Rethinking US Census racial and ethnic categories for the 21st century

Abstract

Racial and ethnic categories in the US census have continually changed. In this paper, we address the question: How do high levels of immigration and a growing multiracial population challenge census racial and ethnic categories? We examined data from the 2000 Census 5 percent IPUMS to compare racial responses of native- and foreign-born Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners, and native-born multiracial Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners, by ancestry. The relationship between race and ancestry can be instructive. If people understand and identify with census racial categories, we expect considerable overlap between their reported race and ancestry. For some groups, including Europeans, Africans, and Middle Easterners (regardless of nativity) and foreign-born Asians, ancestry and race overlapped well. A serious challenge to current census racial categories is the large and growing numbers of people who reported Some Other Race (SOR) alone (primarily non-Cuban Hispanics) or in combination with another race (a diverse population that includes multiracial Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and Asians). One way of addressing this problem is to merge the current race and Hispanic questions, drop the SOR category, and add the ancestry question to the short-form census, changes that may more effectively meet statistical, government, and other needs.