (or not). In addition to public hearings in Boston, Denver, San Francisco and Honolulu, Katzen’s agency published a Federal Register notice in 1994 that welcomed people to air their thoughts in writing.

One man with a Japanese surname sent a photograph to show he didn’t look Japanese. Some protested that race was a fiction, or that labeling people evoked Adolf Hitler’s murderous obsession with racial purity and South Africa’s perverse and defunct apartheid system.

American Indians concerned about “wannabes” objected to letting people fill out their own census forms, and asked instead that official tribes name and count their members for the government.

A sampling of other letters:

“We are asking as citizens of U.S.A. for our right to be ethnically named according to our adequate and appropriate ancestry as ‘European Americans with origins in the British Isles, Continental and East Europe and Scandinavia.’ “--Nadine and Clyde Clewett, Peoria, Ariz.

“My husband and I are the adoptive parents of two multiracial children. They are mixed European and African ancestry, while I am European-American and my husband is Iranian-American. Each time we are faced with racial-classification questions, we are faced with an insoluble dilemma--neither black nor white and certainly not ‘other,’ they are most significantly human. . . . I feel that a multiracial category is not only needed for the accurate reflection of my children’s heritage, but could be statistically useful information in assessing the progress our society is making towards the elimination of racism.”--Melanie Mouzoon, Pasadena, Texas.

“There are many people in the United States whose ancestors have lived here for hundreds of years. It is almost impossible for them to know where all of their ancestors came from. . . . With varying degrees of certainty I have some documentation on the origin of about 15% of my ancestry. . . . Just what are you people trying to do anyway? It would appear that the only people allowed to live in the United States are people whose ancestors all came from one place that can be documented. . . . This whole racist effort should be abandoned, the sooner the better.”--Lyman S. Stanton, a racially incorrect citizen, Lafayette, Calif.