I enjoyed this essay immensely. The nuance and complexity of race today doesn't lend itself to black and white (no pun intended) bright line distinctions. Race is no longer a social construction (cue the one-drop rule). Instead and in the year 2024, there are innumerable variations of race and/or ethnicity. I have a distant cousin who I first thought was white. When I learned he was the descendant of free blacks in America, I perceived him as black. He eventually disabused me of my visceral desire to place a race/ethnic label on him. He self-identifies as a human being. How would the 2030 U.S. Census account for his human existence?
What does it mean to be recorded as "black" on the 2030 U.S. Census? Suppose one's great grandmother was born black in Louisiana but passed for white in New York State? Does the census permit this person to self-identify as white? Multi-racial? Black under the one-drop rule? I am zeroing in on self-identity of race and ethnicity, not social construction.
Here's another example -- me. When I was born, I was assigned the race "Colored" by the state of Virginia. I grew up in 92% to 95% white public suburban schools in the post-Jim Crow era. I have retired now from Blackness since I do not define black identity as dogma and slogan words. How should I self-identify on the 2030 U.S. Census and be authentic to my self identity? I have more in common with white suburban southerners and my genetic heritage is not mono racial. Would the 2030 Census allow me to check two or more races and/or multi-racial?
Suppose a young woman is half black and half white. She identifies as half white privileged and half black. Would the 2030 U.S. Census permit this woman to check the two races box? The multiracial box? Just questions I have for the essayist and commentators. Thanks for your words on a fascinating topic. We must accommodate the growing trend of fluid identity when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Whatever Blackness means today, it shares very little with the meaning and definition of Blackness in the 1790 U.S. Census. The trend of fluid identity will continue to accelerate in the 2030s and 2040s. Self-identity falls along a spectrum.
Based on my understanding, the answers to most of your questions are "yes". The census allows people to self-identify any of the choices they present, or even write in another option. And they've increasingly allowed people to pick multiple categories. If a person wanted to, they could probably pick every single race and ethnic box and then write in a few more.
I clicked on your Substack and enjoyed reading it, btw.
Seems like there's still just tremendous confusion between the concepts of "race" and "ethnicity". MENA being a subcategory of white, rather than it's own identity, is solidly rooted in the ideologies of racism that generated American Slavery, Jim Crow, etc, that required these umbrella racial categories to be cobbled together from ethnic groupings.
But yet we still think about white, asian or black as "racial categories", when in reality, at best they are groupings of many ethnicities, some of which fit relatively comfortably and reasonably into their census grouping (maybe for example, Black immigrants from Jamaica, or a White immigrant from the UK) but many of which don't.
MENA is under discussion because of that misfit, but others are very numerous. A short list off the top of my head includes: Mestizos from LatAm and Pardos from Brazil, Afghan refugees, immigrants from the Caucuses and much of Western Asian, Somalis and Ethiopians, the Amish, etc... The grouping of South Asian ancestry with East Asian is especially clumsy and looks increasingly silly as time goes by.
The social construct of race is never going to account for these diverse identities in a realistic way. And it's not needed to! If a person wants to, for example, account for harms done due to redlining or slavery, then what you want to know is if a person or their ancestors were harmed by those policies. If instead what you want to do is counter name-based resume discrimination, then people with distinctly "Black" names and people with Somali names need to be accounted for differently, based on the realities facing their ethnic groups, not based on their "race". If a researcher, journalist or intellectual wants to group Somalis and American Descendants of Slavery into one category for whatever their purpose it, they should be able to, but we don't need to force people into these categories right at the data collection stage.
Are you saying we should have no categories or way more categories? or that talking about categories misses the point if we are talking about the goals or programs we are trying to achieve
Mostly, more, but I think I'm trying to say something a little more subtle. The concept of "White" and "Black" as **both** race and ethnicity is really broken. We're used to race and ethnicity being interchangeable because for so much of our history, white and especially black (races) were interchangeable for White and Black (ethnicities). But even that is changing, especially as black immigrants without any direct connection to Jim Crow or prior become a larger and larger part of the black population.
So I'm saying that it's increasingly less true that your race explains your ethnicity, and that's why MENA is going to be it's own category. It's why they added Hispanic as an ethnic overlay on top of Race in the census, and it's why "White" leaves something to be desired if it's going to group you and an Amish person together, and "Black" really lacks something when it groups Somali refugees in North Dakota with Black people in the former Cotton area of Georgia.
So yes, my remedy is to do a better job of matching census categories to the socially relevant identities that impact people's lives. MENA should probably be a category.
Amish should probably be a category. Maybe Muslim should? Let the people decide what aspect of their identity defines them. Do American Indians think of themselves as a racial category or mainly in tribal belonging terms? I think it's more of the latter, but the way to know is to give the choice on the census.
There's room for a concept of race in here, too, separate from ethnicity. But it should probably be used in a secondary way, as Hispanic is now. So for example, it could ask for ethnicity and additionally ask "do you consider yourself racially African, European, South Asian, mixed, etc...).
The question is not just how or as what someone identifies/defines/sees/considers themselves, but perhaps even more so, what this person associates or connects with this designation or self-declaration. For example, do I associate the designation "white" in some way or various ways with being better than many or all people of other category designations? Or do I associate "being white" with the thought or fact that I am undeservedly and unfairly – whether I want it or not – enormously privileged and advantaged? Naturally, even regarding "white", many other considerations and identifications (beside the in the end insignifikant skin color) are possible, and even more so, what associations all other people have with their identifications and self-declarations.
I enjoyed this essay immensely. The nuance and complexity of race today doesn't lend itself to black and white (no pun intended) bright line distinctions. Race is no longer a social construction (cue the one-drop rule). Instead and in the year 2024, there are innumerable variations of race and/or ethnicity. I have a distant cousin who I first thought was white. When I learned he was the descendant of free blacks in America, I perceived him as black. He eventually disabused me of my visceral desire to place a race/ethnic label on him. He self-identifies as a human being. How would the 2030 U.S. Census account for his human existence?
What does it mean to be recorded as "black" on the 2030 U.S. Census? Suppose one's great grandmother was born black in Louisiana but passed for white in New York State? Does the census permit this person to self-identify as white? Multi-racial? Black under the one-drop rule? I am zeroing in on self-identity of race and ethnicity, not social construction.
Here's another example -- me. When I was born, I was assigned the race "Colored" by the state of Virginia. I grew up in 92% to 95% white public suburban schools in the post-Jim Crow era. I have retired now from Blackness since I do not define black identity as dogma and slogan words. How should I self-identify on the 2030 U.S. Census and be authentic to my self identity? I have more in common with white suburban southerners and my genetic heritage is not mono racial. Would the 2030 Census allow me to check two or more races and/or multi-racial?
Suppose a young woman is half black and half white. She identifies as half white privileged and half black. Would the 2030 U.S. Census permit this woman to check the two races box? The multiracial box? Just questions I have for the essayist and commentators. Thanks for your words on a fascinating topic. We must accommodate the growing trend of fluid identity when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Whatever Blackness means today, it shares very little with the meaning and definition of Blackness in the 1790 U.S. Census. The trend of fluid identity will continue to accelerate in the 2030s and 2040s. Self-identity falls along a spectrum.
Based on my understanding, the answers to most of your questions are "yes". The census allows people to self-identify any of the choices they present, or even write in another option. And they've increasingly allowed people to pick multiple categories. If a person wanted to, they could probably pick every single race and ethnic box and then write in a few more.
I clicked on your Substack and enjoyed reading it, btw.
Seems like there's still just tremendous confusion between the concepts of "race" and "ethnicity". MENA being a subcategory of white, rather than it's own identity, is solidly rooted in the ideologies of racism that generated American Slavery, Jim Crow, etc, that required these umbrella racial categories to be cobbled together from ethnic groupings.
But yet we still think about white, asian or black as "racial categories", when in reality, at best they are groupings of many ethnicities, some of which fit relatively comfortably and reasonably into their census grouping (maybe for example, Black immigrants from Jamaica, or a White immigrant from the UK) but many of which don't.
MENA is under discussion because of that misfit, but others are very numerous. A short list off the top of my head includes: Mestizos from LatAm and Pardos from Brazil, Afghan refugees, immigrants from the Caucuses and much of Western Asian, Somalis and Ethiopians, the Amish, etc... The grouping of South Asian ancestry with East Asian is especially clumsy and looks increasingly silly as time goes by.
The social construct of race is never going to account for these diverse identities in a realistic way. And it's not needed to! If a person wants to, for example, account for harms done due to redlining or slavery, then what you want to know is if a person or their ancestors were harmed by those policies. If instead what you want to do is counter name-based resume discrimination, then people with distinctly "Black" names and people with Somali names need to be accounted for differently, based on the realities facing their ethnic groups, not based on their "race". If a researcher, journalist or intellectual wants to group Somalis and American Descendants of Slavery into one category for whatever their purpose it, they should be able to, but we don't need to force people into these categories right at the data collection stage.
Are you saying we should have no categories or way more categories? or that talking about categories misses the point if we are talking about the goals or programs we are trying to achieve
Mostly, more, but I think I'm trying to say something a little more subtle. The concept of "White" and "Black" as **both** race and ethnicity is really broken. We're used to race and ethnicity being interchangeable because for so much of our history, white and especially black (races) were interchangeable for White and Black (ethnicities). But even that is changing, especially as black immigrants without any direct connection to Jim Crow or prior become a larger and larger part of the black population.
So I'm saying that it's increasingly less true that your race explains your ethnicity, and that's why MENA is going to be it's own category. It's why they added Hispanic as an ethnic overlay on top of Race in the census, and it's why "White" leaves something to be desired if it's going to group you and an Amish person together, and "Black" really lacks something when it groups Somali refugees in North Dakota with Black people in the former Cotton area of Georgia.
So yes, my remedy is to do a better job of matching census categories to the socially relevant identities that impact people's lives. MENA should probably be a category.
Amish should probably be a category. Maybe Muslim should? Let the people decide what aspect of their identity defines them. Do American Indians think of themselves as a racial category or mainly in tribal belonging terms? I think it's more of the latter, but the way to know is to give the choice on the census.
There's room for a concept of race in here, too, separate from ethnicity. But it should probably be used in a secondary way, as Hispanic is now. So for example, it could ask for ethnicity and additionally ask "do you consider yourself racially African, European, South Asian, mixed, etc...).
The question is not just how or as what someone identifies/defines/sees/considers themselves, but perhaps even more so, what this person associates or connects with this designation or self-declaration. For example, do I associate the designation "white" in some way or various ways with being better than many or all people of other category designations? Or do I associate "being white" with the thought or fact that I am undeservedly and unfairly – whether I want it or not – enormously privileged and advantaged? Naturally, even regarding "white", many other considerations and identifications (beside the in the end insignifikant skin color) are possible, and even more so, what associations all other people have with their identifications and self-declarations.