State may start counting its mixed-race residents
MY QUESTION IS, WHY?
By Steven Harmon
TIMES SACRAMENTO BUREAU
SACRAMENTO - California is poised to become the first state in the nation to allow people of mixed ethnicity to officially identify with more than one race.
A state Senate committee on Tuesday approved a bill by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, that would allow people to choose more than one race when filling out official state government forms. It would also require the state to record and report the number of those who identify with multiple ethnic or racial backgrounds.
The federal government began giving people of mixed race that option in 1997 — about one in six Californians identified that way in the 2000 Census — but no state has since followed through in its own data collection.
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May 1st, 2006 at 9:46 pm
You know, from what little I’ve seen and been told, most “African Americans” are in fact “mixed race”. Few have only Africans as their sole ancestors. So, in if given the option of “Mixed Race” what African American could not check that box? I sure wish we lived in a world where the only race that got specialized human attention was the human race. Cause every other attempt at counting up folks based upon the original home site for their ancestors (not them) seems to be aimed at either exclusion or special treatments of some kind… Sigh.