For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it classifies people by race and ethnicity. A move federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern or North African heritage.
The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This process of evolution often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as the desire for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.
Under the revisions, questions about race and ethnic origin that were previously asked separately on forms will be combined into a single question. This will give respondents the option to choose multiple categories at the same time, such as “Black,” “American Indian,” and “Hispanic.”
Research has shown that a large number of Hispanics are unsure how to answer the race question when it is asked separately because they understand race and ethnicity to be similar and often choose “some other race” or do not answer the question.
A Middle East and North Africa category will be added to the available options for questions about race and ethnicity. People with roots in places like Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, and Syria were previously encouraged to identify as white. But now they will have the option to identify under the new group. Results from the 2020 Census, in which respondents were asked to explain their origins, suggest that 3.5 million residents identify as being from the Middle East and North Africa.
“It feels good to be seen,” said Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando whose parents are from Iran. “Growing up, my family checked the ‘white’ box because we didn’t know what other box reflected our family. Having representation like this feels meaningful.”
The changes also remove the words “Negro” and “Far East” from federal forms, now widely considered pejorative, as well as the terms “majority” and “minority,” because they do not reflect the nation’s complex racial and ethnic diversity, some officials say.
The revisions also encourage the collection of detailed data on race and ethnicity beyond the minimum standards, such as “Haitian” or “Jamaican” for someone who checks “Black.”
Grouping people from different backgrounds into a single race and ethnicity category, such as Japanese and Filipinos under the Asian classification, often masks disparities in income or health, and advocates argued that having detailed data will allow information about subgroups to be separated in a process called disaggregation.
“Being able to disaggregate can be really useful for distinguishing different types of discrimination, the ability to enforce laws around discrimination, and conducting research on economic and public health outcomes,” said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans.
The changes to the standards were developed over two years by a group of statisticians and federal bureaucrats who prefer to stay out of the political fray. But the revisions have long-term implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, health statistics, and possibly even politics as the number of people classified as white declines.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, recently alluded to arguments made by people who claim Democrats are promoting illegal immigration to weaken the power of white people.
As president, Trump unsuccessfully tried to disqualify people who were in the country illegally from being included in the 2020 Census.
The push to change racial and ethnic categories grew during the Obama administration in the mid-2010s but stalled after Trump took office in 2017. It revived after Democratic President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
The changes will be reflected in data collection, forms, surveys, and census questionnaires issued by the federal government, as well as by state governments and the private sector, since businesses, universities, and other groups often follow Washington’s lead. Federal agencies have 18 months to submit a plan on how they will implement the changes.
The first federal standards on race and ethnicity were issued in 1977 to provide consistent data across agencies and generate figures that could help enforce civil rights laws. They were last updated in 1997, when five minimum racial categories were defined: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and white. Respondents could choose more than one race. The minimum ethnic categories were grouped separately as non-Hispanic, Hispanic, or Latino.
The racial and ethnic categories used by the U.S. government reflect their time.
In 1820, the category “Free people of color” was added to the decennial census to reflect the growing number of free Black people. In 1850, the term “mulatto” was added to the census to include people of mixed ancestry. Native Americans were not explicitly counted in the census until 1860. After years of immigration from China, “Chinese” was included in the 1870 census. There was no formal question about Hispanic origin until the 1980 census.
Not everyone agrees with the latest revisions.
Some Afro-Latinos feel that combining the race and ethnicity question will reduce their numbers and representation in the data, though previous research by the U.S. Census Bureau found no significant differences in Afro-Latino responses when the questions were asked separately or together.
Mozelle Ortiz, for example, is of mixed Afro-Puerto Rican descent. She feels the changes could erase that identity, even though people can choose more than one answer once the race and ethnicity questions are combined.
“All my lineage, that of my Black Puerto Rican grandmother and all other non-white Spanish-speaking peoples, will be erased,” Ortiz wrote to the interagency group.
Others are unhappy about how some groups of people, such as Armenians or Arabs from Sudan and Somalia, were not included in the examples used to define people of Middle Eastern or North African origin.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said that while she was “incredibly happy” with the new category, that enthusiasm was tempered by the omissions.
“It does not reflect the racial diversity of our community,” Berry said. “And it’s wrong.”
Image: Wfla
