{"id":33069,"date":"2013-08-22T12:52:42","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T12:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=33069"},"modified":"2013-08-22T21:48:13","modified_gmt":"2013-08-22T21:48:13","slug":"fix-the-census%e2%80%99-archaic-racial-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=33069","title":{"rendered":"Fix the Census\u2019 Archaic Racial Categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fix the Census\u2019 Archaic Racial Categories<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2013-08-21<\/p>\n

Kenneth Prewitt<\/a><\/strong>, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
\nColumbia University<\/em>
\nAlso former director of the\u00a0U.S. Census Bureau<\/a> from 1998 to 2001 and author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans<\/a> (Princeton University Press, 2013)<\/p>\n

Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has sorted the American population into distinct racial groups<\/a>. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the \u201cfive races of mankind,\u201d lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.<\/p>\n

The nation\u2019s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico…<\/p>\n

…Fast-growing population groups \u2014 mixed-race Americans, those with \u201chyphenated\u201d identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 \u2014 increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau\u2019s designation, since 1970, of \u201cHispanic\u201d as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a \u201crace.\u201d In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for \u201csome other race\u201d \u2014 a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.<\/p>\n

Indeed, anyone who filled in \u201csome other race\u201d that year was allocated to one or more of the five main groupings. Many absurdities have resulted.<\/p>\n

America has about 1.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa \u2014 some 3 percent of the nation\u2019s black population. Like President Obama\u2019s father, who was Kenyan, their experience differs vastly from that of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved, yet they are subsumed into the same category \u2014 one that, until this very year, continued to include the outdated term \u201cNegro.\u201d<\/p>\n

The census considers Arabs white, along with non-Arabs like Turks and Kurds because they have origins in the Middle East or North Africa. Migrants from the former Soviet nations in Central Asia are lumped in as white along with descendants of New England pilgrims…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fix the Census\u2019 Archaic Racial Categories The New York Times 2013-08-21 Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs Columbia University Also former director of the\u00a0U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001 and author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton University Press, 2013) Starting in 1790, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,20],"tags":[2544,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-33069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-kenneth-prewitt","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}