By MIKE SCHNEIDER (Associated Press)
In Orlando, Florida, the US government is making its first update in 27 years to how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity. Officials think this will give a more accurate count of residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.
On Thursday, the Office of Management and Budget announced changes to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity. This is the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a desire for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.
Meeta Anand, senior director for Census & Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said, “The emotional impact this has on people is significant. It’s how we conceive ourselves as a society. There is a desire for people to want to self-identify and be reflected in data so they can tell their own stories.”
The revisions will combine questions about race and ethnicity that were previously asked separately, giving respondents the option to pick multiple categories at the same time, such as “Black,” “American Indian” and “Hispanic.” This change is based on research showing that many Hispanic people struggle with the race question when it is asked separately because they see race and ethnicity as similar.
A Middle Eastern and North African category will be added to the choices available for questions about race and ethnicity. People from places such as Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, and Syria will now have the option of identifying themselves in this new group. The 2020 census revealed that 3.5 million residents identify as Middle Eastern and North African.
Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, whose parents are from Iran, said, “It feels good to be seen. Growing up, my family would check the ‘white’ box because we didn’t know what other box reflected our family. Having representation like that, it feels meaningful.”
The changes remove the words “Negro” and “Far East,” now seen as pejorative, from federal forms, as well as the terms “majority” and “minority,” because they fail to reflect the nation’s complex racial and ethnic diversity. The revisions also encourage the collection of detailed race and ethnicity data beyond the minimum standards, such as “Haitian” or “Jamaican” for someone who checks “Black.”
Combining people of different backgrounds into a single race and ethnicity category, such as Japanese and Filipino in the Asian classification, often hides disparities in income or health. Advocates argued that having detailed data will allow the information about the subgroups to be separated out in a process called disaggregation.
Allison Plyer, chief demographer of The Data Center in New Orleans, stated that being able to break down data into smaller parts can help distinguish between different types of unfair treatment, enforce discrimination laws, and conduct research on public health and economic outcomes.
The adjustments to the standards were worked out over two years by a group of federal statisticians and bureaucrats who prefer to stay out of political conflicts. However, the changes will have long-term effects on legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, health statistics, and possibly even politics due to the decrease in the number of people classified as white.
Donald Trump, the presumed GOP nominee for president, recently hinted at arguments made by those who claim Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to weaken the influence of white people. Trump, while president, unsuccessfully attempted to exclude individuals in the United States unlawfully from the 2020 census.
The momentum for altering the race and ethnicity categories grew during the Obama administration in the mid-2010s, but was paused after Trump became president in 2017. The initiative was revived after Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
The changes will be seen in data collection, forms, surveys, and the once-a-decade census questionnaires released by the federal government, as well as in state governments and the private sector, as businesses, universities, and other groups typically follow the lead of Washington. Federal agencies have 18 months to submit a plan on how they will implement the changes.
The initial federal standards on race and ethnicity were created in 1977 to provide consistent data across agencies and generate figures that could support the enforcement of civil rights laws. They were last updated in 1997 when five minimum race categories were defined — American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white; respondents could select more than one race. The minimum ethnic categories were classified separately as not Hispanic or Hispanic or Latino.
The racial and ethnic categories used by the U.S. government mirror the era in which they are applied.
In 1820, the category “Free Colored People” was included in the decennial census to represent the rise in free Black individuals. In 1850, the term “Mulatto” was added to the census to include people of mixed heritage. American Indians were not specifically counted in the census until 1860. After years of immigration from China, “Chinese” was listed in the 1870 census. A formal question about Hispanic origin did not appear until the 1980 census.
Not everyone supports the latest revisions.
Some Afro Latinos believe that combining the race and ethnicity question will decrease their numbers and representation in the data, although earlier research by the U.S. Census Bureau did not find significant differences among Afro Latino responses when the questions were asked separately or together.
For example, Mozelle Ortiz is of mixed Afro Puerto Rican descent and thinks the changes could erase that identity, even though individuals can select more than one response once the race and ethnicity questions are combined.
"My whole family history, including my Black Puerto Rican grandmother's and all other non-white Spanish speaking groups, will be wiped out," Ortiz stated to the interagency group.
Some people are not happy that certain groups like Armenians or Arabs from Sudan and Somalia were not mentioned in the examples used to define people of Middle Eastern or North African background.
Maya Berry, who is the executive director of the Arab American Institute, said that while she was "extremely pleased" with the new category, she was also disappointed by the omissions.
"It does not represent the racial diversity of our community," Berry said. "And it's incorrect."
___
Follow Mike Schneider on X, formerly known as Twitter: @MikeSchneiderAP
