The article Whitenorthern references is here:
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/08/2006080903n.htm It is subscriber-only but here is the opening:
Education Department Proposes Giving Students More Options in Identifying Their Race
By SAM KEAN
The U.S. Department of Education proposed this week an overhaul of how it collects statistics on students' racial backgrounds, including a long-awaited proposal to allow students to identify themselves as belonging to more than one racial category.
That proposal and others -- including one that would ask students whether they identified themselves as Hispanic, regardless of race -- are contained in "proposed guidance" that was published on Monday in the Federal Register. The proposed changes are meant to reflect the increasing diversity among American college students. But it was the idea of multiracial identification, under which students could check more than one box under "race," that drew the most attention from higher-education experts.
The federal government first proposed using such racial classifications in 1997, and many agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, have adopted that change. During the most recent U.S. Census, in 2000, 6.8 million people, including 2.8 million people under the age of 18, identified themselves as multiracial by checking more than one box under "race," indicating that a significant share of the country's multiracial population is young.
