{"id":59618,"date":"2020-03-10T14:48:31","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T14:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59618"},"modified":"2020-03-10T14:53:52","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T14:53:52","slug":"to-fight-discrimination-the-u-s-census-needs-a-different-race-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59618","title":{"rendered":"To fight discrimination, the U.S. census needs a different race question"},"content":{"rendered":"

To fight discrimination, the U.S. census needs a different race question<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Science News: Independent Journalism Since 1921<\/a>
\n2020-03-08<\/p>\n

Sujata Gupta<\/strong><\/a>, Social Sciences Writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nAn accurate sense of racial diversity is hard to achieve with current U.S. census questions.
\nDelphine Lee<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The government has asked people their race since 1790<\/em><\/p>\n

Wendy Roth<\/a> has been arguing for years that the U.S. Census Bureau<\/a> should ask about race in a different way. The race box that people check for themselves on the census doesn\u2019t always match the box someone else might have checked for them. And that, Roth says, is a problem.<\/p>\n

Roth, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, began researching that mismatch in racial identification in the early 2000s. She recruited 60 New Yorkers who had been born in Puerto Rico<\/a> or the Dominican Republic<\/a>, showed them the census race question and asked them how they would answer. The responses surprised her.<\/p>\n

Consider the case of Salvador, a kitchen worker in the Bronx<\/a>. \u201cMany Americans observing him would consider him to be black<\/a>,\u201d Roth wrote in December 2010 in Social Science Quarterly. But Salvador told Roth that he checks \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n

While attitudes in the mainland United States<\/a> have been shaped by the long legacy of the \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>,\u201d in which a single drop of \u201cblack blood\u201d conferred \u201cblackness,\u201d Puerto Ricans believe the opposite \u2014 that even dark-skinned people can\u2019t be black if they have \u201cwhite blood.\u201d Puerto Ricans use terms like mulatto<\/em><\/a> or trigue\u00f1o<\/em> to describe those falling somewhere between white and black. But when presented with race checkboxes that offer no intermediate options, Salvador simply goes by what he knows…<\/p>\n

…A slippery sense of self<\/strong><\/p>\n

As minority groups fight for greater visibility, and the race question gets wound up in ideas about self-affirmation and group empowerment, the census data have been getting more difficult to decipher since the 1960 shift to self-identification.<\/p>\n

With the power to check their own race box, many people previously identified as white have embraced a nonwhite or mixed-race identity. That\u2019s evident in the American Indian numbers. From 1890 to 1960, the American Indian population grew from 248,000 to 524,000, with an average annual growth rate of just 1.1 percent. But over the next several decades, and coinciding with the shift to self-identification, that population grew to almost 2 million by 1990<\/a> \u2014 with an average annual growth rate of 4.3 percent. That meteoric growth extends well beyond what is possible through births alone, [Carolyn] Liebler<\/a> says…<\/p>\n

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

The government has asked people their race since 1790<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,394,20],"tags":[171,30827,26457,14996,18906,30825,30826,2546,5367,2419,8858],"class_list":["post-59618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-carolyn-liebler","tag-katherine-wallman","tag-khaled-beydoun","tag-nancy-lopez","tag-science-news","tag-science-news-independent-journalism-since-1921","tag-sujata-gupta","tag-u-s-census-bureau","tag-united-states-census-bureau","tag-wendy-d-roth","tag-wendy-roth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59618","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=59618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59619,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59618\/revisions\/59619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}