After slavery was abolished, race was still used by the government to the detriment of ethnic and racial groups, says Carnegie-Mellon University statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg. With the Civil Rights Act, and the civil rights movement of the '60s, suddenly there was a need to measure race in order to implement government policy in support of minority groups, instead of to control them. The racial and ethnic categories appearing on the census forms are determined by the Office of Management and Budget, which sets a single standard for all federal statistics and administrative reporting. But those surveyed in 2000 can check off as many race boxes as they like, and Hispanic origin is a separate ethnic category. For example, a person could mark boxes declaring himself Asian, black and white.
Every decade there's lots of public hearings.
For Ryan Graham, the road to those public hearings started with his mother's unsettling experience with the Census Bureau a decade ago. I'm white, my husband is black. My children are, at least, biracial. She picked up the phone, called the Census Bureau, and asked what box she was supposed to check for her children. Five years later, when Graham was registering her son, Ryan, for kindergarten, she was told it wasn't necessary to check the race box on the registration forms, but later found that Ryan's teacher was told to pick a category for him.