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Michelle Malkin has it right on the census.
My race is “American”
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.
Any questions that don’t deal with how many people live in my house will be left blank or be answered fictitiously. Constitutionally, the census is a count. Everything else is not allowed, so I choose to give ‘em heck about it!
While Malkin is still atrocious for advocating putting Arab-Americans into detention camps here domestically (“In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror”), I will agree with her that the 2010 US Census was WAY too racially/ethnically intrusive. As a “demographically ‘mainstream’ ” American, even I was insulted that our government would demand, under a threat of punishment, information about any of my fellow citizens’ racial/ethnic background. For the government to insinuate that grouping the cattle demographically like this is going to control illegal immigration, which of course it won’t; chances are, that’s the pretext.
How about human race!?!