{"id":56064,"date":"2018-03-30T19:42:15","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T19:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56064"},"modified":"2018-03-31T22:21:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-31T22:21:59","slug":"the-americans-our-government-wont-count","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56064","title":{"rendered":"The Americans Our Government Won\u2019t Count"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Americans Our Government Won\u2019t Count<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2018-03-30<\/p>\n

Alex Wagner<\/strong><\/a>, Contributing Editor
\nThe Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nMonica Ramos<\/small><\/p>\n

Racially speaking, the United States<\/a> is zero percent Hispanic. This is confusing \u2014 especially for America\u2019s nearly 58 million Hispanics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The United States census<\/a> breaks our country into six general racial categories<\/a>: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. \u201cHispanic, Latino or Spanish origin\u201d is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity \u2014 a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check \u201cWhite\u201d or, increasingly, \u201cSome Other Race.\u201d This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me \u2014 half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish \u2014 often check. It might just as well be called \u201cGenerally Brown.\u201d Today, the third-largest racial group in America is \u201cSome Other Race\u201d \u2014 and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics.<\/p>\n

Equally obscured are America\u2019s estimated 3.7 million residents of Arab descent. With neither a racial nor an ethnic category to call their own, they most often opt for a racial designation of \u201cWhite.\u201d But to count Yemenis and Syrians as generically white is a complicated proposition these days, when whiteness confers power, and men and women from the Arab world are instead the subjects of travel bans and national security debates.<\/p>\n

Nearly four years ago, the Census Bureau began researching<\/a> how to more accurately represent these populations and decided to combine the race and ethnicity questions into one, and to add two new categories: one for residents of Middle Eastern\/North African origin and one for those of Hispanic origin. Many advocates within those groups celebrated the reforms, and the broad expectation was that the next census, in 2020, would incorporate these changes. After all, the bureau itself concluded that they were necessary to \u201cproduce the highest quality statistics about our nation\u2019s diverse population.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

But in January, the bureau abruptly announced it would not move forward with the reforms after all, saying only that \u201cmore research and testing\u201d was needed on the addition of a Middle Eastern\/North African category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,26,20],"tags":[28277,28278,2640,2327,856,5367],"class_list":["post-56064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-alex-wagner","tag-arturo-vargas","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-tomas-jimenez","tag-united-states-census-bureau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56064","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=56064"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56079,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56064\/revisions\/56079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}