A historical overview of the census race question-and a bold proposal for eliminating itAmerica is preoccupied with race statistics-perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different "race" line-the nativity line-separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's "statistical races." Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America-Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task-particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census-but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

List of Figures and Tables ixPreface xi
Part I What Are Statistical Races?
Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview 3
Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races 14
Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces
Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation's First Statistical Race 31
Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census 45
Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There? 61
Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool 83
Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused 105
Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale
Chapter 8 Pressures Mount 129
Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line 151
Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need
Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly? 171
Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be 183
Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad--Brazil, France, Israel 209
Notes 221
Bibliography 251
Index 263