rate for whites. Hiring practices, jury selection, discriminatory housing patterns, apportionment of
political power in all these areas, and more, the government patrols society, armed with little more than statistical information to insure equal and fair treatment.  We need these categories essentially to get rid of them,  Hahn says.
The unwanted corollary of slotting people by race is that such officially sanctioned classifications may actually worsen racial strife. By creating socialwelfare programs based on race rather than on need, the government sets citizens against one another precisely because of perceived racial differences.  It is not  race  but 2 practice of racial classification that bedevils the society,  writes Yehudi Webster, a sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of  The Racialization of America.  The use of racial statistics, he and others have argued, creates a reality of racial divisions, which then require solutions, such as busing, affirmative action, and multicultural education, all of which are bound to fail, because they heighten the racial awareness that leads to contention. Webster believes that adding a Multiracial box would be  another leap into absurdity,  because it reinforces the concept of race in the first place.  In a way, it s a continuation of the one-drop principle. Anybody can say,  I ve got one drop of something I must be multiracial.  It may be a good thing. It may finally convince Americans of the absurdity of racial classification. 
In 1990, Itabari Njeri, who writes about interethnic relations for the Los Angeles Times, organized a symposium for the National Association of Black Journalists. She recounts a presentation given by Charles Stewart, a Democratic Party activist:  If you consider yourself black for political reasons, raise your hand.  The vast majority raised their hands. When Stewart then asked how many people present believed they were of pure African descent, without any mixture, no one raised his hand. Stewart commented later,  If you advocate a category that includes people who are multiracial to the detriment of their black identification, you will replicate what you saw an empty room. We cannot afford to have an empty room. 
Njeri maintains that the social and economic gap between light-skinned blacks
51. One Drop of Bloot
and dark-skinned blacks is as great as th< gap between all blacks and all whites ir America. If people of more obvious!) mixed backgrounds were to migrate to   Multiracial box, she says, they would be politically abandoning their former allies and the people who needed their help the most. Instead of draining the established categories of their influence, Njeri and others believe, it would be better to eliminate racial categories altogether.
That possibility is actually being discussed in the corridors of government.  It s quite strange the original idea of O.M.B. Directive 15 has nothing to do with current efforts to  define  race,  says Sally Katzen, the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at O.M.B., who has the onerous responsibility of making the final recommendation on revising the racial categories.  When O.M.B. got into the business of establishing categories, it was purely statistical, not programmatic purely for the purpose of data gathering, not for defining or protecting different categories. It was certainly never meant to define a race.  And yet for more than twenty years Directive 15 did exactly that, with relatively little outcry.  Recently, a question has been raised about the increasing numbei of multiracial children. I personally have received pictures of beautiful childrer who are part Asian and part black, or par American Indian and part Asian, witl these letters saying,  I don t want to checl just one box. I don t want to deny part o my heritage.  It s very compelling. 
This year, Katzen convened a nevi interagency committee to consider hov races should be categorized, and ever whether racial information should b< sought at all.  To me it s offensive-because I think of the Holocaust-for someone to say what a Jew is, says Katzen.  I don t think a government agency should be defining racia and ethnic categories that certain!) was not what was ever intended b) these standards. 
IS it any accident that racial and ethnic categories should come unde attack now, when being a member o a minority group brings certain ad vantages? The white colonizers of Nortl America conquered the indigenou people, imported African slaves, brough
2(
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
in Asians as laborers and then excluded them with prejudicial immigration laws, and appropriated Mexican land and the people who were living on it. In short, the nonwhite population of America has historically been subjugated and treated as second-class citizens by the white majority. It is to redress the social and economic inequalities of our history that we have civil-rights laws and affirmative-action plans in the first place. Advocates of various racial and ethnic groups point out that many of the people now calling for a race-blind society are political conservatives, who may have an interest in undermining the advancement of nonwhites in our society. Suddenly, the conservatives have adopted the language of integration, it seems, and the left-leaning racial-identity advocates have adopted the language of separatism. It amounts to a polar reversal of political rhetoric.
Jon Michael Spencer, a professor in the African and Afro-American Studies Curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently wrote an article in The Black Scholar lamenting what he calls  the postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity.  The article ignited a passionate debate in the magazine over the nature and the future of race. Spencer believes that race is a useful metaphor for cultural and historic difference, because it permits a level of social cohesion among oppressed classes.  To relinquish the notion of race even though it s a cruel
hoax at this particular time is to relinquish our fortress against the powers and principalities that still try to undermine us,  he says. He sees the Multiracial box as politically damaging to  those who need to galvanize peoples around the racial idea of black. 
There are some black cultural nationalists who might welcome the Multiracial category.  In terms of the African-American population, it could be very, very useful, because there is a need to clarify who is in and who is not,  Molefi Kete Asante, who is the chairperson of the Department of African-American Studies at Temple University, says.  In fact, I would think they should go further than that identify those people who are in interracial marriages. 
Spencer, however, thinks that it might be better to eliminate racial categories altogether than to create an additional category that empties the others of meaning.  If you had who knows how many thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people claiming to be multiracial, you would lessen the number who are black,  Spencer says.  There s no end in sight. There s no limit to which one can go in claiming to be multiracial. For instance, I happen to be very brown in complexion, but when I go to the continent of Africa, blacks and whites there claim that I would be  colored  rather than black, which means that somewhere in my distant past probably during the era
of slavery I could have one white ancestors. So does tl that I, too, could check Mi Certainly light-skinned bl pie might perhaps see this out of being included among; racial group. The result cou creation of another class o who are betwixt and betwi and white. 
Whatever comes out of tl sion, the nation is likely to the most profound debate questions in decades.  We the importance of racial cat correcting clear injustices i law,  Representative Sawyer i dilemma we face is trying to fundamental guarantees of c opportunity while at the s recognizing that the populati selves are changing as we se egorize them. It reaches where it becomes an absurd game. Part of the difficulty are dealing with the illusior sion. We wind up with prec of everybody in the country are precisely wrong. They fleet who we are as a peof effective, the concepts of and group identity need to only who we have been but \ becoming. The more these distort our perception of r less useful they are. We ar knew what we re talking al we talk about race, and w<
266
Article J
The Place of Faith in Public Life: A Personal Perspective
John Brademas
On December 11, 1984, I delivered the annual Liss Lecture at the University of Notre Dame. Sponsored by the Department of Theology, the lecture came weeks after the 1984 presidential campaign that brought a potentially dangerous intrusion of religion into the national political arena.
In these observations, I discussed what 1 believe should be the relationship between religion and politics in the American democracy. I also reflected upon the importance of religion in my own life.
A AM DELIGHTED to be back on a campus and in a community that hold for me such deep personal meaning and so many warm memories.
As you know, I was bom in Mishawaka, grew up in South Bend and so lived all my life in the shadow of Notre Dame.
For twenty-two years, I had the privilege of representing the people of the Third District in the Congress of the United States, and, without question, my most famed constituent was my longtime mentor, valued friend and now academic colleague, Father Theodore Hesburgh. He has, for an entire generation, served as president of Notre Dame, an extraordinary record in American higher education.
Beyond this stewardship, Father Hes-hurgh has been the conscience of our nation, bringing his religious vocation and
a remarkable range of experience to bear on the most challenging issues of our times civil rights, human rights, the struggle against poverty at home and abroad, and the control of nuclear arms.
I am proud now to serve on the Board of Trustees of the university he has done so much to build.
I am especially pleased to be here at the invitation of my dear friend, Bert Liss. The goal of the lecture series he created is to enhance communications across the boundaries of faith, a purpose with which I feel wholly at home. For my late father was Greek Orthodox, my mother is a member of the Disciples of Christ Church and I was brought up a Methodist. Before going to Congress, I taught at Saint Mary s College; and during my campaigns, I was enriched by the opportunity to represent people with a wide variety of religious traditions, including, beyond those I have mentioned, Amish, Mennonite, Brethren and, of course, Jewish.
Indeed, I recalled my own religious background in 1965 during a debate in the House of Representatives on aid to parochial schools. I recited the diversity of my family s religious ties and added that as one of the remaining bachelors then on Capitol Hill, all I needed to complete my experience was a Jewish wife.
Not long thereafter, I received a letter from New York City on Saks Fifth Avenue stationery, which began:  Dear Sir, I have read with interest your advertisement in the Congressional Re-
cord. I am 5'4", green eyed, blonde gle and Jewish. Your attention wi appreciated! 
On a more serious note, 1 shall s to you on the relationship of reli; faith to the political order, first, bei my own religious background h definite effect on my career in f life; and, second, because of the e sion of attention to the question < ligion and politics during this ; presidential campaign.
Religion and Politic
Of the latter point, I note some from contemporary American life
 	Debate has escalated in the las ade over such highly charged as abortion and school prayei
 	During 1980, we observe emergence of the  Religious 1 spearheaded by the Reverenc Falwell s Moral Majority, a targeting for defe