Abolish Race: Remove the Race Questions from the US Census

The government should not support ideas that science rejects.

The theory of separate human races has been rejected by scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders, yet the United States census still asks about race. Why the government should support the myth of race, no one can say. A government’s obligations to its citizens are simple: the poor should be helped and the rich should be taxed. Continuing to divide us by race is no more useful than dividing us by the houses of the zodiac.

The purpose of the census is spelled out in Article 1, Section 2 of the United States Constitution:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Race is irrelevant there. A free citizen of any race counted as one person. A slave counted as three-fifths of a person even if the slave had enough white ancestry to be legally white. (The legal definition of whiteness was decided by each state. Before the Jim Crow era, being three-fourths white…