Most household will received their 2010 Census forms this week. While most of the form is focused on pinning you down on your exact racial and ethnic background, the only constitutional reason for requiring a census every ten years is to apportion congressional districts based on population.
Here is what Florida Pundit wrote last week on how to answer the race question on the census:
The census form has gotten obsessed with categorizing Americans by race and ethnic origin. Here is a sample:
Mark Krikorian of National Review Online (via Michelle Malkin) proposes a way to send our government the message that we reject being categorized into hyphenated Americans:
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 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 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 — don’t do it.
Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.
Michelle Malkin provides a great quote from Teddy Roosevelt about hyphenated Americanism:
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic… There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
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I am not a hyphenated American and I am not a hyphenated Christian either, like in Judeo-Christian.
Is it true I have to give my name and DOB to the census? I realize my phone # is an intrustion. I’ve already filled out my census, but not mailed it yet with the # in my household, sex, wrote in American under race and left everything else blank. Tami
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