Census: Racial, Ethnic Categories

* Ruben Navarrette Jr. chides black folks in “Count Black and White and Brown All Over” (Commentary, March 9). He suggests we should be ashamed that 60% of us voted for Proposition 187 to deny services to illegal immigrants.

We had good reason for that vote. No other population has been as negatively impacted by this invasion of illegal immigrants. Our schools have the lowest test scores and are filled with children whose educational and language skills are keeping our schools at the bottom. How can our black children learn in classes where English is the second language and classes are dumbed down?

Our public hospitals are crowded with five beds in a room and hours waiting in the halls and ER for one of those beds. Hourly pay rates have plummeted because this large group of unskilled workers will work for any amount offered. Rental housing is in decline, repairs are not completed and apartments are occupied by people who live in unsafe, overpriced and overcrowded units.

Blacks had to march, demonstrate and die for the civil rights we should have had as native-born Americans. We don’t consider it discrimination as we protest the deterioration of the inner city and its institutions.

ANN HADLEY

Los Angeles

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* Re “Census Illustrates Diversity From Sea to Shining Sea,” March 13: The census hoopla about Hispanics soon becoming the nation’s “largest minority” fails to answer the question of why Hispanics are even considered a minority at all.

Racially, most Hispanics are of at least part European origin, i.e., “white.” Linguistically, Spanish is closely related to English, and most U.S.-born Hispanics speak English as their first language. Most Hispanics are Catholic, the largest single denomination in the United States. All these factors place them fairly close to the mainstream of America.

CHRIS NORBY

Fullerton

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* Re “No Need for 57 Census Varieties,” Voices, March 10:

Felicia Clark is right on the mark when she decries the system of racial identification espoused by the 2000 census. However, further analysis gives a different emphasis to her argument. It is fundamentally undesirable to categorize our populace by race or ethnicity--it merely reinforces the stereotypes and biases that many of us have spent years trying to obliterate.

Continuing to play on these divisions will lead in the end to further fragmentation of our society and to the persistence of the hatred and exploitation that Clark rightly deplores. I strongly endorse her suggestion that we abandon race identification and concentrate our analyses on education and income levels.

Surely we should strive to implement the dream (not the actuality) of the brilliant men who founded our nation, so that Lincoln’s Gettysburg wish may come true--that this nation, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . shall not perish from the earth.”

IRA SKUTCH

Sherman Oaks