Census update: racial (bean-)counting

Last updated on: April 19, 2017 at 12:56 pm by Jane the Actuary

Census update: racial (bean-)counting 2017-04-19T12:56:07-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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From the National Review Corner, citing the Heritage Foundation, on proposed changes to the census which are now in a comment period:

Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation has done yeoman’s work on this matter. I quoted his issue brief last fall: “The two most significant proposals [are] creating a new ethno/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and taking from those who identify as Hispanic the option to identify their race.” In the introductory part of the formal comment he has now submitted, he explains:

The proposals would affect our nation adversely in at least three ways: (1) adding one more ethnic group [i.e., MENA] would further sub-divide America along ethnic lines and take another step to transform the U.S. into what the Founders never intended, a nation of groups; (2) creating a Hispanic race would deepen these fractures and threaten to make them permanent; and (3) dangling purported advantages such as congressional redistricting would further help perpetuate divisions within the country by giving people an incentive to identify themselves as a member of a subnational group and a disincentive to build inter-ethnic coalitions.

So, yes, this is a venture with an uncertain outcome.

In the worst case, this creates a new “race” and solidifies racial groups as permanent fixtures, preventing a sense of integration by ensuring that Hispanics and Middle Easterners see themselves as wholly different than the white Americans that they previously would have been counted as being. After all, it’s my understanding that, in the past, individuals whose ancestors had immigrated from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America would, over time, cease to identify as “Hispanic” as they became more integrated into mainstream American culture, and, in particular, to the extent that they or their parents intermarried with “Anglos.”

(At the same time, though, I well remember an acquaintance in college, recipient of a generous scholarship because his mother was of Mexican ancestry, though his father was of Polish stock and the family was thoroughly middle or upper-middle class. His “Hispanic” identity was one of convenience.)

But, on the other hand, perhaps this approach, moving away from our archaic “racial” classifications, simply highlights the arbitrary nature of those classifications. I had earlier observed that the proposal drops the word “race” from the question entirely, though it keeps as an answer choice “some other race, ethnicity, or origin”, and that the next step would be to simply recast this entirely, e.g.,

From what major geographical region do you or your ancestors originate? If your ancestors have themselves migrated from one region to another in the recent past*, use their original region. If your ancestors have come from multiple regions, use the predominant one.

with the idea being that, for instance, if your ancestors had moved from India to Africa before migrating to the United States, you’d mark India rather than Africa, and that you’d use the same approach if your ancestry is predominantly European even though those ancestors had immigrated to Argentina, Colombia, or Mexico in the meantime, as distinct from Latin American immigrants whose ancestry is primarily that of indigenous groups/Indians.

The bottom line, then, isn’t what information the Census Bureau chooses to collect, but how we choose to use the information, and, more generally, how Americans choose to view their “race” — as a determining or incidental component of their sense of self.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMulticulturalism.jpg; By Monisha.pushparaj (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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