"We really didn't expect that number. We just don't really have a good handle on it right now," Census Bureau racial statistics chief Claudette Bennett told the New York Times earlier this week.

The NAACP downplays the wow factor of the results, pointing out that African-Americans have always had diverse ethnic backgrounds. "The African-American community is very diverse," says Hilary Shelton, the NAACP's Washington bureau chief. "Particularly coming out of slavery, African-Americans have white ancestors. You can let your imagination run wild with that one. There was always a little house behind the big house. That's always been the untold story."

But the ongoing debate over what to do with the information could have major repercussions for policy decisions affecting the allocation of billions in federal funds and the enforcement of civil rights laws.

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This time last year, all-out war loomed between civil rights leaders and the Census Bureau as the bureau looked at ways to revise its decennial national head count to reflect the ever more diverse racial composition of the country.

The 2000 Census, the first to attempt to count mixed-race Americans, expanded the number of racial categories Americans can choose among from five to 63. Civil rights groups worried about the impact on minority groups, since the traditional categories formed the basis for federal enforcement of civil rights legislation like the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, congressional redistricting and reapportionment of federal spending. A census with multiracial categories could imperil the enforcement of civil rights laws, advocacy groups feared.

Blacks have been particularly hard hit by census problems in the past. For example, in Richmond, Va., 11,000 school-age children weren't counted in the 1990 Census, and as a result, the community lost the $640 per child that the government gives to the poorest communities -- a disproportionate percentage of those being African-American. Effects such as this are why organizations like the NAACP are particularly sensitive to changes in the count.

Most parties wanted to develop a broader census that would be more reflective of racial realities. But some organizations emphasized that the civil rights laws of the 1960s were written with more limited definitions of race in mind. There had to be a way to develop a census that would reflect the new look of America without compromising previous classifications.

To solve the problem, the NAACP and other groups asked the Census Bureau to create a system of tabulation that would permit respondents to select multiracial categories but would also allow those categories to be reverted to the category that would have been chosen in the previous census, enabling researchers, bureaucrats and armchair demographers to compare racial data accurately between the 1990 and 2000 censuses.

To read the coverage this week, you'd think that hadn't happened.

"The new options mean that data from the 2000 census is not directly comparable with information from previous censuses or with other statistical systems that use the traditional racial categories," a New York Times report stated Wednesday. "Direct comparisons of figures for 1990 and 2000 were impossible, however, because people previously could choose from only five racial categories compared to 63 in the latest census," the Associated Press reported on March 8.

In a way, these reports were correct. The sheer volume of data is enormous, presenting complications that could mar certain comparisons. But the reports also overlooked an important part of the planning process.

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