Race: Time to Give Up on the Four-Letter Word

Since the 19th century, the word has burrowed its way into our everyday lexicon, just as the very concept has entrenched itself in our lives.

Ostensibly, race is a key, crucial definer of who and what we are. Your race is your raza, your people. This is what I am, or, at the very least, this race of mine has informed the way I experience the world -- and how, for better or worse, others relate to me.

As Americans, we learn to check the race box early on: Black. White. Asian-Pacific Islander. Native American, and the confusing Hispanic/Latino distinction.

In this way, we check boxes to announce that we are of one kind of human or another which, according to U.S. Census 2000, means that we're a country of many races; fully one-third of our country now consists of "minority races," while some 15 million of us belong to that enigmatic racial category, "Other."

Racial categories, particularly those relating to the U.S. Census, provide endless hours of number-crunching fun for government statisticians. We journalists, in turn, take this data and weave racial figures into articles on housing, health care, prisons, jobs, elections, television and education. Racial data allows us to highlight discrimination, racial profiling, gaps in funding, trends in voting.

Writing guidelines for journalists including the favorite Associated Press Stylebook, encourage us to identify when a particular issue "cuts across racial lines," just as we are expected to refer to a person's race when such identification provides the reader with a "substantial insight into conflicting emotions known or likely to be involved in a demonstration or similar event."

We're further expected to identify article subjects by their race when a subject has been appointed to a position not typically held by persons of that race. President Bush's February nomination of Charles A. James, a respected antitrust lawyer, to the position of assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the Justice Department was therefore duly noted in The New York Times this way: "If confirmed, Mr. James would be the first black to lead the antitrust unit on a permanent basis."

Mr. James was therefore "the first black," and not "the first black (or African American) person" or the more accurately descriptive "dark-brown person." Because the point, in this instance as in so many others, was not to be physically descriptive. The point was to deliver to the reader an identification of the subject's race -- an announcement of the racial subdivision to which Mr. James has been assigned from the time of his birth. And, in this manner, it became a way of recognizing that Mr. James had accomplished something significant for his race.

Racial Categories: Tainted Origins

The New York Times article is, in fact, a relatively benign example of the power and the loaded, layered meanings of the term. In the hands of white supremacists, "race" quickly takes on a dark and vicious lifeforce of its own, and the fight against the "mongrelization of the races" (an issue argued about loudly and publicly by segregationist politicians as late as the 1960s) becomes the rallying cry for the self-appointed protectors of the "white race."

But Klansmen are hardly the only ones hanging onto the idea that humans can and should be shoved into racial categories. In the world of journalism (and beyond), race is such a pervasive and stubbornly entrenched term that even publications which have finally made the switch from "minorities" to "people of color" are still unwilling to use "ethnicity" and "ethnic origin" rather than race, although many are now grouping the two together, with phrases like "the nation's many racial and ethnic groups."

The change seems a long way in coming. Even the recent announcement by scientists sequencing the human genome that they were unable to find any biological basis for race warranted only a few of interesting newspaper articles on the subject, but no real discussion or examination of why -- in the absence of any science to back up racial divisions among human beings -- we still cling to the word.