Anne Pemberton hits the nail squarely on the head in her brief story 
about filling out a federal census form for an elderly neighbor. The 
census categories were originally, and for a long time remained, 
race-based. The truth of the matter, of course, is that race was and is 
a social construct with serious political implications. It has a certain 
logic, but only in the context of a racist society. In a different 
context--one in which racism is rejected--the logic for using race-based 
categories disappears.

In 1960 and beyond, individual heads of household got to fill out most 
of the census form themselves, but they were given only the standard 
race-based categories to use in identifying themselves. Not until 2000 
were people given the option of using multiple categories that would 
better reflect their mixed ancestry. Many persons who in earlier 
censuses appeared as just African American or American Indian or 
Hispanic now show up as mixed this way or that (or not, since it's up to 
the individual to make the call... some do and some don't). 
Self-indentification of ethnicity (or something other than race) is 
clearly the wave of the future. In the meantime, all we can say about 
the old categories is that they have been and are still used and misused 
in extraordinarily capricious and inconsistent  ways.

And, yes, census tabulators in 2000 did indeed go through all the forms 
where mixed ancestry was claimed and they hand-coded all the new 
categories; there were 57 different combinations of 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 
races used by respondents. Anyone interested in a lengthy exploration of 
these matters can look, for starters, at Charles Hirschman, "The Origins 
and Demise of the Concept of Race," /Population and Development Review/ 
30:3 (September 2004), 385-415.

Doug Deal

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