Beyond Census 2000: As a Nation, We are the World by Kenneth Prewitt In the year 2000, for the first time in its 200-year history, the U.S. census allowed people to state that they were of more than one race. Here, Kenneth Prewitt, who directed that census, comments on issues raised for the nation by the new “multiple-race” option.

How can we live together? How can we live together justly?

Haven’t we, as Americans, already asked ourselves these questions—and answered them? They were forcefully addressed in the Constitutional amendments after the Civil War that abolished slavery, provided equal protection under the law and guaranteed all citizens, regardless of race, the right to vote. Although these principles were slow to be honored, and not seriously enforced until the advent of court rulings and legislation stimulated by the civil rights movement, it would seem that our nation has finally rejected discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin. Today we view ourselves as more tolerant, more welcoming of diversity than at any time in our history.

In fact, this nation has had a complicated relationship to diversity. We have prided ourselves on finding common ground in the midst of diversity; we have based our claim to being exceptional among nations on having established a nation rooted not in ties of blood, ancestry, nationality or religion but on the shared belief in an ideal: liberal democracy. There is some truth to this claim, but it is also true that at various moments in our history, significant numbers of Americans—black slaves, native Indians, Catholic immigrants, Chinese workers and Jewish tradesmen, to name just a few—were thought to be too “other” to join in the common enterprise. Diversity and discrimination have been linked throughout our history more, perhaps, than we care to admit. Perhaps this is unavoidable. There are inescapable political and philosophical tensions between, on the one hand, a belief in human unity and, on the other, the reality of differences and persistence of conflicts among multiple cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and languages.

In this country, while we have lived together, it has not always been peacefully. It has not always been justly. And there is no guarantee that we will do so in the coming decades. There are issues to be confronted, particularly those raised by the recently completed national census.

Census 2000 and
Liberal Democracy

Since the nation’s founding we have counted and classified ourselves every ten years—but it was not until the 2000 census that Americans were given the opportunity to declare themselves as being of more than one race. This may appear to be a technical adjustment in how we classify racial groups, but the “multiple-race” option on the census form goes to the core of the tension between unity and diversity. The multiple-race option, I suggest, has set off tremors that signal a political and social earthquake to come.

This earthquake will occur against a backdrop of far-reaching shifts in the nation’s demography. We are in the early stages of diversifying our population in a manner historically unprecedented. We start with the fact that the foreign born cohort of our population is now ten percent. This may not seem significant: after all, as a frontier nation built upon immigration, we have always had high levels of foreign-born people living within our borders, with rates occasionally rising well above ten percent. Our liberal democracy has adjusted itself accordingly, embracing both assimilation and accommodation. Certainly there have been rough moments, yet we have generally found ways to work through them.

But something new is underway. The 19th and early 20th century immigration patterns transformed a nation initially based on a northern European population into one that became pan-European. A nation that started the 19th century as a Protestant stronghold ended it as an amalgam of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. This transformation, though consequential, was qualitatively different from the situation that we now face. The U.S. has become home to people from, literally, every civilization and of every nationality, and speaking almost every language. Not in recorded history has there been a nation so demographically complex. So it falls to us, the American citizens of the 21st century, to fashion, from this diversity, history’s first “world nation.”

Since the first census in 1790, which recognized only a few population categories—free whites, other free people and slaves—those who count and classify us have tried to keep up with changing demographic realities. But looking to the future, how will we deal with our extraordinary and ever-growing diversity? Will newly arriving groups be counted and sorted in some yet-to-be-designed racial and ethnic taxonomy? If so, the issues to be worked out are daunting: will Sudanese refugees, for example, be assigned to the same “race” as seventh-generation African Americans? Will Arab Americans become an independent racial group? Is “white” one race or a residual category for everyone not noticeably something else? Resolving these issues justly is a challenge for our fractious politics.

Or perhaps we won’t go this route at all. Perhaps there will be a movement toward dismantling racial and ethnic classifications altogether. That possibility also leaves a host of uncomfortable issues in its wake, not least of which is the future of civil rights. If diversity and discrimination have so often been joined together in American history, will the pairing grow weaker or stronger—will racism and nativism wax or wane—as we become more diverse?

It is the task of a liberal democracy to keep reflecting on the inescapable tension between unity and diversity, to ask, for each fresh set of conditions: How can we live together? How can we live together justly? A quick historical tour, focused on America’s continuous demographic transformation, helps to frame these questions for today.

Next page: If diversity and discrimination have often been joined together in American history, will the pairing grow weaker or stronger as we grow more diverse?

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