More on The White Latino Question: The Meaning 

of Selecting "Some Other Race"?

CONTENTS

* "The Census Bureau's Racial Straitjacket" By Amitai Etzioni, Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2014)

* "Latino Whiteness? They're Asking the Wrong Question" By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (May 22, 2014)

* "Are Latinos Really Turning White? By Manuel Pastor, Huffington Post (May 29, 2014)

* "Pinpointing Another Reason That More Hispanics Are Identifying as White" By Nate Cohn, New York Times (June 2, 2014)

Opinion

The Census Bureau's Racial Straitjacket

In the 2010 survey, 53% of Hispanics said they were white. The next census may not let them.

By Amitai Etzioni

Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2014)

Earlier this month at a meeting of the Population Association of America, researchers presented preliminary findings that more than two million Hispanics changed their racial classification to "white" in the 2010 census from "some other race" in 2000. Overall, according to official data, 53% of Hispanics classified themselves as white in 2010.

Yet for 2020 the Census Bureau is considering racializing the constellation of Hispanic ethnicities. The current population survey asks if a person is of "Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin" and states that "Hispanic origins are not races." Then another question presents individuals with a range of racial categories, including white, black, or "some other race" to choose from. For the 2020 survey, the Census Bureau proposes a single question about a person's race or origin. Among the racial categories to choose from is "Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin."

This would be damaging. Racial categories are considered immutable, biologically determined and have often enough served as the basis of mutual hate and distrust. In contrast, ethnic categories are considered a normal part of Americana-most of us have some kind of ethnic "hyphen." We are Polish-American, German-American, and so on and on. Americans consider that kind of ethnic diversity culturally enriching.

News media already are beginning to refer to Hispanics in explicit racial terms. An April 8, 2014, San Francisco Bay Guardian article is headlined "Report details how brown and black communities are decimated, step by step"-although the report, about gentrification, actually deals with "the Latino and African American communities." More often, Hispanics are treated as a race implicitly through their inclusion in a racial lineup such as "Blacks, Hispanics More Optimistic than Whites" (Associated Press, Aug. 1, 2013), or "Will Today's Hispanics Be Tomorrow's Whites?" (Slate, April 15, 2014).

The Census has for many years taken a very enlightened position on racial categories in its population surveys. Since 1970, individuals have been free to declare their own racial and ethnic identity (until 1950, census surveyors marked a person's race as they saw fit, and in 1960 some people were allowed to choose). In recent years Americans have even been able to state that they belong to several races or refuse to be boxed in by marking "other." This approach is particularly commendable since historically, prejudice was often based on other people imputing racial affiliation to Americans. The Deep South used to believe that if an individual had even one drop of black blood he was to be treated as black, regardless of his skin color or the way he viewed himself.

Race data from the Census also are used to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, draw political districts and enforce a variety of civil rights laws. And so the more Hispanics define themselves as white-the less money and affirmative action advantages might flow their way.

Since 2010 the Census Bureau has used statistical procedures to modify the data in its survey, assigning a specific race to each person who ticked the "some other race" box. The bureau then issues a "Modified Race Data" file to be used for the purposes of disbursement of funds and affirmative action, although keeping the original statistics of the choices people themselves made. In effect, it keeps two sets of books.

Other than the distribution of public funds and the drawing of congressional districts, does any of this matter? I think it does. The changes proposed for the 2020 census affirm and further encourage the media to racialize Hispanics, and many colleges use Census categories in their admissions policies. If the Census Bureau is allowed to proceed, it will increase divisiveness when what we need is more community building.

Hispanics-who are set to make up close to 18% (60 million people) of the U.S. population by 2020-are a diverse group of people with varying ethnic ancestries. Trying to shoehorn them into a single racial category would be a step backward for a country that, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., strives to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Mr. Etzioni is a professor of international affairs and director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University.

Latino Whiteness? 

They're Asking the Wrong Question

By Victor Landa

NewsTaco (May 22, 2014)

Here's a fact: In the 2010 Census many Latinos, given the option, chose to identify as "white," as opposed to black or Asian. Other Latinos chose to identify as "other," then wrote-in a more specific identity based on their (or their family's) country of origin. The Pew Research Center took a deep-dive into these choices and earlier this month released a study that parsed the numbers and took a stab a some conclusions.

Whiteness dazzles

Since then, the idea of Latino "whiteness" has captivated demographers, social scientists, writers and pundits.  Each has approached the Latino Census choice as if it were a phenomenon to be observed at arm's-length, a snapshot to be critiqued. They all seem to be dazzled by the idea that  2.5 million Latinos changed their identity from "some other race" in the 2000 census to "white" in 2010. About half as many, 1.2 million, changed in the opposite direction.

The back and forth switch from white to other and back to white again has generated a stack of theories about why Latinos do what they do: assimilation, education, citizenship, generational differences - all delivered, more than likely, with the appropriate furrowed brow and authoritative air.

Has anyone bothered to ask Latinos?

For Latinos, though, there's nothing dazzling about it, and if  the writers and demographers were to ask Latinos why, they'd be much closer to the real story behind "Latino whiteness."

Latinos have been thinking about this for decades, but not because we have identity issues. Latinos think and talk about identity because marketers and politicians have been hell-bent on stuffing us into a box for their purposes, and official Census forms keep asking the question. In this sense, Latino identity is not about how we see ourselves, but about how we think we fit into prefabricated boxes, because we've been asked to decide. These are not choices we'd make for ourselves.

The fact that 3.7 out of the 35 million Latinos in the U.S. (in 2000) changed their minds from one decade to another tells me more about the available official options than it does about Latino identity. There's an intent in the Census race question to fit everyone living in the United States into a tired black-white paradigm, the tricky thing is that the intent is disguised in an attempt to define diversity.

The idea is "you can be Hispanic, but you must decide if you're white Hispanic, black Hispanic or other Hispanic."

Latino identity is a living thing.

It changes, if you ask, because it's many things at the same time.

Maybe that's the problem. Diversity, all men being equal and all that, by definition defies strict parsing. It makes little sense to those being parsed, but feels important to the furrowed brows doing the parsing. The findings are only good until 2020, when a new batch of choices will spark a new batch of dazzled writers and pundits and scientists.

The Future is Meztizo.

In 1984 Virgilio Elizondo wrote a prophetic book titled "The Future is Meztizo." It was republished in 2000 with an introduction by David Carrasco. If you want a better idea as to why Latinos change their minds about identity, read how Carrasco began his introduction:

We are entering the Brown Millennium. By Brown millennium I mean the type of hopeful and complex change summoned by the poet Paul Celan when he wrote

Speak

But keep yes and no unsplit

And give your say this meaning

Give it the shade

No more the color line as the only defining symbol of race and culture in this country. No more the border line as the primary defining political scar between Latin America and the United States.

The problem isn't that Latinos change their minds. The truth is that Latinos are opening a new way of thinking, and it doesn't fit the official forms.

The Blog

Are Latinos Really Turning White?

By Manuel Pastor

Huffington Post (May 29, 2014)

Writing for The New York Times, Nate Cohn recently reported that more Hispanics are identifying as white. The piece -- which even includes a cute graphic in which a (presumably Latino) man steps from one square to another, miraculously becomes white, and then rises up to the sky -- suggests that this may be "new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish...."

That's interesting (and colorful), to be sure. But as I often tell my data staff, when you discover a surprising fact, you could be on to something -- but you could also just be wrong.

Cohn's analysis is actually a few steps removed, which may explain part of the problem. He bases his discussion on a summary offered by the Pew Research Center, which was in turn reporting on a presentation given at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America.

The underlying research is novel in several ways, one of which is that it links individual answers on the 2000 Census with the answers those same individuals gave when administered the Census in 2010.

It turns out that 2.5 million Americans who marked Hispanic and "some other race" in 2000 indicated that they were Hispanic and white a decade later; while another 1.3 million people flipped the other way, it's still a large net gain -- about 3.5 percent of the Latino population in the year 2000.

So what happened? Perhaps assimilation is indeed alive and well? Maybe the racial threats posed by anti-immigrant rhetoric led some Hispanics to become defensively white? Maybe it's young people who became adults over the course of the decade and finally got a chance to choose their identity rather than have it chosen by the head of their household?

Or maybe the question changed.

That actually seems like the most likely culprit. Demographers have already been aware of the rise in the share of Latinos identifying as white: In the 2000 Census, 48 percent of Latinos identified as white, while in 2010, 53 percent chose that tag. Of course, after a full decade of migration, births, and deaths, those could be very different people -- and that's precisely why the linked record analysis is so interesting.

But you have to ask the same questions. In general, the Census asks two general questions: First, are you Hispanic? And second, what race are you? There's also a specific admonition to the respondent to answer both the questions being asked. And what was different in 2010 was the inclusion of a line -- in bold type -- saying, "For this census, Hispanic origins are not races."

The addition of that phrase could have pushed Latinos into skipping the "other" category and choosing one of the predefined groups -- sort of like whitening through reworking the data rather than the reality. That was, in fact, part of the motivation: The Census wanted what it thought would be a more accurate race count. But could a simple bolded -- albeit nuanced -- statement have really made such a large difference?

One way to examine the issue is to look at American Community Survey (ACS), an annual sample administered by the Census. The yearly ACS has taken the place of what used to be called the long-form census, an instrument that collected in-depth socioeconomic data every decade. There, the question switch -- that is, the addition of the bolded message about racial identification -- occurred in 2008.

So how did the answers in the 2008 ACS compare with those in 2007? While this is not quite as good as individually linked records, one suspects that it's close -- some Latinos died, some were born, and some migrated, but surely the populations were fairly similar in the two concurrent years.

As it turns out, in 2008, the share of Latinos identifying as white in the ACS went up by over eight percentage points -- twice as much as the net shift shown in the linked record analysis for 2000 and 2010. It's hard to think of anything happening that year that would have driven up whiteness quite that quickly -- except for the change in the question.

To be clear, the researchers who made the original presentation were careful to clarify that they were reporting, not interpreting, the numbers, and the commentary by Pew also noted that it could have been a change in the question (something Pew also noted in past postings). That didn't prevent reporters, including at MSNBC and Slate as well as at The New York Times, from speculating on the changing meaning of race for Latinos in America.

I've actually looked at the issue in some detail, most recently in work with my colleague, Laura Pulido. The article, published in American Quarterly, examined how Latinos in Southern California mark their racial identification answers in the ACS.

We're geographers -- so we were particularly interested in whether living in a suburb had a "whitening" effect. (In fact, the paper was title "Where in the World Is Juan -- and What Color is He?") But because housing location is associated with income and education, we used a technique called multivariate logistic regression that tried to control for the impacts of all the variables at the same time.

And before you even ask: We only used data from 2008 to 2010 -- all years after the bolded directions made their way in to the question -- partly because we saw the big jump in the underlying data.

Suburban location was indeed associated with Latinos identifying as white, and this was on top of factors that also pushed in that direction, such as age, income, education, and English ability. But our most novel result may have involved the recency of migration.

Much of the previous work in this area has suggested that new immigrants might be confused by U.S. racial categories and so mark "other"; with more time in country, they will settle into being white. But our regressions indicated that, controlling for other factors, the more time you spend in America, the less likely you are to think you're white.

In our view, there may be something about being "othered" by the society that drives Latino racial identification away from rather than toward whiteness. All this seems relevant in light of the current heated debates about immigration, particularly in places like Arizona and Alabama (and even Congress).

In any case, to those who follow the discussion of race -- and to the raft of colleagues that sent me a note about the piece by Cohn -- a more nuanced understanding of the data and the questions being asked would probably lead one away from a breathless conclusion that a new and fundamental shift in Latino assimilation is occurring.

And for the record, I marked Latino and "other" both years. I value consistency in my answers as well as in the questions.

Manuel Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies, University of Southern California

Follow Manuel Pastor on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Prof_MPastor

The Upshot | Demographic Shift

Pinpointing Another Reason That More Hispanics Are Identifying as White

By Nate Cohn

New York Times (June 2, 2014)

Recently, I wrote about new research that showed that a net 1.2 million Hispanics changed their racial identification from "some other race" to "white" between the 2000 and 2010 censuses.

Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of Southern California, added an important detail to the story. Between 2000 and 2010, the census question on race and ethnicity changed in a subtle way.

The salient difference is the second line of the "Note" preceding the two questions on race and ethnicity. The 2010 census prefaces the otherwise identical questions with the statement: "For this census, Hispanic origins are not races." The 2000 census offered no such clarification. Both questionnaires offered the "some other race" option at the bottom. The instruction could have led some Hispanics, who otherwise might have checked "some other race" because they thought their race was "Hispanic," to switch their answer to "white."

Mr. Pastor offers evidence to demonstrate the effect of the question change: the shift in white identification in the American Community Survey, a continuing longform survey conducted by the census. In 2008, the A.C.S. started using the same question that would later appear on the 2010 census; between the 2007 and 2008 A.C.S., the white share of the Hispanic population increased from 53.8 percent to 62.4 percent.

That 8-point increase in white identification in just one year strongly suggests that the question change led many Hispanics to alter their answer on the race question.

The question, then, is how much of the change between the 2000 and 2010 censuses it explains. Mr. Pastor notes that an 8-point shift would exceed the 2.5 million Hispanics who shifted from "some other race" to "white" in the new study.

The 2010 Census form, left, told respondents that "Hispanic origins are not races." The 2000 form did not.

But it is difficult to make an exact comparison between the A.C.S. and the census on this matter. The A.C.S. offers far different estimates for the racial composition of the Hispanic population than the census: In 2010, for instance, the A.C.S. said that 64 percent of Hispanics were white; the census said 53 percent of Hispanics were white. That's because the A.C.S. doesn't weight its sample of Hispanics to match census results, and the A.C.S. has far lower response rates than the census.

Aside from these survey-methodology details, there is other evidence that the white share of the Hispanic population has increased. Even after the question change in the 2008 A.C.S., the white share of the Hispanic population steadily increased every survey. In 2012, 65.6 percent of Hispanics identified as white, up from 62.3 percent in 2008.

That's a rate of 8.1 percentage points per decade. If this shift is due to changes in self-identification, then the answers in the 2000 census reflected about one-half change in attitude, one-half change in the questionnaire.

Based on the A.C.S. data, Mr. Pastor said, "there could be some effect where more are identified as white, but the shifts over time are hard to interpret," and added: "Year-to-year comparisons in the A.C.S. aren't the same as comparing individual respondents. It is possible, for instance, that the decline in Hispanic migrants in recent years has reduced the number of individuals who would otherwise identify as of 'some other race.'"

Many analyses of census data shows that Hispanics who call themselves white have higher levels of educational attainment, income and civil engagement than those who identify as some other race. A Pew Research report, drawing on these findings, concluded that Hispanics saw white racial identification as a "measure of belongingness."

Gabriel Sanchez, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico and a director of research for the polling group Latino Decisions, interpreted the upward swing in white identification as consistent with the possibility that well-assimilated Hispanics might become "for most social purposes, white."