How the Census Bureau Socially Constructs the Next America(s)
1st December 2013
Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
What perhaps puzzles the reader is why [Census] race statistics are so terribly important that they are announced simultaneously with the population figures mandated for reapportionment. You may also be puzzled that the census form dedicates so much of its space to the race and Hispanic question but has no space for education, health, employment, or marital status questions.
(Not to mention the absence of a citizenship question, which would ask about a simple yes-or-no legal distinction far less murky than race or ethnicity.)
Ask Willie Sutton: ‘That’s where the money is.’
An old-fashioned nice white Protestant liberal, Prewitt, who is now Carnegie professor of public affairs at Columbia University, expresses befuddlement at how a job he apparently assumed would be suitable for a technocratic good government Progressive like himself wound up plunging him into the maelstrom of modern racial politics. Thus his proposals for technical improvements in the Census quite unexpectedly (to him) degenerated into a donnybrook over race, complete with angry charges of, guess what, “racism.”
Prewitt points out that, from the disinterested perspective of promoting the commonweal, the federal government’s racial preoccupation synchronizes poorly with the lack of informed public discussion over the purposes of all this categorizing of people. Instead, the crucial process of drawing official racial and ethnic boundaries tends to be either hijacked by interest groups or is the remnant of bureaucratic inertia and lack of foresight.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised. I’m sure surprised.