Ethical dilemmas concerning race.

• Position: Census

More than a dozen government agencies rely on racial data from the Census to help serve minorities. On the flip side, the government has, in the past, used the data on race for more unseemly pursuits. Matthew Snipp, a demographer in the Department of Sociology, Stanford (Calif.) University, who also is a member of the Census Bureau's Race and Ethnic Advisory Committee, notes that some U.S. residents are suspicious of the Census and argue it has the potential for an Orwellian kind of abuse. Snipp cites one example of how such data can be used for dubious purposes.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Washington relied heavily on Census data to identify and detain people o[Japanese heritage living in the U.S. More recently, some Arab-American organizations lobbied to include an Arab race category on the 2000 Census. "If the Arab-American groups had been successful in making their case to have this information included, you have to wonder where we would be after September 11. What sorts of uses would be made with that information?," Snipp speculates.

Indeed, the Census comes replete with ethical dilemmas, many of which have become more tangled since 2000, when U.S. residents were permitted for the first time to choose more than one race in identifying themselves. Some oppose gathering racial data altogether, and it is...