Race on the 2010 census: Hispanics & the shrinking white majority

Daedalus

Volumn 134, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 42-52

  López, Ian Haney ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21644448464     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124479     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. U.S. Const., art. I, § 2, cl. 3.
2. Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 28, 44. The 1850 and 1860 censuses constitute partial exceptions: "white" did not appear on the census schedule, but enumerators were instructed "in all cases where a person is white [to] leave the space blank."
3. Quoted in Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York : New York University Press, 2000), 76.
4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Hispanic Population: Census 2000 Brief (May 2001), 2.
5. The population projections are taken from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Projections Program, Population Division, Projections of the Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Nativity: Middle Series, 2016 to 2020 〈http://www.census.gov./population/projections/nation/summary/np-t5-3. tx〉 (accessed January 13, 2000),
6. and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports: Population Projections of the United States by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1995 to 2050 (1996), 13.
7. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
8. On the census and Hispanics, see generally Rodríguez, Changing Race;
9. Sharon M. Lee, "Racial Classifications in the U.S. Census, 1890-1990," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1) (1993): 75-94, esp. 75, 78;
10. Jorge Chapa, "Hispanic/ Latino Ethnicity and Identifiers," in Margo J. Anderson, ed., Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2000);
11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790-1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970-1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States (September 2002), table 1.
12. Rodríguez, Changing Race, 102.
13. This discussion draws on census data analysis from John R. Logan, How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans (Albany, N.Y.: Lewis Mum-ford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, University at Albany), July 14, 2003.
14. Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002 National Survey of Latinos, Summa-ry of Findings (December 2002), 31. "What race do you consider yourself to be?" Posing this and a series of follow-up questions to nearly three thousand Latinos, this survey found that 56 percent of Hispanics consider themselves racially Latino, while only 20 percent accept a white racial identity.
15. Logan, How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans, 10.
16. See Kenneth Prewitt in this issue of Dædalus.
17. In 1996 the Census Bureau studied the effect of combining the race and ethnicity items while simultaneously allowing respondents to pick more than one identity. One result was that the number of Hispanics identifying as white fell to 13.7 percent; another was that the number choosing "other race" plummeted to 0.4 percent. Charles Hirschman, Richard Alba, and Reynolds Parley, "The Meaning and Measurement of Race in the US Census: Glimpses into the Future," Demography 37 (2000); 381, 389.
18. See generally Taunya Banks, "Colorism: A Darker Shade of Pale," UCLA Law Review 47 (2000): 1705-1746;
19. Trina Jones, "Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color," Duke Law Journal 49 (2000): 1487-1557.
20. George F. Will, "Race, Now an Anachronism," San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 2003.
21. Nathan Glazer, "Do We Need the Census Race Question?" Public Interest (Fall 2002): 21, 23.
22. Ibid., 22.
23. Ibid., 23.
24. See Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999);
25. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
26. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1950, Population Characteristics of the Population (1953), vol. 2, pt. 1, 35.
27. Quoted in Darryl Fears, "California Activist Seeks End to Identification by Race," The Washington Post, July 5, 2003, A1.
28. Glazer, "Do We Need the Census Race Question?" 23.
29. See also David Hollinger in this issue of Dædalus, as well as American Anthropological Association, "American Anthropological Association Response to OMB Directive 15: Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting" (September 1997), 〈www.aaanet.org/gvt/ ombdraft.htm〉.