Confused about race? So is the Census

In 1990, Robert Lilligren had to choose whether to check American Indian or white on the census form. Even though he is both, the census form only allowed him to choose one.

A member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, the Minneapolis city council member said: “Filling out only one race made me feel that I was not fully represented by my response.”

Every 10 years since 1790, the census has attempted to count the exact number of people in the U.S. By doing this, the government is able to make a proper estimate on where it should allocate federal funds for everything from schools to jobs programs. The census also decides how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. That is why it’s important for the census to get the most accurate feedback as possible.

But from the beginning, the census has had trouble reporting race in America. First off, the definition of race keeps shifting. In 1850, for example, the census asked for “color” and gave three choices: white, black and mulatto, a blend of white and black. By 1880, the choices had changed to white, black, mulatto, Chinese and Indian. Today we consider Mexican a nationality and Hispanic an ethnicity, but in 1930, Mexican was considered a race.

Tom Gillapsy, Minnesota state demographer who has helped administer four census counts, has mixed feelings about collecting information on race. On one hand, collecting information about race can help show segregation and discrimination.

“One way to determine discrimination is through data,” he said. For example, if “no one of (a certain) race ever gets hired for this (type of) job.”

On the other hand, race isn’t something encoded in the DNA; categories shift over time depending on society’s ideas about race.

The census has had problems documenting race dating as far back as 1790 with the Three-Fifths compromise between Southern and Northern states reached during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, Gillaspy noted.
The compromise provided that three-fifths of the population of slaves would be counted for enumeration purposes regarding both the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the United States House of Representatives. Southern states had plantations with slaves, who weren’t allowed ot vote, but still wanted slaves counted to increase their political power in Washington. The three-fifths compromise held until slavery was abolished in 1865.

Back then, Lilligren would not have been counted at all that year because the census didn’t collect information on American Indians, Gillaspy said.

Mixed-race is one of the fastest growing parts of the population, Gillaspy notes. In 2000, the census form recognized this by allowing people to check more than one racial box. Lilligren was finally able to check boxes for both of his races – white and American Indian. And he wasn’t the only one.
“Lots of people checked more than one,” Gillaspy said, and he predicts even more people will check more than one box in 2010.

As the U.S. population becomes more multi-racial, Gillaspy wonders if race will matter less to statisticians in the future and class as measured by income will matter more.

“Eventually it gets to the people where everybody is ‘all of the above’,” he said. “So who cares? By 2030, we’ll forget the whole concept, it will become so complicated.”

Even deciding on what terms to use for each race is challenging. This year, some people object to “Negro” being on the census. All three options of African-American, black, or negro are on this census, but “negro” is offensive to some. The Census Bureau’s position is that advisory groups informed the bureau that some people identify themselves with that label, Gillapsy said.

But doing away with documenting race is also problematic. To document things like discrimination, there has to be some kind of identifying characteristic to figure out who is being affected. “If measuring race is less important,” Gillaspy asked, “what do we measure?”