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Census ex-director details trends in race identity
By Jack Chang, CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Posted on Sat, May. 03, 2003

BERKELEY - Having overseen the biggest census count in U.S. history,
former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt came to UC Berkeley on
Friday to report on demographic trends to come and the complicated,
ongoing debate about ethnicity, identity and race.

In particular, Prewitt, who now teaches at Columbia University, predicted the
coming importance of multiracial people in that debate. The 2000 census was
the first to let people mark more than one race and ethnicity on their forms,
offering 126 different combinations, Prewitt said.

"I think the multiracial thing is very big news in American society," Prewitt said.
"We just don't know it yet."

Prewitt's comments kicked off a two-day seminar, "A Nation of Immigrants:
Ethnic Identity and Political Incorporation," organized by the school's Institute
of Governmental Studies.

Continuing today, scholars from around the country will examine how
continuing, record waves of immigration have affected everything from
national voting patterns to notions of ethnic identity to the U.S. military.

In Prewitt's eyes, the debate over identity politics will increasingly pit traditional
black and Latino groups who want to use the census and other government
policy to correct past injustices against multiracial people seeking to express
their own unique identities.

Three years ago, traditional ethnic groups said they feared the new multiracial
selections would dilute black, Asian and Latino numbers and result in less
power and money for those people.

Prewitt said he thinks people around the country need to form a unifying
definition of diversity to answer such questions and to prevent the country
from fracturing into too many parts.

"If we don't theorize, we're going to be left with a very tough question," he said.

Other experts at the conference tackled the ethnicity and diversity issue from
myriad angles.

UC Berkeley doctoral student Brendan Doherty and political science professor
Bruce Cain found that U.S. residents holding dual citizenship voted less often
than people holding only U.S. citizenship and were more cynical about the
political process.

Karthick Ramakrishnan of the Public Policy Institute of California revealed data
finding that people from immigrant households become more involved in U.S.
civic life, such as volunteering and political campaigning, the longer their families
have been here.