I am circulating the letter below, hoping I can get a public interest law organization interested in exploring ways to block the OMB's plan -- announced in its Bulletin No. 00-02 "Allocation Guidance" -- to collapse multiple-checking 2000 census respondents down to a single "race."

Appended at the end are addresses to several public interest law firms. I invite Interracial Voice readers to adapt my letter and search with me for an advocate interested in stopping this governmental identity-theft sham.

Letter:
Census 2000 identity-theft targets multiracial people

Request:
Following-up a suggestion of Mr. Ward Connerly's, I am asking your office to please investigate possible legal action against plans announced March 9, 2000, by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), set out in its OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 "Allocation Guidance", which impact respondents on the 2000 census selecting more than one "race" for themselves or their children.

Background:
I write on behalf of myself and other multiracial people. (As many "white" Americans, I've a drop of Indian "blood." I'm also interracially married and a biracial's parent.) Multiracial people are racially mixed. Although the government eschews the word "multiracial," the 2000 decennial census and subsequent data collection instruments -- for the first time, under new OMB rules -- collect data on 63 racial combinations. (Adding the Hispanic "ethnicity" doubles the count to 126 American racial combinations.) If we would be consistently tabulated "the individuals reporting more than one race" (OMB's terminology) we would effectively, satisfactorily, be counted as we are -- multiracial. However, OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 does not allow tabulating us consistently. For various governmental purposes our "race" is to be "allocated" in ways tending to perpetuate "race-lines" and antiquated racial distinctions. "Race" is indistinct in us, and we protest being Procrusteanized so as to perpetuate the divisive, segregating fiction which is "race."

Since the legalization of interracial marriage in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010, 87 S.Ct. 1817 (1967) (hereafter, Loving), a biracial community has grown to include around four million biracial children. Also, Americans have licitly and illicitly been miscegenating (racially intermarrying, etc.) since at least 1614, when John Rolfe married Pocahontas. Great numbers of these "pre-Loving" descendants are living, and they know their multiracial ancestry too. Of the combined millions of pre-Loving and post-Loving multiracials, OMB studies concede up to two percent of Americans wish to acknowledge their special identity by "reporting more than one race" on Census 2000, each indicating "what this person considers himself/herself to be." The government, however, intends to allocate each multiple-checking person to a "race" it thinks they ought to be, and without their notice or consent.

Americans acknowledging their multiracial identities by multiple-checking the new census's "race" boxes will be defrauded by an identity-theft conspiracy, with U.S. Government complicity. Under OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 "guidance" multiracial peoples' racial identities will be converted for use by racial separatist minority identity political organizations (e.g., the N.A.A.C.P., M.A.L.D.E.F, N.A.P.A.L.C., N.C.A.I., and the many others). That is, our racial identities will be turned over to the various liberal racial "minority" political organs eagerly increasing their political power and their federal entitlement funding at our expense (and taxpayer expense), through this conspiratorial, overt OMB action.

Argument:
The OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 "Allocation Guidance," clearly is fraudulent. It deceives because the form of the 2000 census question, reading "Mark [x] one or more races to indicate what this person considers himself/herself to be," invites detrimental reliance. Moreover, the documentation accompanying the census provides no fair or reasonable notice that the identities so marked will be "allocated" (i.e., stolen). The 2000 census questionnaire, together with the Bulletin No. 00-02 "allocation" scheme creates a hurtful sham, with no fair notice or any basis for finding constructive consent.

The government's proposed race-based "allocation" scheme excludes half of each biracial person's heritage. Under provisions of OMB Bulletin No. 00-02,1/ every biracial person's "white" parent and all relatives on that side of the family would be denied, or made to seem to disappear. Bulletin No. 00-02 requires double-minority biracial persons at some later time to also choose one "race."

It has been observed that many multiracial people (especially those born prior to the Loving decision) identify themselves with one "race." They are unaffected. Everyone remains free to select one "race" when responding to the census and other forms. However, no basis has been shown for concluding the two percent of the population (i.e., roughly 4.6M), who the OMB conceded could self-identity multiracially, wish to be identified with only one "race." That is, there is no guidance in the OMB's "Guidance" showing which one "race" multiple-checking respondents would choose for themselves. Nonetheless, the OMB's plan denies discretion which census respondents heretofore had enjoyed to designate the one "race" of themselves or their minor children. Under Bulletin No. 00-02, identities of those indicating themselves multiracial all will be "allocated," stealthily (i.e., unknown to respondents), to single non-"white" "minority races." This is conversion and theft. The multiracial identities will be stolen.

It is no accident the OMB's "allocation" replicates a racist "one-drop rule" which purported during the "Jim Crow" American apartheid era to ordain "white purity" and a "colored" ("black") "taint." (See fn. 4 of the Loving opinion.) Modern racial separatists re-use several former "Jim Crow" white supremacist methods for their "minority" empowerment. These work through racial re-segregation and other marking (stigmatizing), aggregating societal influences. Unfortunately, apartheid practices of "one-drop," "hyodescent" (an Antebellum practice replicated in the OMB 00-02 rule allocating each multiracial child to the "race" of its "minority" parent), and the other revived racially aggregating techniques continue operating as divisively as they did in the slavery and Jim Crow eras. Dividing remains their purpose -- under the rubric of "culture building," "neighborhood formation," etc.

Multiracial Americans' fraudulent identity-theft loss is not limited to the decennial census. Under OMB guidance, government agency racial information (e.g., employment, student information, application forms, etc.) will continue being collected and "aggregated" into traditional "minority race" categories.2/ This injures multiracial people by rendering them legally nonexistent as civil rights claimants. They will be left with no redress, for example, for discrimination by those sharing the "minority" to which the claimant was "allocated" by OMB Bulletins No. 00-02 and the February 1999 Draft Guidance.

A cause of action for fraud usually requires showing detriment, such as monetary loss. The Office of the Director of the Census Bureau repeatedly elicited responses, with mailings stating "the amount of government money your neighborhood receives depends on your answers." A March 13, 2000, mailing added -- correctly -- that the number of congressional representatives depends on the census count. However, it is well known that the racial minorities employ census "race" data. It is a factor in their re-drawing voting district boundaries calculated to encourage minority political representation. Under this process our American political community increasingly is peopled by "minority" representatives, elected to office from "minority" neighborhoods, based on the representative's "minority" "race" instead of on his/her leadership ability alone. We multiracials adopt the principal stated by the late President John F. Kennedy, "Race has no place in American life or law." Therefore, in respect to fair political representation, too, we feel that the OMB's planned "allocation" of our multiple "races" perpetrates actionable fraud.

Because the OMB's "allocation" scheme impacts only multiple-checking respondents, as shown (i.e., based on race of insular minority -- multiracials), and not all census respondents, a violation of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection appears, in addition to the discussed issues of conspiracy, deceit or fraud.

The OMB's racial "aggregation" further offends or injures multiracials, who regard "race" a psychologically harmful categorizing habit without any natural grounding. We observe, no evidence of "race-lines" can be found in nature. Society has long been plagued with this needless, pseudo-scientific, "human taxonomy." It is merely an abstraction rooted in the late Eighteenth Century. Moreover, although "race" originally was constructed on peoples' varying inherited physiognomies, "race" nonetheless is entirely arbitrary in its divisive, imaginary lines and categories, inspiring hoary stereotypes. "Race," in fact, continues today functioning as it did in Antebellum times -- as an American caste system. We do not need the failed hypothesis of "race" or the atrocious, racialist caste system which it perpetuates. Following this line of thinking, we multiracials prefer a generic designation -- one permitting expressing our pan-human ties while declining to take sides in competitions of the so-called "races."

Conclusion:
Will you please consider examining this government OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 racial re-allocation plan with a view to possible injunction or other relief from government conspiracy to deceive, defraud, and discriminatorily perpetrate identity-theft as shown above.

Thank you.
George A. Winkel, Esq.

____________________________________________
1/ Pertinent language of OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 provides:

"II. Allocation Guidance: Federal agencies will use the following rules to allocate multiple race responses for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement.

"Responses in the five single race categories are not allocated.
"Responses that combine one minority race and white are allocated to the minority race.
"Responses that include two or more minority races are allocated as follows:
If the enforcement action is in response to a complaint, allocate to the race that the complainant alleges the discrimination was based on."

Bulletin No. 00-02 also states:
"Allocation for enforcement purposes should not be confused with various allocation methods under consideration for 'bridging' to past data collections as described in OMB's Provisional Guidance on the Implementation of the 1997 Standards for Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity."

2/ The OMB's "Draft Provisional Guidance" dated February 5, 1999, anticipated the proposed OMB Bulletin No. 00-02 tabulating scheme. The publishers of the "Multiracial Activist," and "Project R.A.C.E" jointly discussed and criticized the February 1999 draft guidance in their document entitled "Blood Pressure."

cc: Ward Connerly
Interracial Voice
Multiracial Activist
Project R.A.C.E.

End of letter

=================================================
SOME PUBLIC INTEREST LEGAL FOUNDATIONS:

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI)
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
www.aei.org

Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington DC 20036
www.brook.edu

Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20001-5403
www.cato.org
other links:
www.libertarianism.org
www.individualrights.org

Center for Individual Rights
1233 20th Street, N.W., Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 833-8400
www.wdn.com/cir
cir@mail.wdn.com (e-mail)

Southeastern Legal Foundation
3340 Peachtree Road, NE Suite 2515
Atlanta, Georgia 30326-1088
(404) 365-8500
E-Mail\ feedback@southeasternlegal.org
http://southeasternlegal.org
Write\ http://southeasternlegal.org/write_us.htm

The Institute for Justice
1717 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Suite 200
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 955-1300
http://www.ij.org/index.shtml

©2001 all rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part prohibited without
the express written consent of Interracial Voice.