In 1984, Norm Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, received a call from the state police. Somebody had found a body in the woods. The decomposed corpse displayed the typical mute profile of an unknown homicide victim: no clothing, no personal possessions at the scene, not even enough soft tissue left to readily identify its sex. The police only knew the body was human. They asked Sauer if he could recover the person's disintegrated identity--turn the "it" back into a he or a she.
Sauer got into his car and drove up to the hospital where the body was being kept. He examined the form and structure of the skeleton, concentrating on the skull and pelvis, then took a number of measurements with his calipers--the distance between the eye orbits, the length and width of the skull, for example--and plugged them into standard forensic equations. Within a few hours he was able to inform the police that the skeleton was that of a black female who had stood between 5 foot 2 and 5 foot 6 and was 18 to 23 years old at the time of her death. She had been dead somewhere between six weeks and six months. With that information in hand, the police were able to narrow their search through the files of missing persons to a handful of cases. Some unusual dental restorations completed the puzzle: the skeleton belonged to a woman who had lived two counties away and had been missing for three months. She'd been 5 foot 3, 19 years old, and black.
Age, sex, stature, and race are the cardinal points of a preliminary forensic report, the cornerstones that support the reconstruction of a specific human identity. Three out of four of these characteristics are firmly anchored in empirical fact. A person's sex, age, and height at any given moment are discrete quantities, not matters to be interpreted, revised, or dissected into their constituent parts. Whether I am 6 foot 1 or 5 foot 3 does not depend on who is holding the ruler. If I am male in Milwaukee, I remain male in Mobile. My age, like it or not, is 43; no amount of investigation into my personal history will reveal that I am mostly 43, with some 64 mixed in, and just a trace of 19 from my mother's side.
But the fourth cornerstone--race--is mired in a biological, cultural, and semantical swamp. In the United States, most people who are considered to be black trace their ancestry to West Africa; biologically speaking, though, some 20 to 30 percent of the average African American's genetic material was contributed by ancestors who were either European or American Indian. Different jurisdictions, government bureaucracies, and social institutions tend to classify race in different ways--as do different individuals. Most Americans get to decide which race box to check on a form, and their decision may depend on whether they are filling out a financial-aid application or a country club membership form. A recent study found that in the early 1970s, 34 percent of the people participating in a census survey in two consecutive years changed racial groups from one year to the next.
The classifications themselves are eminently changeable: the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for overseeing the collection of statistics for the federal government, recently held public hearings and is currently reading written commentary on the categories used by the Census Bureau. In addition to the racial categories now in place-- white, black, American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, Asian or Pacific Islander, and "other"--the OMB is considering adding slots for native Hawaiians, Middle Easterners, and people who consider themselves multiracial. If such categories are added, they should be in place for the census in the year 2000.
