“Many Americans, especially younger ones, are fed up with the needless labeling,” wrote Canis Scot, a reader from Los Angeles. “While this seems to be quite a mess,” a reader named Sue wrote on our Web site, “there may be an advantage to the variety of systems presently in place: Over time we can compare the consequences of different classification systems, and move toward a better system.”Ī great many readers, however, expressed the wish that the government and members of the media would simply stop using racial and ethnic categorizations, because, as one reader put it, “marking people by race is the most racist of all actions.” The article stated that the nation is in transition when it comes to keeping track of the population by race and ethnicity, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand.Ī measurement problem has emerged, however, with statisticians and demographers saying that the lack of uniformity is undermining the purpose of collecting racial and ethnic statistics in the first place, which is largely to monitor disparities in fields like health and education, and to protect the population’s civil rights.

Is there any reason to be optimistic here?Īt least a few readers who commented on the second installment of our series “Race Remixed,” which is exploring the growth of mixed-race America, think so. But it also sows some confusion in the process, perhaps making it harder for researchers to detect racial and ethnic injustice.

An increasingly multiracial nation strives to get a better portrait of its people, and, in many ways, it is successful in gathering more information.

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