Federal government statistical agencies are islands of excellence in what Donald Trump regards as a swamp that needs draining. Their integrity and rigor deserve respect and careful tending. But not all their recommendations deserve to be followed.
Case in point: the Census Bureau’s proposals for change in the race and ethnic questions it asks Americans in the constitutionally mandated decennial census. One change would be to give respondents the option to designate their ancestry as “MENA” or Middle Eastern/North African. This would facilitate treating people of such ancestry as a preferred group in the racial and ethnic quotas and preferences so common not only in government but in business corporations.
Another is a change in the Hispanic category which the Census Bureau created for the 1970 Census. Currently the Census asks two questions: “Are you Hispanic?” and “What is your race?” People classifying themselves as Hispanic can and do answer the race question in different ways, and some aficionados of racial and ethnic quotas and preferences are dismayed that so many Hispanics identify as white or “other” race.
They evidently want to solidify Hispanic consciousness, in the face of the fact that large numbers of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics and produce children who may or may not embrace that identity. And do most people in the United States of MENA origin identify themselves as part of a discriminated-against minority, in need of preferential treatment to get ahead? My guess is not.
The bureau’s proposal would boil the two questions down to one: what is you race or origin? But that raises some problems, which the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez points to in a Wall Street Journal opinion article opposing the change. Gonzalez writes:
“The proposed new census form, for example, defines ‘white’ as ‘German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, French, etc.’ If you are ‘Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Salvadoran, Dominican, etc.,’ you are directed to check the box for ‘Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin.'” Respondents are told they can check multiple boxes, but Census Bureau trial runs indicate that fewer people do so in the one-question format.
In other words, race and national origin are often not congruent. There are citizens of France and Britain in the United States of African ancestry, for example. And do Hispanics include people from Portuguese-speaking Brazil, who are of varied racial ancestry, as are very many people from Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America? Generally recognized racial categories in those countries are different from those we’re used to in the United States.
And how would King Felipe of Spain fill out the form if he were still, as he was in 1993-95, a graduate student at Georgetown University? If he would be counted as Hispanic, would he be eligible for ethnic or racial preferences even though he is a direct descendant of the Emperor Charles V and King Louis XIV?
Gonzalez urges the Office of Management and Budget, which is reviewing these changes, to reject them and, presumably, keep the same two-question format used in recent decades. Another proposal, unlikely to be seriously considered, would be to scrap the racial question altogether and just ask about national ancestry. Even if you take the Census Bureau proposal as a good faith effort to reflect the ethnic and racial variety of the nation, as I do, it seems likely to slot us into fewer categories when in fact an increasing share of the population can assert membership in more.
