








f protecting vulnerable minorities from the decisions of majorities. On the one hand, respect for minority groups in liberal societies may translate into (illiberal) restrictions on criticism of aspects of cultural traditions held to be sacred by all (or nearly all) members of those groups. For example, Bhikhu Parekh suggests that laws against libel can be employed to protect minority cultures from various forms of defamation and hate speech. On the other hand, a richer and fuller respect for minorities may translate into expanding the set of social and economic rights typically granted in liberal societies. Perhaps the parents of East Asian immigrants can be given the right to immigrate as well, and adults of East Asian origin who care for their elderly parents can be given a special right to claim tax benefits. Nor should one rule out the possibility that liberal majorities learn from the cultural traditions of minority groups. In an age when Social Security payments may no longer be economically sustainable at their current level and when it is widely seen as morally acceptable in the West to commit relatively fit elderly parents to nursing homes, it may not be entirely implausible to promote the value of filial piety in liberal societies. But whether the issue is restricting rights, expanding rights, or learning from nonliberal cultures, the political proposals that we endorse should always be based on detailed knowledge of the cultural self-understandings of minority groups.
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50. Minority Rights
Notes
1	It is worth noting, however, that in a different context even the Chinese government concedes that minority groups with legitimate aspirations for autonomy need not be defined in terms of language or ethnicity. In the case of Hong Kong the Chinese government officially endorses a  one country, two systems  political proposal for rule in the post-1997 period. What defines group particularity in this case is shared attachment to the rule of law and experience with a free economic system, not shared language or ethnicity.
2	1 quote from a paper presented at a workshop held in Hakone, Japan, June 1995, the first of three workshops on the theme  The Growth of East Asia and Its Impact on Human Rights.  More generally, the second through fourth sections of this essay draw on papers presented in Hakone and at the second workshop held in Bangkok, Thailand, March 1996, as well as on ideas contained in my article  The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights: Reflections on an East West Dialogue,  forthcoming in the Human Rights Quarterly, August 1996.
3	It is worth noting that Article 4 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) explicitly allows for short-term curbs on some rights (in
cluding the right to the protection of minority cultures, Article 27) if these are necessary to deal with particular social crises. Article 4 goes on to state that the derogation of rights against murder, torture, and slavery, among others, may not be made under this provision.
4	It is not well known that the Iranian Parliament guarantees five seats for religious minorities. Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenian and Assyrian Christians are allowed to elect deputies. A recent article in the International Herald Tribune noted that  Iran s 30,000 Jews turned out in force in general elections here to elect their representative to the Islamic republic s Parliament.  (March 13, 1996)
31	do not mean to imply that Islamic countries are unique in this regard. Many religious Americans, for example, might think that the idea of human rights derives its ultimate justification from God s special concern for human beings.
6 Dr. Sulak explains that he uses  the older terms Siam and Siamese rather than the government terms Thailand and Thai out of respect for the non-Thai minorities within the country. The word Thailand was initially imposed by the dictators in 1939. 
25
Article 51
ONE DROP OF BLOOD
Do ethnic categories protect us or divide us? The way that Washington chooses to define the population in th\ 2000 census could trigger the biggest debate over race in America since the nineteen-sixties.
LAURENCE WIGHT
WASHINGTON in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth centuiy largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last year in the obscure House Subcommittee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993.
Although the Sawyer hearings were scarcely reported in the news and were sparsely attended even by other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Representative Thomas E. Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, they opened what may become the most searching examination of racial questions in this country since the sixties. Related federal agency hearings, and meetings that will be held in Washington and other cities around the country to prepare for the 2000 census, are considering not only modifications of existing racial categories but also the larger question of whether it is proper for the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of skin color and ancestry. This discussion arises at a time when profound debates are occurring
in minority communities about the rightfulness of group entitlements, some government officials are questioning the usefulness of race data, and scientists are debating whether race exists at all.
Tom Sawyer, forty-eight, a former English teacher and a former mayor of Akron, is now in his fourth term representing the Fourteenth District of Ohio. It would be fair to say that neither the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service nor the subcommittee that Sawyer chairs is the kind of assignment that members of Congress would willingly shed blood for. Indeed, the attitude of most elected officials in Washington toward the census is polite loathing, because it is the census, as much as any other force in the country, that determines their political futures. Congressional districts rise and fall with the shifting demography of the country, yet census matters rarely seize the front pages of home-town newspapers, except briefly, once every ten years. Much of the subcommittee s business has to do with addressing the safety concerns of postal workers and overseeing federal statistical measurements. The subcommittee has an additional responsibility: it reviews the executive branch s policy about which racial and ethnic groups should be officially recognized by the United States government.
 We are unique in this coi the way we describe and defi and ascribe to it characterist other cultures view very diffe Sawyer, who is a friendly m; an open, boyish face and grayi: hair, says. He points out that the c in the midst of its most profoun graphic shift since the eighteen-n a time that opened  a period of the immigration we have ever seer numbers have not been matched u now.  A deluge of new Americ. every part of the world is overv our traditional racial distinctions believes.  The categories thems evitably reflect the temporal bias age,  he says.  That becomes a when the nation itself is undergo and historic diversification. 
Looming over the shoulder yer s subcommittee is the C Management and Budget, the agency that happens to be res for determining standard classi of racial and ethnic data. Sint those categories have been O.M.B. Statistical Directive 1! controls the racial and ethnic si on all federal forms and st Directive 15 acknowledges foui racial groups in the United American Indian or Alaskan Asian or Pacific Islander, Bk White. Directive 15 also breal ethnicity into Hispanic Origin ;
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JU'y 1"4' PP' 46'5 ' 52 55-   1"4 by	W"9hV R d Permission of The Wendy
of Hispanic Origin. These categories, or versions of them, are present on enrollment forms for schoolchildren; on application forms for jobs, scholarships, loans, and mortgages; and, of course, on United States census forms. The categories ask that every American fit himself or herself into one racial and one ethnic box. From this comes the information that is used to monitor and enforce civil-rights legislation, most notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also a smorgasbord of set-asides and entitlements and affirmative-action programs.  The numbers drive the dollars,  Sawyer observes, repeating a well-worn Washington adage.
The truth of that statement was abundantly evident in the hearings, in which a variety of racial and ethnic groups were bidding to increase their portions of the federal pot. The National Coalition for an Accurate Count of Asian Pacific Americans lobbied to add Cambodians and Lao to the nine different nationalities already listed on the census forms under the heading of Asian or Pacific Islander. The National Council of La Raza proposed that Hispanics be considered a race, not just an ethnic group. The Arab American Institute asked that persons from the Middle East, now counted as white, be given a separate, protected category of their own. Senator Daniel K. Ataka, a Native Hawaiian, urged that his people be moved from the Asian or Pacific Islander box to the American Indian or Alaskan Native box.  There 15 the misperception that Native Ha-waiians, who number well over two hundred thousand, somehow  immi-grated  to the United States like other Asian or Pacific Island groups,  the Senator testified.  This leads to the erroneous impression that Native Ha-waiians, the original inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, no longer exist.  In me Senator s opinion, being placed in the same category as other Native Americans would help rectify that Sltuation. (He did not mention that certain American Indian tribes enjoy privileges concerning gambling conces-si ns that Native Hawaiians currently don t enjoy.) The National Congress  f American Indians would like the Ha-
waiians to stay where they are. In every case, issues of money, but also of identity, are at stake.
IN this battle over racial turf, a disturbing new contender has appeared.  When I received my 1990 census form, I realized that there was no race category for my children,  Susan Graham, who is a white woman married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia, testified. I called the Census Bureau. After checking with supervisors, the bureau finally gave me their answer: the children should take the race of their mother. When I objected and asked why my children should be classified as their mother s race only, the Census Bureau representative said to me, in a very hushed voice,  Because, in cases like these, we always know who the mother is and not always the father.   
Graham went on to say,  I could not make a race choice from the basic categories when I enrolled my son in kindergarten in Georgia. The only choice I had, like most other parents of multiracial children, was to leave race blank. I later found that my child s teacher was instructed to choose for him based on her knowledge and observation of my child. Ironically, my child has been white on the United States census, black at school, and multiracial at home all at the same time. 
Graham and others were asking that a  Multiracial  box be added to the racial categories specified by Directive 15  a proposal that alarmed representatives of the other racial groups for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that multiracialism threatened to undermine the concept of racial classification altogether.
According to various estimates, at least seventy-five to more than ninety per cent of the people who now check the Black box could check Multiracial, because of th
