Skin colour query sours the census

A fortnight from next Sunday, I will sit down with my census form. The law says that I have to fill it out, but I would usually do so with great enthusiasm. The census is a crucial snapshot of Ireland. It gives us our best map of who we are.

Like anyone else who writes about Ireland, I refer to it regularly. But this time I will have real trouble in filling out the form.

It contains a question that I don't know how to answer and that, in truth, I don't want to answer. That question seeks to define me in a way that I find not merely nonsensical but actively repellent. More seriously, it seeks to define "us" in a way that the State has never explicitly done before - by the colour of our skin.

The part of the form that disturbs me is Question 14: "What is your ethnic or cultural background?" The question itself is absolutely fine, and I don't have to think for more than a split second about the answer: "Irish". My ethnic or cultural background is Irish. Next question.

But this is an answer I'm not allowed to give. The form gives me four mutually exclusive categories to choose from. Three of them are "Black or Black Irish", "Asian or Asian Irish" and "Other, including mixed background". The "other" one is the one that is obviously intended for me and for people like me who were born here of Irish-born parents.

But that category isn't "Irish". It's "white". Within this category there are three further options: "Irish", "Irish Traveller" and "Any other White background".

I cannot therefore declare myself to be Irish without first declaring myself to be white. For the first time ever, the State is now defining Irishness as a sub-category of whiteness. So this is what I am to be now: a white man of the Irish variety.

Being white isn't, according to the form, just a matter of skin colour (mine in fact ranges from a wintry translucence to a mottled pink to an angry, lobster red). Whiteness is to be my "ethnic or cultural background". It is to be both a tribal inheritance and, God help us, a culture.

Since none of this makes any sense to me, I looked up the official Step-by-Step Guide to Filling in the Census 2006 Form. It confuses the issue even further. Its heading for Question 14 is: "What cultural group do you feel you belong to?" So now whiteness is not a background but a "cultural group".

And the question is not about what I am but how I feel. I can answer this question very clearly in negative terms: I don't feel that I belong to a cultural group called the White Race. But I don't feel black Irish, Asian Irish, or part of a "mixed background" that excludes Irishness either. So I can't tick any of the boxes.

The census form doesn't define "white". It doesn't do so for a very good reason: the term is absurd. It is useless for any purpose except racism. The census is a scientific operation, and racial categories have no scientific meaning. The US census, which uses these categories, actually acknowledges that "The categories represent a socialpolitical construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based."

So what does the socio-political construct "white" mean? Again according to the US census, it "refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa". So Arabs, for example, are white. Except that, presumably, the Irish census expects them to define themselves not as white but as Asian.

Whiteness is indeed a "social-political construct". It was constructed in the 19th century for very specific reasons: to define racial superiority. The Irish, like, at certain stages, the Jews, the Italians, and even the Germans (Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1751 that "The Germans are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion") were, for a long time, non-white.

As the American historian Noel Ignatiev showed in his brilliant book How the Irish Became White, you got to be white by adopting the dominant values and by distinguishing yourself from blacks. The Irish abroad largely mastered this trick. Now the Irish at home are being asked to learn it.

This, I'm sure, is not the intention of the Central Statistics Office, but it is the import of the bad decisions it has made. And it's not just a matter of ticking a box in a form. Filling in the census is a key moment of collective self-definition, and a large majority of the population is being invited to define itself as white first, Irish second.

This, in turn, is intended to establish categories that will inform public policy into the distant future. The case for leaving this box blank is that by collectively refusing to answer a stupid question we might force the CSO to come up with a more intelligent one.