Latinos may be tempted \u2013 again — to avoid choosing a racial identity in the census, but if they don\u00b4t, someone will, says USC Geographer Manuel Pastor<\/p>\n
By Pilar Marrero<\/p>\n
La Opinion, Ethnic Media Services<\/p>\n
In the 2010 Census, 53% of Latinos chose the \u201cwhite\u201d option for the question about race and 43% chose \u201cother races,\u201d leading professor Manuel Pastor (Sociology and American Studies, University of Southern California) to wonder out loud in a published article: \u201cAre Latinos really turning white?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, 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?\u201d he wrote in 2014.<\/p>\n
In a recent interview, as he had in his research back then, Pastor pointed to the questions as the likely culprit, not the answers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a growing sense that the questions being asked of people regarding race and ethnicity were not the right questions to ask,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And in the year 2020, this is happening again, he says.<\/p>\n
This year, the Trump administration decided to drop a question that they had extensively tested and that would improve the gathering of data, particularly for Latinos, in the 2020 Census.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was one of the few questions they had thoroughly tested,\u201d Pastor said in a recent interview, referring to a combined \u201corigin and race\u201d question that would take the place of two questions, one for Hispanic origin and one for race, which had yielded a lot of confusion in the 2000 and 2010 censuses.<\/p>\n
Instead, the Trump administration sought to add a question they had not tested at all, the citizenship question — now excluded from this census due to Supreme Court intervention.<\/p>\n
In both cases, the administration\u2019s decision would have the same result: depressing the Latino numbers. Pastors says he can\u00b4t reach that conclusion but he makes the observation that both things are true.<\/p>\n
He himself confesses marking \u201cother races,\u201d after self-identifying as a Hispanic in previous census. Pastor is of Cuban origin but he hardly sees himself as white, the race that\u00b4s assumed in the United States. \u201cI think the longer Latinos are in the United States, the less white they feel and the more they feel they are the other.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Research in this area indicates that many new immigrants might be confused by U.S. racial categories and then mark \u201cother\u201d because nothing fits. Pastor\u00b4s own research shows that, controlling for other factors, \u201cthe more time you spend in America, the less likely you are to think you are white.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u00b4s the recommendation for Latinos filling out the census regarding the racial question? Nobody can tell you how to self-identify, activists agree, but Pastor and others seem to believe that leaving the question blank is not the way to go.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public service message is to answer ALL nine questions with as much accuracy as possible,\u201d Pastor said. \u201cIf you say you are Hispanic but don\u00b4t choose a race, the U.S. Census Bureau will do it for you. They use \u2018imputation,\u2019 looking at similar people around where you live, age, sex, ethnicity and they \u2018impute\u2019 something is missing. The more people don\u00b4t mark, the less information they got.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that may skew the results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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