The census form lay there for days on the sideboard at home. Not that most of it was hard to fill out. Name, address, members of the household, that sort of thing, but then came the boxes that always stopped me: race, ethnicity, that sort of slippery thing. Hate to be pigeonholed. Doesn’t everybody? It’s part of being American.

The president set a good example by filling out his form on time. Of the 14 or so racial/ethnic flavors offered, he chose “Black, African Am., or Negro.” He might have chosen “White.” His mother was, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. But he chose to be black. On the Census form, you get to choose. Nothing so well demonstrates that, at least in America, race is a social construct rather than biological category. Take that, Darwin!

Once upon a time, a light-skinned Negro (that was the accepted term then) might choose to be white. And had to be secretive about it. It was called “passing,” a term that may need to be explained to the next generation. Now a café-au-lait American may choose to pass as black. Who cares? And why should we?

My own official Census form still lay there waiting for me to fill it out – like a rebuke. Why hadn’t I done my civic duty?

It would have been easy enough if there had been a box marked Jewish. That would have covered ethnicity, “race,” religion, history, habit, the whole shebang. But there isn’t such a box on the form, and if I wrote it in, that surely wouldn’t be what was meant by race on the form. So I decided to pass as White.

Talk about conflicted. I had to let down one side or another. And myself, too. I’ve had this conflict before – between the conventional, acceptable answer and the one I felt was right. In college I was once asked to fill out a long personality test being given to a bunch of us active in student affairs. (I was president of Hillel, the Jewish students’ group at the University of Missouri.) One of the questions was, “Do you ever talk to God?” I knew it would go against the secular grain to put down “Yes,” but it was true. I did, God knows. And prayer qualifies as talk, doesn’t it? That’s a respectable enough answer.

Then came the real doozy of a question: “Does God ever talk to you?” Uh oh. All the time. But to say so, I thought, would clearly mark me as some kind of religious nut. Now I can’t remember what I put down. I hope I said Yes. At any rate, nobody came to cart me off to the mental ward.

Then there was the question on the Census form that asked if I were a “Person of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” Not to the best of my knowledge, but surely there was a Sephardic Jew somewhere in the family line. If way back.

Once I was in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, deep in what was then the Soviet empire, and walking down the street was like looking in a mirror. Everybody looked like me. There was a strange, Stonehenge feel about the whole, eerie experience. It was Deja Vu magnified, as if I’d been here long ago. And the steppes of Central Asia would have been in the Sephardic belt. Granted, that’s not very scientific evidence, but to me it was much realer. I felt it. Elusive yet persistent thing, ethnicity.

On the Census form there’s a box to check for “American Indian or Alaska Native” with space to write in your tribe. (When I read that, my first thought was, “I know mine. I’m a Levite.”) There were also about 10 varieties of Asians plus various Pacific Islanders listed. But no subdivisions for White or European, as if they were all the palefaced same, whether English, Scots-Irish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian. … Not an exact science, census-taking.

For that matter, Southerners exhibit traits of an ethnic group – a common land and language, customs and cuisine. … We were even a separate nation for four disastrous years, which is an experience to remember the next time some fire-eater starts talking up nullification, interposition and/or secesssion. Once was enough, thank you.

So what is race, precisely? Answer: Nothing precise. Mexicans refer to themselves as La Raza, and Churchill spoke of the British race. In that context, the word has a poetic rather than faux-scientific sound. No people that can produce a Shakespeare – or a Faulkner – can be without a defining character. If race has a legitimate meaning, maybe that’s it.

Ah, the intricacies and staying power of ethnicity. My petite but ramrod-straight, blue-eyed mother with her round Slavic face and pale complexion could have passed as Polish, and did so when she had to in the old country. (There must have been a Cossack somewhere in the woodpile.) There’s no mention of Slav on the Census form, either – unlike Fijian or Hmong.

My mother seems to have disappeared from the ethnic categories as surely as her genes have vanished from the dark-haired family tree. Though now and then my latest granddaughter shows indelible signs of her great-grandmother. By the time, Lord willing, her own granddaughter fills out a Census form, there’s no telling what ethnic categories will be listed. Extraterrrestrial, maybe?

I was tempted to just leave the more troublesome spaces on the form blank, but the Census does serves a purpose. Plans for providing all sorts of government services depend on it, not to mention its usefulness as a research tool. And that includes the questions about race, which go back to the first U.S. Census in 1790.

That first Census had to count the number of Negro slaves in order to determine the number of seats each state would get in the still new U.S. House of Representatives. Each slave counted as three-fifths of a person for that purpose. If that’s degrading, as was the whole Peculiar Institution of slavery, would it have been preferable to count slaves as whole persons, and therefore add to the political clout of the slave states? There are no simple answers once we set out to reduce ethnicity to a check on a form.

Yes, the Census figures are sure to be used for nefarious purposes. They’ll be manipulated to make a political point, or to demonstrate some dubious socio-economic theory. But that’s not the numbers’ fault. They serve any number of beneficial purposes, like giving us the best snapshot we have of the American population in the year 2010. What would historians do without Census records? It’s not the numbers’ fault if they’re misused. The figures don’t lie even if liars figure.

It’s better to risk the information’s being abused than not to collect it at all. So in the end I went ahead and filled out the form as best I could, qualms and all. One must have a little faith. Even trust.

Oh, yes, as for what Barack Obama should be called, how about Mr. President?

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