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What Is "Your" Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans
America is preoccupied with race statistics--perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different "race" line--the nativity line--separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's "statistical races." Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.
Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America--Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?
What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task--particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census--but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.
Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America--Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?
What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task--particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census--but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.
- GenresRacePoliticsNonfiction
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 16, 2022
Summary: A must read for any data scientist or statistician. Will be relying on it heavily as I write my book.
Prewitt is brilliant as he attempts to lay out his argument. Sadly, I don't think enough people will really give him the full props for what he is advocating.
p. 21 He admits that statical categories are real, but they are also created and become realized by the laws and legal standing that then surrounds it.
p. 114 He describes how affirmative action was the first time in history that people then wanted to be marked by race. Before that, race categories were used to exclude (see Chinese example).
p. 178 - He talks about the diversity in the Latino community, which benefits from a single Latino category, but has lots of subcultures that are doing very differently socioeconomically in the US.
p. 210 - His call to action is to stop asking race or ethnicity to depoliticize it and laws from being based upon it. But it's so radical.
p. 225 - In the appendix, he discusses the case with Brazil, which is more related to shades than colors. For a while, they pretended like racism wasn't there, but in fact, that's not true.
p. 228 - French law prohibits the use of colors to define people.
In other sections of the book, he talks about how the Chinese were the first group to be separated in the count due to being from another country. Then for awhile, the Mexican population was just white. But as soon as there was an immigration issue, the census started counting. He's in this section talking about how the Census mixes race and immigration issues together.
Brilliant book. I think it really tells the story of the responsibility a data scientist has. A lot of people have suffered and a lot of angry feelings exist because of these categories.
Prewitt is brilliant as he attempts to lay out his argument. Sadly, I don't think enough people will really give him the full props for what he is advocating.
p. 21 He admits that statical categories are real, but they are also created and become realized by the laws and legal standing that then surrounds it.
p. 114 He describes how affirmative action was the first time in history that people then wanted to be marked by race. Before that, race categories were used to exclude (see Chinese example).
p. 178 - He talks about the diversity in the Latino community, which benefits from a single Latino category, but has lots of subcultures that are doing very differently socioeconomically in the US.
p. 210 - His call to action is to stop asking race or ethnicity to depoliticize it and laws from being based upon it. But it's so radical.
p. 225 - In the appendix, he discusses the case with Brazil, which is more related to shades than colors. For a while, they pretended like racism wasn't there, but in fact, that's not true.
p. 228 - French law prohibits the use of colors to define people.
In other sections of the book, he talks about how the Chinese were the first group to be separated in the count due to being from another country. Then for awhile, the Mexican population was just white. But as soon as there was an immigration issue, the census started counting. He's in this section talking about how the Census mixes race and immigration issues together.
Brilliant book. I think it really tells the story of the responsibility a data scientist has. A lot of people have suffered and a lot of angry feelings exist because of these categories.
August 21, 2015
Fascinating discussions of the history of the census and race, with thoughtful analysis of where to go from here.
November 28, 2021
Every ten years in our lifetime, we are asked to perform a government mandate: to complete the US Census. These statistics are America's most accurate depiction of its residents, and helps us to determine how government funding, civic institutions, and political representatives can be better distributed to reflect the shifting national demographic.
Published in 2013, after the release of the 2010 decennial census results, former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt revisits in his book What is Your Race? the age-old question that has plagued the American count: "How do we count race?"
His answer? We shouldn't. Or, at least, we should be intergenerationally phasing out our archaic "five-race" dichotomy that centers a hierarchy of whiteness and that has dominated public mentality of race, ethnicity, and origin as they relate to nativity, color, and im/migration.
Much like the federal minimum wage, the US hasn't budged much over the (many!) years in changing how we universally categorize ourselves based on "race." Kenneth Prewitt's What is Your Race? gives readers an essential primer on the history of the decennial census, how it has counted and categorized America's residents and immigrants across shifting racial identities, and how it has changed policy and public opinion on race and identity in America over the span of two centuries.
Prewitt follows this in-depth history with critiques of how the census attempts to make changes to their questionnaire in order to accurately count and represent the national population without losing the constitutional mandate of the census itself ("to provide statistics for reapportionment and redistricting," p. 197). He suggests alterations to the race/ethnicity/origin questions and outlines a gradual phasing out of the questions regarding race/ethnicity/origin over three generations, or about 40-60 years (or around the 2040 and 2060 censuses), of implementing the count.
This is a book for statistics nerds, for mixed race and second generation Americans of immigrants, and for folks generally interested in how we are being counted and then represented in the US Congress. So much of our redistricting, reapportionment of reps, and grant funding rely on data we provide every ten years, and that data also has the power to control the public narrative of how we talk about race and its hold on class and politics for generations to come. Given that we have just conducted the 2020 Census and are now seeing its results, I found it useful to compare the survey's questions over the decades and see just how much progress has already been made and where we can go from here to more accurately represent a rapidly growing population of residents who experience that gut-wrenching anxiety over what to put in what seems to become an obsolete "race" category.
Prewitt also includes an appendix of how other countries conduct their own resident counts, which I found inspiring in how we can build off of Prewitt's proposal and make new decisions in the wake of a more white supremacist and politically polarized national system.
What is Your Race? invites us to take part in changing the narrative of how Americans can best represent ourselves in a more multicultural nation that should no longer depend on stratifications of whiteness in order to count as a person.
Published in 2013, after the release of the 2010 decennial census results, former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt revisits in his book What is Your Race? the age-old question that has plagued the American count: "How do we count race?"
His answer? We shouldn't. Or, at least, we should be intergenerationally phasing out our archaic "five-race" dichotomy that centers a hierarchy of whiteness and that has dominated public mentality of race, ethnicity, and origin as they relate to nativity, color, and im/migration.
Much like the federal minimum wage, the US hasn't budged much over the (many!) years in changing how we universally categorize ourselves based on "race." Kenneth Prewitt's What is Your Race? gives readers an essential primer on the history of the decennial census, how it has counted and categorized America's residents and immigrants across shifting racial identities, and how it has changed policy and public opinion on race and identity in America over the span of two centuries.
Prewitt follows this in-depth history with critiques of how the census attempts to make changes to their questionnaire in order to accurately count and represent the national population without losing the constitutional mandate of the census itself ("to provide statistics for reapportionment and redistricting," p. 197). He suggests alterations to the race/ethnicity/origin questions and outlines a gradual phasing out of the questions regarding race/ethnicity/origin over three generations, or about 40-60 years (or around the 2040 and 2060 censuses), of implementing the count.
This is a book for statistics nerds, for mixed race and second generation Americans of immigrants, and for folks generally interested in how we are being counted and then represented in the US Congress. So much of our redistricting, reapportionment of reps, and grant funding rely on data we provide every ten years, and that data also has the power to control the public narrative of how we talk about race and its hold on class and politics for generations to come. Given that we have just conducted the 2020 Census and are now seeing its results, I found it useful to compare the survey's questions over the decades and see just how much progress has already been made and where we can go from here to more accurately represent a rapidly growing population of residents who experience that gut-wrenching anxiety over what to put in what seems to become an obsolete "race" category.
Prewitt also includes an appendix of how other countries conduct their own resident counts, which I found inspiring in how we can build off of Prewitt's proposal and make new decisions in the wake of a more white supremacist and politically polarized national system.
What is Your Race? invites us to take part in changing the narrative of how Americans can best represent ourselves in a more multicultural nation that should no longer depend on stratifications of whiteness in order to count as a person.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews