Political Commentary

Civil Disobedience

12 Comments

Check “other race” and write in “American.”

[Early afternoon update]

As a response to some commenters, here’s an explanation by Mark Krikorian why you should write “American,” and not “human”:

The most common response from readers was that you should put “human” as your race, or even “100 yard dash.” The problem is that those responses will be written off as cutesy, like answering “frequent” when asked about your sex, and won’t be reported by the Census Bureau. “American,” on the other hand, is clearly a political protest against government race laws, and is included when the Bureau reports the results, or was in 2000. In fact, the number of people answering “American” grew from 12.4 million in the 1990 census to 20.2 million in 2000, “the largest numerical growth of any ancestry group,” according to Wikipedia.

Join the crowd.

12 thoughts on “Civil Disobedience”

  2. American is a nationality, not a race. For the last census, I checked “other” and wrote in “human”. I’ll do the same thing this time, too.

  3. I’ve been a “human” in the last two censuses (censi?), although my ex would dispute that.

  4. Read the link. Pakistani is a race according to the census and Pakistan’s only been a country about 65 years.

  5. American is a valid race per the census question. If you look at the question Chinese, Korean, Japanese, East Indian, and Pakistani are given as racial choices. So by this reason German, Belgian, Dutch are races.
    Me, I’m tempted not reply just to be able to ask a census worker if they are given training in “racial science”.

  6. I’m a Native American, I was born in Brooklyn, NY. (1/2 Italian, 1/4 Swedish, 1/4 English, some small percent of mutt.)

    American sounds good to me.

  8. I got my letter the other day and was amused at the incessant urge to fill it out correctly so that, “everyone gets their fair share”. As a white 30-something I think the only fair share of anything I’ll get is a swift boot up the ass from the IRS if I don’t pay my “fair share”.

  11. Your link to Krikorian’s explanation actually links to the “Obama is acting unconstitutionally” story…

Comments are closed.