We have received a response from the Annie E. Casey
Foundation because of our complaint (see last blog post). Either they just
don’t understand, or they are deliberately excluding multiracial children.
The rather chilling response indicates that they take their
data “collected by birth and death certificates at the state level.” That is
the absolutely worst way to collect
data on multiracial children. Most often, the parent is not asked the race of
the baby at birth, and it is written on the baby’s chart by an attending nurse
or doctor at the birth. Thousands of women over the years have told me they
were never asked the race of their
multiracial child until they started school. The fact is that in most states,
race of the child is not even on the birth certificate and other times it only
has the race of the parents.
What about those death certificates? A dead person cannot
self-identify their race. Funeral home employees “eyeball” the person and write
down a race—usually only one race.
The next Casey Foundation problem is that if they asked the right questions, they would get the right and most accurate data. In other words, they have admitted to only
allowing one choice for “the five largest racial categories.” So if they don’t
allow people to mark two or more, they haven’t asked question the right way to
begin with. They are using inaccurate data.
The response from The Casey Foundation baffles me because
they can get better data from the US Census Bureau, The American Community Survey and schools. The federal
government ordered federal agencies to comply with check two or more boxes in
1997. Casey is a private foundation and they do not have to do what the federal
government does, but what ever happened to doing the right thing?
Their response concludes by saying they will “explore”
revisiting the categories for the 2013 publication and then they abruptly
dismiss us. Oh really? There will be more to this story.
