{"id":9172,"date":"2010-03-10T07:05:20","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T12:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9172"},"modified":"2010-03-10T07:05:20","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T12:05:20","slug":"todays-census-tip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9172","title":{"rendered":"Today’s Census Tip"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Krikorian at NRO-Online is un-thrilled by the census’ intrusivness, too:<\/a><\/p>\n

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form<\/a> 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<\/em><\/a>‘ 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 don’t do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I’ve done that.\u00a0 I also registered for Obama’s “Organizing for America” email blasts as “Beinrich Bimmler” (20 extra points for those who get the reference).<\/p>\n

Krikorian actually has a better idea:<\/p>\n

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option \u2014 “Some other race” \u2014 and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens<\/a> to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census<\/a> in four states and several hundred counties.<\/p>\n

So remember: Question 9 \u2014 “Some other race” \u2014 “American”. Pass it on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll plan on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Krikorian at NRO-Online is un-thrilled by the census’ intrusivness, too: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9193,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9172\/revisions\/9193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}