Why hyphens don’t matter

My Denver Post column today discusses a new census report that claims I’m now a minority.

Now that 50.01 percent of Denver’s population is non-white, I’m finally a minority.

Frankly, not much has changed in my life. My editor is still Irish-American. My wife, she’s three-fourths Italian-American. My boss is an African-American.

A bunch of hyphenated people roam my world. My kids are so ethnically confused, in fact, I’m not sure there’s enough hyphen space to appropriately describe them.

When I asked Colorado’s official demographer why government even queries for racial and ethnic data, she, after mulling it over for a bit, could really only think of one reason: allocation of funding for government programs. As someone who’s self-identified himself as a Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander more than once, I can tell you the census numbers are “soft” data, anyway. And I assume most of us would rather be categorized by our accomplishments and beliefs than geographical area of import or color.

There’s actually a new category called “Two or More.” I asked the demographer to explain it. Could you be half Hispanic, half white? Or a fourth Hispanic and qualify?

“If you are Hispanic and white, then you would be considered white or Hispanic … If you were, however, white and black and you self-identified as white and black, you would be ‘two or more’ …”

Confusing — and completely unnecessary.