Census Forms

“Most people who appear phenotypically ‘black’ enjoy neither the privilege nor the inclination to play around on a government form designed to track and remediate generations of prejudice,” writes Patricia Williams. “To be visibly black in this culture is to feel race every day–one can’t forget it entirely when walking down the street. You’re fingered, inescapably tagged–boxed in not by the form but by collective presumptions and cultural prejudgments–about beauty, criminality, intelligence, manners, articulateness, merit, health and contagion. That’s the larger meaning of a social construction, after all: it has walls.”