The black population, now just over 13 percent, will grow, but slowly. The number of Latinos, however, will more than double, from 24 million in to almost 60 million in absent a complete change in immigration laws. The proportion of Asians will also double. A few states will be especially transformed.
And today, of 30 million Californians, 56 percent are white, 26 percent Latino, 10 percent Asian, and 7 percent black. These demographic changes may have less dramatic effects on U. For example, the proportion of voters who are white is much higher than the proportion of the population that is white in states such as California and Florida, and that disproportion is likely to continue for some decades. Second, some cities, states, and even whole regions will remain largely unaffected by demographic change.
Thus racial and ethnic politics below the national level will be quite variable, and even in the national government racial and ethnic politics will be diluted and constrained compared with the politics in states particularly affected by immigration.
Third, most Latino and Asian immigrants are eager to learn English, to become Americans, and to be less insulated in ethnic communities, so their basic political framework may not differ much from that of native-born Americans.
Finally, there are no clear racial or ethnic differences on many political and policy issues; the fault lines lie elsewhere. For example, in the Washington Post survey mentioned earlier, whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians showed similar levels of support for congressional action to limit tax breaks for business under 40 percent , balance the budget over 75 percent , reform Medicare about 55 percent , and cut personal income taxes about 50 percent.
Somewhat more variation existed in support for reforming the welfare system around 75 percent support and limiting affirmative action around a third. The only issue that seriously divided survey participants was increased limits on abortion: 24 percent support among Asian Americans, 50 percent support among Latinos, and 35 percent and 32 percent support among whites and blacks respectively.
Other surveys show similar levels of inter-ethnic support for proposals to reduce crime, balance the federal budget, or improve public schooling. But when political disputes and policy choices are posed, as they frequently are, along lines that allow for competition among racial or ethnic groups, the picture looks quite different.
But Latinos split evenly 42 percent to 40 percent over whether to award African Americans or themselves this dubious honor. The same pattern appears in more specific questions about discrimination. Blacks are consistently more likely to see bias against their own race than against others in treatment by police, portrayals in the media, the criminal justice system, promotion to management positions, and the ability to get mortgages and credit loans.
Latinos are split between blacks and their own group on all these questions, whereas whites see roughly as much discrimination against all three of the nonwhite groups and Asians vary across the issues. Perhaps the most telling indicator of the coming complexity in racial and ethnic politics is a National Conference survey asking representatives of the four major ethnic groups which other groups share the most and the least in common with their own group.
According to the survey, whites feel most in common with blacks, who feel little in common with whites. Blacks feel most in common with Latinos, who feel least in common with them. Latinos feel most in common with whites, who feel little in common with them. Asian Americans feel most in common with whites, who feel least in common with them.
Each group is running after another that is fleeing from it. If these results hold up in political activity, then American racial and ethnic politics in the 21st century are going to be interesting, to say the least. Attitudes toward particular policy issues show even more clearly the instability of racial and ethnic coalitions. But black Americans place more value than whites and Hispanics on workplace diversity and school integration.
Opinions on these issues also vary considerably along party lines, with Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to express positive views of the importance and impact of racial and ethnic diversity. This is the case even after taking into account the differences in the racial composition of the two parties. This survey includes an oversample of Asian respondents, for a total sample size of Asians.
The sample includes English-speaking Asians only and, therefore, may not be representative of the overall U. Asian adult population overall. Despite this limitation, it is important to report the views of Asians on race relations and racial inequality, as well as their personal experiences with racial discrimination, as the U.
Asian population is growing faster than any other major racial or ethnic group. Measuring the attitudes of Asians on these topics is an important piece in understanding the state of race in America today. Asians are shown as a separate group when a question was asked of the full sample. We are also not able to analyze Asian respondents by demographic categories, such as gender, age or education. The link between education and views of diversity is less clear among Hispanics.
This view is widespread among Democrats, and particularly white and Hispanic Democrats. Among Republicans, half say the fact that the U. While most Americans say having a population that is racially and ethnically mixed enhances U.
Census Bureau projects will happen by the year These partisan differences remain when looking only at those who are white. Again, this partisan difference is nearly unchanged among whites. At the same time, it is increasingly doubtful that policies aimed at making America more inclusive will center, as they did in the s, on numerical remedies using statistical disparities as evidence of discrimination or on affirmative action.
Where, then, on the continuum from no numbers to only numbers will race-sensitive policy be fashioned? Two factors feature in an answer to this question. First, the demand for recognition, choice, and identity expression as heralded by the multiple-race advocates will continue to reverberate in statistical policy-making, especially as new immigrant groups find political voice.
This will lead less to claims for strict statistical proportionality than to demands for visibility and representation. New African immigrants will point to their growing population numbers and ask why they are not better represented in political office. And so forth. Second, there remains a key question that reliable statistics alone can answer rigorously: How well are different groups doing? Here the focus increasingly will turn from large to smaller groups.
These groups are not large on the national scene, but they cluster in ways that make them noticeable in many towns and cities across the country. It is in these local jurisdictions that questions arise regarding health care, performance in the classroom, and access to the ballot box.
Whether for purposes of self-expression or to detect barriers based on race, ancestry, ethnicity, or color, the United States will continue to have a racial and ethnic classification system. But is the one now in place the right one? There are sound reasons to hesitate before recommending measurement changes. Disrupting statistical series, especially in an area that has just had a disruption, is no small matter. Neither is the methodological challenge of assessing the consequences for data quality of even small changes, such as how a question is worded or where it is placed on a form.
I know that it is late in the day to expect a major change for the census. Relevant data can be collected without ever using the term that echoes a discredited eighteenth-century science that took physiological markers as indicative of moral worth and intellectual ability. Such a revised question would minimally disrupt statistical series. It would allow the government to enforce the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws that center on the classification.
Although the Census Bureau is presently field-testing five new formats for collecting race and ethnicity data in , the revision I am suggesting is not among them.
The revised question could be paired with a second, open-ended question 32 :. In the long run, this question or one similar to it should replace the race and ethnicity question altogether.
That change would truly reflect that these are matters of self-identification, and that self-identification is inconsistent with forcing people into prescribed categories.
But from the perspective of racial justice, it is premature to discard the official categories now used to administer antidiscrimination laws.
The open-ended question nevertheless points us to the policy frontiers of the twenty-first century. There remain strong reasons for official statistics that can detect patterns of discrimination, and our classification scheme needs to catch up with the ways in which discrimination occurs across a very diverse population.
Many thoughtful Americans, myself included, wish that antidiscrimination law were not necessary. We want a society that is truly color-blind. But if we are ever to create such a society, we need to know what is actually happening to various population groups across the country. Accepting inclusiveness as a central policy narrative for the nation requires statistics robust enough both to keep track of whether groups historically excluded are overcoming the legacy of official discrimination and to indicate whether more recently arrived groups are being unfairly held back.
More than two centuries after the Constitution started the nation down the road of racially classifying its population, there remain, unfortunately, compelling reasons to design the most policy-relevant classification scheme possible.
On moral and methodological grounds, the classification used in census can and should be improved. Winter Racial classification in America. Author Information. So where do we go from here? Endnotes 1 This essay has been prepared with support from the John D. MacArthur Foundation, which provided a grant for a working group on issues of racial measurement and classification.
Katherine Wallman and Susan Schechter, both of the Office of Management and Budget, commented on earlier versions of this essay, but have no responsibility for the recommendations advanced here. New York: Basic Books, , See also Katherine K.
Serial No. Government Printing Office, , , , , In August of , the government announced a further six-month delay before it could produce reporting guidelines for how agencies were to implement the standards. Other government surveys — even the Current Population Survey, the largest among them — cannot provide detailed racial breakdowns.
The author is an analyst in the racial statistics branch of the population division of the U. Census Bureau. Root, ed. Barack Obama and I have the same race — that is, physical characteristics.
We are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. In the meantime, the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is white, on occasion referred to herself as an African American, citing the fact that she was born to Portuguese parents in Mozambique. Pena , U. The format also discards the many subcategories that appeared on the census form in This requirement was made in response to the concerns of Hispanic advocacy organizations speaking for a constituency that resists being forced to select among the other five options.
Census Bureau, Census Evaluation B. The large Racial and Ethnic Targeted Test used an experimental design to test the effects of eight questionnaire formats on race and ethnicity. One of these formats combined the race and the ethnicity categories. As measured by nonresponse, a key indicator of data quality, the combined format outperformed all alternatives, and for many groups by a substantial margin.
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