In years past, the census has typically obtained race and ethnicity data through a separation of two concepts – race and Hispanic ethnicity. This caused much confusion, as even the definitions of what constitutes ‘race’ can be murky, and many people of Hispanic origin answered ‘other race’ as they did not particularly identify with any of the standard race categories.
The 2020 census combined the two concepts into a single question, and the results were sufficiently different from other tabulations (such as the American Community Survey), that we saw many an article written on the massive shifts in race and ethnicity between 2010 and 2020. Most of that was not a reflection of real change but was instead just a function of the new question style.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been working on some new definitions that will hopefully be of greater use moving forward. The White House issued a briefing in late March (OMB Publishes Revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity | OMB | The White House) and the new standards are detailed in the Federal Register (2024-06469.pdf (federalregister.gov)).
The new classification should result in Race/Origin tables that have the following entries:
- American Indian or Alaska Native
- Asian
- Black or African American
- Hispanic or Latino
- Middle Eastern or North African
- Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
- White
The proposed form of the question is:
There are a few problems here from a practical perspective, one of which is highlighted in the example itself – try writing ‘Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana’ in the space provided. Or, if you are like many, you have traced your roots back and can proudly proclaim that you are ‘German, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Iroquois’. The danger in the self-proclamation is that the coding will allow too many options that will dilute the value of the classification in the first place. A look across the northern border makes that apparent – the 2021 census of Canada reports persons of ‘Nova Scotian’ and ‘Cape Bretoner’ ancestry – and the Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia is certainly not distinguishable from an ancestral standpoint from the mainland of the province.
In general, we at AGS like the changes – more detail is always better, and the addition of the Middle Eastern/North African group makes good sense to us. The downside? You can expect incoming data for the next several years to sometimes reflect the new definitions, sometimes the old. Time series will be difficult without some modeling of the older census data. So, expect a touch of chaos in the next few years, but look forward to a better data series in the long run.
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