All My Cousins, On Race and Ethnicity

Sicily Castellammare

In his column at the Boston Globe this morning Jeff Jacoby expressed his disdain for “Irrelevant racial criteria” that are asked for on census forms and other places as, somehow, important data.  He points out that many of us have backgrounds that have been graced with multiple ethnicity and that multi-racial marriages are  much more common today than they were a half century ago, making race a largely meaningless criterion.

Thurgood Marshall, he points out, “wrote in a brief for the 1950 Supreme Court case of McLaurin v. Oklahoma: “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life.’’”

I agree with Marshall and Jacoby that these criteria can be odious and are sometimes irrelevant, yet, as someone who came of age during the civil rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s, and lived through school integration, busing, the battle over affirmative action, the war on poverty of the “Great Society,” and witnessed  the effects of Jim Crow on society, I understand why the data were necessary at that time and in some cases are still relevant and sometimes necessary today.

But I don’t want to fight that battle today. What Jacoby’s column triggered in my mind was something much simpler than the complex and contentious argument over race.