Census and Race Issues: "American"

The Census continues to draw fire for the taxpayer dollars spent.  First, there are the huge sums being spent in commercial advertizing: $340 million.  This was followed by the $2.5 million spent on Super Bowl ads [source].  This week, some people were incensed at the $85 million spent on two mailers that were sent out: one to let you know the census is coming and another to let you know the census form was sent [source].

The Census Bureau defends the money being spent:

There has been some recent criticism about spending taxpayer money on advertising for the 2010 Census. Experience from the 2000 Census, however, shows that paid advertising can motivate people to respond to the census form by mail, while saving taxpayer dollars

The Census Bureau projects for every one percentage point increase in the national mail back participation rate for the 2010 Census, the federal government saves $85 million in taxpayer money - it costs substantially more money to send census takers to households that fail to mail back their short 10 question form than it does to receive it by mail.

Facing a three-decade decline in the national mail response rates 10 years ago in the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau launched its first ever paid advertising campaign to increase public awareness levels about the once-a-decade and Constitutionally mandated population count. Prior to that, the Census Bureau relied on public service announcements that aired whenever television stations and print media could fit it into their schedules as a pro bono advertisement. The end result was a 2000 Census that turned around the three-decade decline in response rates and exceeded the 1990 Census mail response rate of 65 percent. At the same time the 2000 Census reduced the differential undercount of minority groups compared to the rest of the nation.

Here's a great piece of advice from Michelle Malkin ...

My race is “American”

By Michelle Malkin  •  March 9, 2010 10:47 AM

Mark Krikorian is fighting back against Census form race politics and urging you to do the same:

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.

Ditto that!

Scott Johnson at Power Line reminds us of De Crevecoeur’s Letter from an American Farmer:

In Letter III of his Letters From an America Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur famously asked: “What then is the American, this new man?” He answered: “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He has become an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims.” (More on De Crevecoeur here.)

I’ll add Teddy Roosevelt’s famous passage about hyphenated Americanism:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic… There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

Posted in: census.I love this idea!  I think I'll use it myself ... or check all the boxes that apply, since I am your typical American Heinz 57 ... or do both! -- check all that apply and then write in "American."

Check out Malkin's other reports on Census tax payer boondoggles.

[Note: I posted earlier about the controversial use of "negro" as one of the designations for race.]