The Hispanic question is now usually completely separate from the race one so you can say Hispanic and whatever race. You do get a fairly big group of people who check both Hispanic and white, in most places larger than the number who check Hispanic and either black or native. In most data I see, Hispanic and Other is the most common.
Right - I think that's the part that bugs them. Having to choose Hispanic and White or Hispanic and Other.
I get that it would make continuity of data a mess to change things up frequently.
I am perennially surprised that the word "white" is even used on these things. Instead of, say, "European".
Sometimes people put Caucasian instead of white and it irks me because I think that includes a big chunk of Asia.
4: That was the part that annoying my Syrian colleague.
Ironically it's the Caucasian people, like Armenians, who probably would be most attached to the word "white" rather than "European" since they aren't European.
Honestly, I think Syrians are going to be annoyed. There's no way to put questions with sufficient detail to not annoy them without making the form too big.
Anyway, I think the confusion in "Caucasian" comes not from the Caucus, but from South Asia.
"Caucasian" originated in the racial theories of some 18th century nutter who thought the white people urheimat was in the Caucuses, and that's where the most perfect people could be found. It should be deprecated. "White" has been expanded to include the Middle East, but only some Middle Easterners could expect white privilege in the US. (And I think that should be one of the principal uses of the race question--how is this person treated in America's caste system?) It does seem a bit strange at first that we went that way instead of "European," but that's the history of America. Most black people have substantial--in some cases, majority--European heritage, so "European" isn't going to lead to useful groupings, even without considering populations at the periphery of Europe.
In the 1901 Candadian census, there's a box for "Racial or Tribal Origin." The answer was hand-written by the enumerators. For all by relatives, it's Français.
In a few years, we'll be sending in saliva samples instead of filling out forms and some genetics company will fill in the data.
I learned that the strict definition of "hispanic" has to do with being Spanish-speaking. But in the US, "hispanic" is often used as if it were a synonym for "latino/a" (as in, from Latin America).
So "hispanic" is simultaneously over-inclusive (because people using the term don't mean to include Spaniards, but Spaniards are hispanic) and under-inclusive (because it excludes, for instance, people of Brazilian descent, who are latinos but not hispanic).
Also, anecdotally, it seems like a lot of latinos just really hate the word "hispanic" and take it as a gringo-ism.
I do not have a proposed solution, except to note that a growing number of latinos seem to prefer the term "latinx" and that I'm generally in favor of calling people what they want to be called.
How do you pronounce Latinx? Latin-ex? La-tinks? La-teenks?
It sounds much better than it looks but it looks so bad I can never remember how it sounds.
Is the "x" like x in algebra? So Latinx means Latin, but specific national origin is unknown?
Or is it "x" like "ex"? As in came from Latin America, but doesn't live there anymore?
Maybe I'm missing other possibilities.
"Latinx" surprises me since it seems to fit so badly with the sound system of Spanish. I would have thought Latine would become the preferred term--and it seems like it might be in some contexts--but not among many Spanish speakers in Anglo-America. But everything seems to be in flux, and I should try to follow what people want, with the understanding that for the time being it's going to be highly idiosyncratic.
I've also seen Latin@, which is very cute but orthographically painful. My bygone days parsing leetspeak make it read as "Latina" only.
I think it's a placeholder for "a" or "o", to make it gender non-specific.
Is the "x" like x in algebra? So Latinx means Latin, but specific national origin is unknown?
All it is is an attempt to not have words with genders. This means Spanish words for people can't end in "a" or "o".
In English, however, a language which does not generally have genders for adjectives, let alone gender-signifying endings for words, the perfectly cromulent word "Latin" will cover both Latin American-type men and Latin American-type women.
And I think that should be one of the principal uses of the race question--how is this person treated in America's caste system?
"Indicate your level of privilege on a scale from 1 to 10..."
An acquaintance of mine got in trouble with her university's diversity officer (or whatever) by pointing out that her Latin American students resent "Latinx".
So I disagree with the original post, but in a way that just shows that there are no good solutions to this problem. I am a white Hispanic. My parents are Cuban. They come from a country with its own racial dynamics, some of which are parallel and some of which are distinct from USian racial dynamics. But I am no meaningful way a "person of color". I have European ancestors who migrated to the Americas in the late 19th century, much in the same way that Irish-, German- or Italian-American families' ancestors did.
Latin American countries--like Mexico--where the vast majority are mestizo don't map well onto what the U.S. is trying to do with "white" and "non-white". They do have privileged whites, but they are small minority, population-wise.
I don't know that I agree with that white doesn't cover Middle Eastern or Hispanic at all - they start to merge at higher levels of income, assimilation, and skin pallor. Look at Ralph Nader, Bill Richardson, Steve Jobs.
More about ethnicity than race, but has anyone analyzed marriages to see if in mixed marriages between Anglos and other white immigrant groups (German, Irish, Italian, Slavic, etc.) the husband was more often the Anglo one? I wonder if this income effect might have helped stem the diminution of the notion of an Anglo core to the country over time.
Re 23 and 24, it can be hard for European people to perceive the situation specifically here in the US, and it can be hard for us to perceive that this only exists in the US. Basically, all people with Spanish surnames are considered to be part of a coherent minority race. People who come here from Spain get lumped in with people from Mexico (just look at Hollywood casting). People from Spain (and Portugal, because their names look like Spanish names) are in this category and people from Italy are not. All people from Mexico, Cuba, etc. are lumped together no matter what racial caste they belonged to back home. This is described by the words "Hispanic" and "Latino" which I guess aren't synonyms, but are synonyms. And in the census, since this doesn't make sense, this is a parallel universe independent of the category of race.
26: Interesting question. IDK the answer, but I'd expect the opposite, on the assumption migrants are more often single males.
In the 1911 census of Canada, they still asked the question, but by then I had some relatives in Ontario who's race was given as Scotch.
26 In my own ancestry, marriages between WASP and non-WASP are nearly always WASP men. Similarly, marriages between a American and an immigrant (e.g., from England) are always American man immigrant woman.
nearly always WASP men
The exception that comes to mind is 18th century WASP women marrying descendants of Nieuw Amsterdam settlers.
In the 20th century, especially the latter half, one sees among my cousins a lot more 'mixing' -- WASP women marrying Italian or Hispanic men.
Basically, all people with Spanish surnames are considered to be part of a coherent minority race.
Considered by whom? I may be off on this, but my impression is that there's a very wide regional and community variation on this.
So I disagree with the original post, but in a way that just shows that there are no good solutions to this problem. I am a white Hispanic. My parents are Cuban. They come from a country with its own racial dynamics, some of which are parallel and some of which are distinct from USian racial dynamics. But I am no meaningful way a "person of color".
But there are vastly more Hispanics that are not white than Hispanics that are white. It seems that there should be a percent threshhold, and if your group exceeds the size of that threshhold, then they get a ticky-box besides "other".
When I see Latinx, I read it as most similar to Spanx, but when I've heard it said outloud, it's Latin-x, like Space-x.
" Latinx" is great, except for being really stupid.
33: I think the problem you're having is that the assertion in the original post that "'white' in 2018 has a specific meaning" is incorrect and getting more so every day. Immigration and intermarriage are outrunning America's best efforts to maintain a coherent racial hierarchy, apart from our old favorite "black" and "not black."
I've always assumed that "Latinx" is pronounced "Latino or Latina as appropriate." But that's wordy to write down.
23
But I am no meaningful way a "person of color". I have European ancestors who migrated to the Americas in the late 19th century, much in the same way that Irish-, German- or Italian-American families' ancestors did.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but ISTM that there are generally big differences between a first-generation American whose parents were born in Cuba and their ancestors further back were mostly from Western Europe, than a fourth-or-fifth-generation American whose ancestors further back were mostly from Western Europe.
One is only mostly likely to be fucknuts about Castro.
I agree there are certainly differences, and some of those differences give me things in common with Mexican-Americans or what have you, whatever racial/ethnic background they had in their home countries. But I don't think those things we have in common codify into anything like a "race" or make me non-white. As clumsy as it is, I think the U.S. Census' approach is the best of bad alternatives.
2nd 21. Which is terribly insensitive to Suriname and Belize, but I'm sure they have bigger things to worry about.
But there are vastly more Hispanics that are not white than Hispanics that are white.
Because most U.S. Hispanics are Mexican or Central American, and the vast majority of people in those countries are mestizo. But this wouldn't be true of Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans, or Argentines in the U.S. Interestingly, 75% of Puerto Ricans on the island self-identify as white on the Census, but only 53% in the U.S. (I don't think that's just about the construction of whiteness in each place--blacker and browner Puerto Ricans are more likely migrate).
I married into a WASP family. The big difference I notice is that the WASPs make drinking seem classy and proper.
32
Pretty sure 27 has also never met anyone from the Philippines?
75% of Puerto Ricans on the island self-identify as white on the Census, but only 53% in the U.S.
Apologies for the incorrect way of drawing the distinction here, vs. island and mainland.
37: no, yeah, it's a mess. But if we are in the business of categorizing people, then I take "white" to mean "strangers will think you're white and not think twice". Which is obviously not a perfect measure, but what I'm getting at is that part of it is a perception of others thrust upon you.
Pretty sure 27 has also never met anyone from the Philippines?
You mean the Latinos/Hispanic people who are also Asian?
47: I think you'd find that categorization works pretty differently depending on the backgrounds of the strangers (both ethnic and regional).
48: Do you really want to stand on the claim that all (most? white?) Americans see Filipinos and umpteenth-generation Spanish-surnamed Americans (eg in New Mexico) as belonging to the same "coherent minority race"?
I do!
How does all this play in Hawaii?
47: Are you saying we shouldn't be in the business of categorizing and tracking altogether? Or are you saying that the existing system is more or less optimized?
Also, for giggles, WHAT IF the Philippines had been admitted as a state, in whichever year would be least implausible?
52: Relatively smoothly but with a long way still to go. No one thinks of white as the default ethnicity, which helps, and pretty much any group is racially mixed (including extended families), but there's still significant ethnic-linked disadvantage and complete enlightenment seems unlikely to come anytime soon.
55: And do the divisions map onto those on the mainland in any useful way?
53: I'm saying that the way we currently categorize and track isn't very meaningful, and that to the extent we're using it to try to track and correct social inequities, we're going to need to get a lot more granular.
41. A lot of people in Belize speak Spanish. A lot are Mayan and speak Spanish but don't identify as Hispanic for obvious reasons. A lot of people are African and it's not easy to guess in advance what language they will speak. About half the population is a mixture of races. English is the official language and the people you meet as a tourist almost all speak it well. Belize self-identifies as a Caribbean country, and feels like one. My guess is most of them would laugh at US ethnic and racial labels.
This book would make for a good Unfogged reading group:
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-That-Bind-Rethinking-Identity/dp/1631493833
57: Exactly. Useful classifications would have to cover country of origin SES at least. A half-remembered story from the early 20th C. A man is born in Goa, of Eurasian ancestry, and qualifies as an MD. In Goa he was second-class, not being purely white. Then he went to work for the government in Mozambique, where he had not only white status but higher status than most local-born whites, in virtue of his education. If in 1976 one took that person and dropped him in the US, his passport would say black African, his surname 'Hispanic', his face South Asian, and his CV elite professional.
I work in social science research and think the Census Bureau solution of asking about Hispanic origin separately is weird, so I include it in the list of all races/ ethnicities and say "check all that apply." (The Census item is also multi-check.) I call it "Latinx" because that was what a focus group I conducted in 2008 liked best; I should probably revisit that.
Then of course when I get there data back I disregard everyone's thoughtful self-identification and recode as "white" (if they only checked white) and "racial or ethnic minority" (everyone else). We try not to talk about that though.
The idea of a super-granular system is frankly horrifying. The goal of these kinds of questions on the census are to get a handle on broad trends in discrimination, not to reify some careful hierarchy of racial distinctions.
Also, the existence of weird uncategorizable people like in 60 statistically aren't important, because they are impossible to generalize from.
56: It's the same country and there's enormous traffic back and forth, both tourist and longer-term, so it can't not be linked, but it's different. Local kids going away to school on the mainland have to recalibrate.
62.1: It doesn't have to be crazily granular. Country-of-origin, parents' occupations and income quintiles, some more flexible ethnic checklist such as metasarah describes. I imagine some of those data would very revealing about immigrant life chances.
62.2: Anecdotally, convoluted personal histories are actually quite common, especially among migrants. Any particular uncategorizable convolution will be statistically insignificant, but collectively they might be, even if only as noise that should be filtered.
62: I'm with you completely on avoiding a more granular racial hierarcby, but how is the current system getting a handle on "broad trends in discrimination"? How can it make sense to put a kid whose parents immigrated from the Philippines five years ago and scrape out a living doing manual labor in the same bucket as a kid whose great-grandparents immigrated from Japan and whose parents are doctors or lawyers? Or someone from Spain with dual citizenship in the same bucket as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala?
And those "weird uncategorizable people" who are impossible to generalize from? That's us. Americans. We got past needing to be of English ancestry to be "real" Americans and we'll get past needing to be of European ancestry. What we're trying to do now with our ethnic categorizations is mostly about managing the transition.
Country-of-origin, parents' occupations and income quintiles, some more flexible ethnic checklist such as metasarah describes. I imagine some of those data would very revealing about immigrant life chances.
This is a more interesting question: what are the most efficient questions to ask to get a handle on the broad trends of discrimination?
I definitely like parents' occupations and income quintiles.
Asking income is a good way to hey a fuckton of missing data.
And anyway the data collection in itself doesn't do much reifying; it's the data plus the policy/research/discourse/whatever uses to which they're put. Of course the technocracy can enable or inhibit different uses, but in a polity as messy as America it can't predict very well what those uses will be, especially in policy; nor in general do I think it should.
Good god semi-colons so pretentious. Pretend there're some more periods or things in there.
My supervisor was mentioning this subject some time ago -- his wife is from Uruguay, where she got a law degree. But, she's adopted, and there's a likelihood that her biological parents were Roma people in or from Brazil. I believe she did become a citizen some time ago, so now the US passport covers a multitude of racial confusion. She is still very irritated by those sorts of demographic questions on forms.
If you were Uruguayan, you would have found five beefsteaks.
i love me a well-placed semicolon. when i'm dashing things in briefs i spare a momentary thought for nosflow's i am sure very well supported STRONG OPINIONS re em dashes & etc., but then think of the word count and use whatever gets counted as less words and move on.
It just occurred to me for the first time that with my Israeli mother, I could categorize myself as Asian-American. If I had, maybe Michigan wouldn't have accepted me.
At times like this I give thanks to the great bureaucrat in the sky that forms like this in the UK usually include an option: "Prefer not to say".
I spent Christmas day with a Syrian-heavy crowd; at some point the host, who is white, made a joke about all the Arabs showing up on time and all the white people being late. Aside from the fact that I didn't know lateness was meant to be an Arabian stereotype, it struck me as weird because I would have described all of those Syrians as white (if I really had to describe them as something race-wise).
These categories seem like, in a lot of places, they are just going to have to melt away.
I look at my son's nursery and school friends, and maybe 15%-20% of the kids are unambiguously from some single ethnic/racial/cultural group. The rest are some complicated mix of multiple nested hyphenations (although they probably wouldn't describe themselves that way, since that's not really a "British" thing), and often from at least one or two previous generations of similar multiple-hyphenations. His 'girlfriend' is Syrian-(Chinese-American), his best friend is Welsh-(Indian-South-African),* he's Czech-Scottish**, etc.
I'd assume that kind of thing is universally the case in big international cities in much of Europe and the Americas.
* in fact, and this is presumably just a coincidence, he has two good friends who are Welsh-(South-African), although in one case, one of the parents is Afrikaans speaking from Namibia, and the other is a Hindi speaker.
** although that, obviously, is unambiguously "white".
German farmers in Namibia often wouldn't let Afrikaners come in through the front door, but made them come in through the back, as if they were black people.
They can't be racist if they hate all but one type of white people.