The Census Bureau has never known how to classify Hispanics, and they still don’t. As reported today in the New York Times, it has provoked a new controversy by proposing to drop from the next census the option of checking “some other race,” an option chosen by 42% of Hispanics in the 2000 census.
Never mind that “race” may not exist except as a convenient political category. Everything here has become so racialized that we simply can’t have a group as large as Hispanics have become who can’t be fit into the little racial boxes we’ve created.
The dispute highlights the difficulties the Census Bureau has encountered over the decades as it has struggled to find a racial home for Hispanics living in this country.
“Homeless” because they in fact don’t fit neatly into boxes marked black and white.
No “Other” class? If nothing else, have they not heard tat the miscegenation laws are gone?
But then, “Hispanic” is not a race, it is shorthand for Spanish speaking peoples of the [North and Central] Americas, whether most of their ancestry is Aztec, Spanish, Mayan, French…
I have submitted the above as a question on the Bureau’s web site, reference number ‘041024-000008’
Here’s the problem. Fourteen different racial groups appear on the 2000 Census form, including “Guamanian/Chamorro,” which isn’t the most numerous ancestral group in the world. However, there is no racial group for the descendents of New World Indians from outside the U.S. to check. Tens of millions of Americans trace at least some ancestry back to Indians such as the Mayans, but the form gives them nothing to check besides “Other.”
This shouldn’t be such a difficult problem to solve. There are several historical systems for racial determination, and I’m sure one or a combination of them could help us find exactly the classification we’re looking for.
South Africa under apartheid, most southern U.S.states, and of course the Nuremberg laws all delved into exact racial classifications. We should be able to dredge up something to cover this from these sources.
The group I find most confusing to classify (beyond the multi-ethnic/multi-racial) is the Indian/Middle Eastern group, especially Indian. They don’t really fit in to the “White” category, but it doesn’t seem right to throw them in with the “Asian/Pacific Islander” category. I’ve had people write in “Indian” in the “other” category on surveys (clearly meaning from India, since Native American was a choice). Given the growing size of this group, it seems like something that should be addressed.
Of course, the complexity of trying to “classify” people by race and ethnicity is just going to get more complex over time. Of course, race is just a culturally defined phenomenon. But those who believe in equality of individual treatment (instead of group outcomes) regardless of race are oddly painted with the same “racist” brush as those from the past who claimed that the “races” were different “species”. But of course, in reality it was many of the liberal “heros” like Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood) who were the biggest racists — Margaret Sanger would have gotten along great with Hitler, since both believed so strongly in Eugenics. (Off topic, I know, but just needed a soapbox!).
Why don’t we just eliminate the race category entirely?