N.Y. Times, Aug. 21, 2013
By Kenneth Prewitt
Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has reported the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
The nation’s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico.
Of course, officially sanctioned discrimination was finally outlawed by civil rights legislation in 1964. The underlying demographic categories, however, were kept. Securing civil rights required statistics. Thus resulted an uneasy marriage of preposterous 18th-century racial classifications to legitimate 20th-century policy goals like fair electoral representation, anti-discrimination programs, school desegregation, bilingual education and affirmative action.
But the demographic revolution since the immigration overhaul of 1965 has pushed the outdated (and politically constructed) notion of race to the breaking point. In June the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, taking note of changing demographics. I disagree with the court’s ruling, but agree that society is changing. And our statistics must reflect those changes.
Fast-growing population groups — mixed-race Americans, those with “hyphenated” identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 — increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau’s designation, since 1970, of “Hispanic” as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a “race.” In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for “some other race” — a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.
Indeed, anyone who filled in “some other race” that year was allocated to one or more of the five main groupings. Many absurdities have resulted.
America has about 1.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa — some 3 percent of the nation’s black population. Like President Obama’s father, who was Kenyan, their experience differs vastly from that of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved, yet they are subsumed into the same category — one that, until this very year, continued to include the outdated term “Negro.”
The census considers Arabs white, along with non-Arabs like Turks and Kurds because they have origins in the Middle East or North Africa. Migrants from the former Soviet nations in Central Asia are lumped in as white along with descendants of New England pilgrims.
An indigenous person from Peru, Bolivia or Guatemala is Hispanic, but if she “maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment,” she might also be counted as part of a racial group that includes the Inupiat and Yupik peoples of Alaska.
Are Australian immigrants whites or Pacific Islanders? (The Census Bureau’s own documents are unclear on this.)
The census has no second-generation question, leaving Congress to debate immigration reform with inadequate statistics about which new Americans are learning English, finishing school, living in segregated neighborhoods or staying out of jail. Social scientists closely track intermarriage as an indicator of assimilation, but the census reports intermarriage only among whites, blacks, Hispanics and others — overlooking unions between, say, Japanese and Chinese, Cubans and Mexicans, Nigerians and native-born blacks. These marriages may have as much to tell us about where the nation is headed as the rate at which whites intermarry.
Much attention has been paid to the news that non-Hispanic whites now account for less than half of births in the United States and that deaths now exceed births among non-Hispanic whites. These projections are oversimplified and misleading because they rely on the outdated “five races” concept. The far more significant turning point is the shift from a nation of a few large racial blocs into a hybrid America of numerous nationalities, ethnicities and cultures, unprecedented in human history. It is this hybrid, multivalent, dynamic America that is not reflected in the census. We cannot, however, fix this at the expense of abandoning racial categories, which are still needed for legitimate policy purposes.
The Census Bureau has begun to consider what changes it will recommend for the 2020 census. It will focus, appropriately, on operational improvements, like increasing response rates. But there are also political decisions to be made.
I urge three actions. First, drop the current race questions, which misleadingly conflate race and nationality, and ask two new questions: one based on a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories, and a separate, comprehensive nationality question. (The 2010 census asked Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders to specify a national origin and allowed American Indians and Alaska Natives to put down their tribe.)
These two questions would allow for much-needed flexibility. Broad racial groupings are significant for protecting voting rights, but information on national origin is more useful for understanding health disparities in a metropolis, or for diversifying a university’s student body. Indeed, the failure to appreciate rising inequality within the country’s white majority and to distinguish, say, inner-city blacks from African asylum-seekers, or Southeast Asian refugees from well-educated East Asians, have contributed to the criticisms of affirmative action as too blunt a tool of social policy.
Second, add parental place of birth to the census. One-fourth of Americans under the age of 18 are children of immigrants — a proportion that will increase sharply over the next quarter-century.
Third, slowly phase in the use of the data to make policy. There is a precedent: in 2000, there was strong opposition to the new option of selecting more than one race. It was feared that this would reduce the size of various racial minorities. The government responded by counting those who are white and of one minority race as minorities for the purposes of civil-rights monitoring and enforcement. The new comprehensive statistics on national origin would be put to use judiciously. The five races would not disappear from the statistical system, but neither would they be the only policy tool available.
Americans may hope for a colorblind future, but we know that the legacy of discrimination continues to haunt us; that some new immigrants are assimilated even as others are left behind; that new versions of racism crop up, within as well as among the five “races.”
Faced with these empirical realities, statistical ignorance is a moral failure. It is also a political failure to ignore the arrival of a hybrid America. Even the questions on race we use in 2020 will be wrong for 2100. It will take decades of gradual re-engineering to match census statistics to demographic realities. The Census Bureau is prepared; what’s missing is public awareness and political leadership.
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Kenneth Prewitt, the director of the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 2000, is a professor of public affairs at Columbia University and the author of “What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Effort to Classify Americans.”

Alternet, August 19, 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder promises reform of US criminal justice. For the kids of broken families, it can’t come soon enough
By Michael Leo Owens (The Guardian, UK)
Seeking to cut imprisonment rates and spending while protecting the public, Holder has directed the Justice Department to charge non-violent drug offenders with less severe federal crimes. Beyond reducing the use of mandatory minimum sentences and shortening prison times for lower-level drug felons, while reserving more serious charges and longer sentences for violent and higher-ranking drug traffickers, the Justice Department supports sentencing more people to rehab than (re-)imprisonment for crimes rooted in drug abuse and addiction.Reform criminal justice now. That was the core message US Attorney General Eric Holder delivered recently to the American Bar Associationand our nation. He declared that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason” and at great public expense.
Those reforms, among others, according to Holder, will do more for “the lives being harmed, not helped, by a criminal justice system that doesn’t serve the American people as well as it should”. There is one group of Americans that couldn’t agree more – the children of the imprisoned.
Most prisoners are parents of children under 18 years of age. Two-thirds of incarcerated parents are nonviolent offenders, often locked up on minor drug-related charges. They make up the majority of parents in prison, and they and their children are the ones criminal justice reform will most affect.
By the best estimates, about 2.7 million children under the age of 18 have a parent in prison or jail. According to sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Petit (pdf), that means one in 28 kids in the United States (as of 2010) has a mother or father, or both, in lockup – a dramatic change from the one in 125 rate a quarter of a century ago. Approximately one in nine black children have an imprisoned parent, four times as many 25 years ago. Furthermore, 14,000 or more children of the imprisoned annually enter foster care, while an undetermined number enter juvenile detention and adult prisons.
The losses children experience from of an imprisoned parent are many (pdf). While imprisoned, governments deprive parents of consistent contact and engagement with their children. Their kids rarely visit them in prison because these parents are often isolated at great distances from their communities. A sad example is the recent decision of the federal bureau of prisons to relocate their inmates to prisons scattered around the country, making visitation impossible for many.
Even phone calls become difficult and rare because of exorbitant telephone rates. Some imprisoned parents with long sentences may even permanently lose their parental rights.
The lack of parental contact and engagement during imprisonment hurts kids of the incarcerated, psychologically and socially. Many kids of the imprisoned are teased and taunted, shamed and stigmatized for the actions and absences of their parents. This is true even in communities with high rates of parental imprisonment.
Naturally, kids of the imprisoned try to hide the trauma of parental arrests, convictions, and incarceration. Some mask it. Others act out, resulting in school suspensions, dropouts, criminal arrests, and juvenile imprisonment, which maintains the “school-to-prison pipeline” that Attorney General Holder mentioned in his speech.
The children of the formerly incarcerated suffer, too. A collection of federal and state laws, for instance, bar mothers and fathers with drug felony convictions from federal social welfare programs, such as cash assistance for the poor, food stamps, vouchers for rental housing, apartments in public housing, and subsidized student loans for college educations. Some states prevent parents with felony convictions from voting and ban them from obtaining employment licenses for jobs like truck drivers and barbers.
These and other collateral consequences, as Attorney General Holder knows and his Justice Department is trying to change, weaken families after their reunification with the formerly incarcerated, and hinder parents from being better guardians and role models of their children. The post-prison sanctions also create what sociologist Christopher Wildeman suggests is “a new mechanism through which race and class inequality grow”.
Philanthropic organizations like the Annie E Casey Foundation in Baltimore and community improvement organizations such as Foreverfamily in Atlanta stand up for and with the children of imprisoned parents: they are part of a nascent but growing movement toward change. Their compassion and courage for kids of the imprisoned is commendable. But the children of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated need more – not just private charity, but public support, too.
Transforming the lives of the children of the imprisoned requires that far more Americans learn of, talk about, and act for the kids who are most likely the truly disadvantaged of all our nation’s children. Making the issue a common subject of public conversation will aid this transformation. And popular culture can be a powerful tool.
Earlier this summer, for example, the Children’s Television Workshop, producers of “Sesame Street”, introduced Alex, a Muppet with an imprisoned father. Schools, counselors, and therapists received copies of the video. Its existence and media coverage pushed the issue briefly into the spotlight. Portions of the video and facts about the issue should become part of regular “Sesame Street” programming and other popular shows about children and families.
We can also aid the transformation by giving voice to and advocating for children of the imprisoned. Criminal justice and welfare policymakers need to feel pressure that the needs of kids of the imprisoned are important. Celebrities, who during their youth and teens had imprisoned parents, can help, speaking up – as Laura Kaeppeler, a former Miss America, has done.
The “war on drugs” and mass incarceration policies have failed our criminal justice system at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of ruined lives. They have also created a disastrous de facto child welfare policy, harming those Americans least able to advocate for themselves, our children, and undermining families and communities. Let’s make America’s kids a top priority of Holder’s reforms.

Colorlines, Aug. 21, 2013
BY DANI MCCLAIN
Curtis Hierro speaks into the phone like he’s talking into a bullhorn. The passion the 26-year-old Dream Defenders field director has used to get himself and fellow occupiers through more than four weeks in the Florida statehouse is evident in his voice. He’s ready for their 30th (and what will turn out to be their final) night there, despite an announcement that the state will test the building’s fire alarms from 8 pm to midnight. That’ll make it hard to get a moment’s peace, let alone sleep. But Hierro takes it in stride, as he did when the "Star Wars" theme went blaring at dawn, the weekends when getting access to a shower was tough, and other challenges that make putting one’s body on the line to achieve a political goal a test of endurance.
"That’s expected in this work, and we’ve made sure that everyone who comes in this space knows our norms and that we’re nonviolent," Hierro said. "They’re trying to provoke us so they can discredit us and kick us out."
Since July 16 — three days after the George Zimmerman verdict was announced — Hierro and between a dozen and 60 other Dream Defenders had camped out in Gov. Rick Scott’s office, demanding a special legislative session and the consideration of Trayvon’s Law, a bill crafted in collaboration with state legislators and the NAACP. The young Floridians are using the direct action tactics its founders honed in a previous takeover of the statehouse and in a march they organized after Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in an effort to turn this post-verdict moment into a movement.
In doing so, they joined others around the country who are turning to civil disobedience and strategic protest as a way to force change, or at least create the conditions for a new conversation about issues ranging from racial profiling to the [youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=fSFSSsURE7g], workers’ rights, long term solitary confinement and immigration policy. A spirit similar to the one that motivated 250,000 people to converge on Washington, D.C. 50 years ago this month is moving today. And much of that spirit is being harnessed and directed by millennials.
Young people are filling a role they’ve held in organizing throughout history, says Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago political science professor and founder and director of the Black Youth Project. The students who led sit-ins at lunch counters and boarded buses to challenge segregation were part of that vanguard during the civil rights era. Today’s organizers who use direct action, from the Dream Defenders to the Dream 9, are part of that legacy.
"Young people don’t always have to think about mortgages and jobs and childcare and are freer to engage in a certain kind of risk that as you get older you’re less likely to get involved in," Cohen says.
People in their 20s and early 30s also backed Barack Obama by more than a two-to-one ratio in 2008, and now they’re frustrated by the pace of progress through institutional channels. But if North Carolina is any indication, that frustration hasn’t led them to stop believing in the power of the ballot box. Young people wereat the forefront of some of the Moral Mondays demonstrations there, particularly those that called out the state GOP’s efforts to restrict access to the polls through a new law that requires photo ID, shortens the early voting period and ends the same-day registration option. More than 900 North Carolinians were arrested during the 13 weeks that Moral Mondays protests took place at the Raleigh statehouse, drawing attention to conservative attacks on abortion rights, wages and jobs. The intergenerational group of protestors had a clear effect, and approval ratings for the Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature are down.
Black Youth Project’s Cohen said the 24-hour news cycle and the speed at which information travels via social networks has given young people a new understanding and sense of urgency of how high the stakes are.
"Given that reality that’s in their faces and the infrastructure for mobilization that’s developing, there’s an opportunity for young people to engage in direct action in a way that is hopeful for all of us," she said.
Much of this infrastructure is dependent on what Daniel Maree, the 25-year-old lead organizer of last year’s Million Hoodies March in New York City, refers to as the democratization of technology. Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and design techniques normally seen in corporate advertising, Maree and collaborators got thousands of people to Union Square in just two days. Despite the near absence of mainstream news stories about Martin’s death, images from the rally and Maree’s subsequent push of a petition demanding Zimmerman’s arrest helped get the incident onto the national stage.
In the days following the March 21st march, coverage of and Twitter conversations about the killing as well as signatures on a Change.org petition that had been started earlier that month skyrocketed. In June, the Pew Research Center reported that in the five years that it’s tracked weekly news coverage, Martin’s killing received more sustained coverage than any other story that was largely about race.
Maree, a digital strategist at an ad agency, worked with people such as Andrea Ciannavei, 38, a writer and Occupy Wall Street participant who offered up InterOccupy.net to help coordinate the mobilization. He hadn’t set out to position himself as a leader in the wake of the tragedy, but he saw a vacuum that needed to be filled.
"Every time I Googled Trayvon’s name, I didn’t see anything coming from any organization," Maree said. "I thought, ‘Nobody’s doing anything about this so I have to do something.’"
This pattern — an expectation that an established progressive or legacy civil rights organization would already be responding to a crisis, a realization that those groups didn’t have a game plan or were being slow to implement, followed by a quick pivot to take the reins and a willingness to work with (but not for) whoever then shows up — came up again and again as I spoke with young organizers. For many, the first wakeup call came with an acknowledgment of the Obama Administration’s limitations.
Nelini Stamp, an advisor to Dream Defenders who also participated in Occupy said that she’d had high hopes that the president would use the power of his office to address issues like racial profiling and police brutality. As her expectations have shifted, she’s put her hopes in the power of young people, especially young people of color, to bring about change.
"Now you have a movement that is really strong," Stamp, 25, said. "We should push this man and this country to do better because that’s what we thought we were getting."
One characteristic of how these younger organizers push is a willingness to move at a fast pace, abandoning what’s not working and moving on to new tactics when demands aren’t met.
"I think people are escalating a lot quicker and a lot earlier," Stamp said.
No group demonstrates this fearlessness and righteous impatience like the Dream 9, the transnational activists who until August 7 had been held for more than two weeks at a detention center in Eloy, Ariz. In an effort to bring attention to the 1.7 million deportations that have taken place since Obama has been in office, the group of undocumented immigrants traveled to Mexico, then turned themselves in at the US border seeking reentry on humanitarian grounds. This border crossing was broadcast via a Ustream live feed that attracted more than 10,000 viewers who cheered them on from around the world.
While the hashtag and rallying cry "Bring them home" shot around the Internet, the Dream 9 waited to learn whether they’d be granted return to the country they’ve known as home since they were children. Members of the group were isolated in solitary confinement, participated in a hunger strike and organized deportees inside the detention center, all in an effort to highlight the plight of many.
It’s necessary action that people at negotiating tables aren’t taking, said 27-year-old Mohammad Abdollahi, a member of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and a coordinator of the action. Abdollahi said the NIYA maintains a broad view of what undocumented immigrants and their families actually need, and he echoes the sentiments of other organizers who see their work as the nimble and envelope-pushing counterpart to more plodding, bureaucratic processes that legacy organizations are often confined to.
"Our goal has always been for the greater immigration rights movement to catch up," he said. "Folks can have a trajectory of what’s possible in the movement and hopefully replicate or come up with more creative ways to do things themselves."

• • Dani McClain
  • Dani McClain is an Oakland-based journalist covering reproductive rights and sexuality.
    She reported on education while on staff at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and covered breaking news for the Miami Herald‘s metro desk. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Root, Loop21, AlterNet, On the Issues, and …