Should the Census Offer 'Negro' as an Identity Option? - TIME - 3 views
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the flash point represents a much larger theme: the often contentious way the Census both reflects and forges our evolving understanding of race.
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2000 Census, more than 56,000 people wrote in Negro to describe their identity — even though it was already on the form
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Consider that in a 2006 study of 138 censuses from around the world, New York University sociologist Ann Morning found that only 15% of those asking about ancestry or national origin used the term race. Almost all of those that did were former slave economies.
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only the U.S. asked about Hispanic ethnicity in a stand-alone question.
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could unintentionally reinforce the view that while ethnicity is a product of culture and society, race represents something else
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The first Census, in 1790, explicitly asked about only one race: white.
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The antidiscrimination laws written in the 1960s and the affirmative-action policies that followed relied on Census data to determine if minorities were underrepresented in any number of realms, from home sales to small-business loans.
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One of the possible changes the Census is testing during the 2010 count is allowing respondents to check more than one box not just for race but for Hispanic origin as well.
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Another change under review is letting people who check "white" or "black" to write in more specific information afterward.
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For the time being, write-in responses still often need to be shoehorned into broader categories for the purpose of following certain laws based on official statistics.
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Census categories reflect perceptions. But they also forge them.
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