Racialization, Recognition, and Rights: Lumping and Splitting Multiracial Asian Americans in the 2000 Census

Abstract

THE 2000 CENSUS WILL MARK a dramatic change in the way that “race” is officially enumerated in the United States to allow people to check more than one race. This is a significant change for the way people do and understand the concept of race, and will have potentially far-reaching effects for multiracial Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Asian Pacific Islander communities. The Census, as a representation of the state, is an ideal place to see how race is changing both practically and conceptually as people lobby the Census Bureau to change racial categories to accurately reflect their multiracial understanding.1 In this article, I examine the impact of changing the Census to allow people to check more than one race box on Asian Pacific Americans (APAs). Race is now widely recognized as being a contested and changing, socially constructed category.3 As historical proof of this, APAs have long been unable to fit the racial labels used by the U.S. government to classify them. For example, the plaintiffs in the infamous cases of Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922) and United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923) failed in their attempts to be considered “not Asian, Caucasian/white” in order to become naturalized citizens of the U.S. Those cases foreshadowed a legal framework that would continue throughout the 1900s to remind APAs that they were racially different, not white, and therefore ineligible for American citizenship.4 There has never been a comfortable fit historically for Asian Americans with racial categories used by the U.S.