Ethnicity & the boundaries of race: Rereading Directive 15

Daedalus

Volumn 134, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 61-69

  Hattam, Victoria ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21744440244     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124352     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. See "Directive No. 15, Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting," Federal Register 48 (87) (May 4, 1978): 19269 - 19270.
2. The directive is accessible electronically as an appendix in "Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity," Federal Register 59 (June 9, 1994): 29834 - 29835. All citations to the directive will be to the 1994 reprint.
3. I use the term 'Hispanic' throughout because this was the term initially adopted by the OMB. The OMB did not use the term 'Latino' until the 1997 revision of the directive.
4. The federal interagency Committee on Education was established in June of 1974. The committee's report, published in April of 1975, lays out almost all the features later promulgated by the OMB in Directive 15. For the directive's history, see "Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity," 29831 - 29832;
5. Barry Edmonston, Joshua Goldstein, and Juanita Tamayo Lott, eds., Spotlight on Heterogeneity: The Federal Standards for Racial and Ethnic Classification (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996);
6. Katherine K. Wallman, "Data on Race and Ethnicity: Revising the Federal Standard," The American Statistician 52 (1) (February 1998): 31-33.
7. For useful secondary sources on the directive, see Michael Omi, "Racial Identity and the State: The Dilemmas of Classification," Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 25 (1) (1997): 7-23;
8. Margo J. Anderson and Stephen E. Fienberg, Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999);
9. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, postscript (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
10. Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000);
11. Clara E. Rodriguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
12. Peter Skerry, Counting on the Census: Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000);
13. Darryl Fears, "The Roots of 'Hispanic': 1975 Committee of Bureaucrats Produced Designation," The Washington Post, October 15, 2003, A21.
14. The five OMB race categories post 1997 are "American Indian or Alaskan Native," "Asian," "Black or African American," "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander," and "White." The 1997 revision also allowed respondents to "check one or more" races for the first time. However, the 1997 revisions did not change the distinction between race and ethnicity. See "Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Data on Race and Ethnicity," Federal Register 62 (210) (October 30,1997): 58781 -58790.
15. See Directive 15, 29834.
16. The directive defines each of the categories in terms of origins: American Indians or Alaskan Natives are said to have "origins in any of the original peoples of North America"; blacks to have "origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa"; whites to have "origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East"; and Hispanics to be persons of "Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." (Note that the category 'black' is the only one in which the directive explicitly refers to race.) The directive allows for more detailed categories than these, but they must be "organized in such a way that the additional categories can be aggregated into these basic racial categories." See Directive 15, 29834.
17. I b i d.
18. See Victoria Hattam, "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy," in Nancy Foner and George Fredrickson, eds., Not Just Black and White (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
19. For a powerful critique of the category 'Hispanic,' see Martha E. Gimenez, "Latino/'Hispanic' - Who Needs a Name? The Case Against a Standardized Terminology," International Journal of Health Services 19 (3) (1989); 557-571.
20. For an early defense of the category, see Marta Tienda and Vilma Ortiz, "'Hispanicity' and the 1980 Census," Social Science Quarterly 67 (1) (March 1986): 3-20.
21. See Executive Order 8802, Federal Register 6 (June 27, 1941): 3109;
22. Executive Order 9346, Fed. Reg. 8 (May 29, 1943): 7183;
23. Executive Order 9980, Fed. Reg. 13 (July 28, 1948): 4311;
24. Executive Order 9981, Fed. Reg. 13 (July 28, 1948): 4313;
25. Executive Order 10308, Fed. Reg. 16 (January 4, 1951): 12303;
26. Executive Order 10479, Fed. Reg. 18 (August 18, 1953): 4899;
27. Executive Order 10925, Fed. Reg. 26 (March 8, 1961): 1977;
28. Executive Order 11246, Fed. Reg. 30 (September 28, 1965): 12319.
29. The Subcommittee on Minority Education produced a 1973 report that called for the creation of common definitions of racial and ethnic groups, which Casper Weinberger took up for further action. See Federal Register 59 (110) (June 9, 1994): 29831.
30. See also Lau v. Nichols 414 U.S. 563 (1974).
31. For an overview of language policy, see Ronald Schmidt, Sr., Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
32. See Public Law 94-311 90 STAT. 688. The quotation is from Katherine K. Wallman, "Statistics for Americans of Spanish Origin or Descent," Statistical Reporter 78-5 (February 1978): 148.
33. See also Jeanne E. Griffith, "Update on Statistics for Americans of Spanish Origin or Descent," Statistical Reporter (September 1980): 401-405.
34. See Federal Register 59 (110) (June 9, 1994): 29832;
35. Edmonston, Goldstein, and Lott, eds., Spotlight on Heterogeneity.
36. For the 1997 standards, see "Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Data on Race and Ethnicity."
37. For an overview of the revision, see Suzann Evinger, "How Shall We Measure Our Nation's Diversity," Chance 8 (1) (1995): 7-14.
38. See Hattam, "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy."
39. Only 0.03 percent of the total population checked "some other race" in 1950, 0.01 percent in 1960, and 0.03 percent in 1970. That number jumped to 3 percent in 1980, 3.9 percent in 1990, and 5.6 percent in 2000 - almost a two-fold increase in the last two decades. See Nancy M. Gordon, "Race and Ethnicity Testing: Update and Discussion," handout distributed at May 2004 REAC meetings, Washington, D.C., p. 4.
40. For the Census Bureau's concern with imputation rates and current efforts to reduce them, see Gordon, "Race and Ethnicity Testing";
41. Elizabeth Martin, David Sheppard, Michael Bentley, and Claudette Bennett, "Results of 2003 National Census Test of Race and Hispanic Questions," U.S. Census Bureau, October 1, 2003.
42. For pretests planned for 2005 and 2006, see "Cognitive Questions for Nancy Gordon," handout distributed at the May REAC meetings.
43. The Race and Ethnicity Advisory Committee meetings began on the afternoon of May 4, but I was only able to attend on May 5 and 6.
44. After some negotiation, Seale agreed to serve on the Advisory Committee as long as the Bureau paid for his bodyguard. In the end, Seale did not take up the appointment because he had to go underground. For discussion of the Seale incident and the early Race Advisory Committee, see Barbara Milton and David Pemberton, "Oral History Interview with Vincent P. Barabba," August 7, 1989, 28-30. A transcript of the interview is available from the Census Bureau.
45. See Orlando Patterson, "Race by the Numbers," op-ed, The New York Times, May 8, 2001,
46. and the website of the National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian Latinos. For discussions of the fluidity of Hispanic party identification, see also Tamar Jacoby, "Republicans and Their Amigos," The Weekly Standard, November 25, 2002, 18.
47. For appeals to Hispanics as people of color, see Fernando Ferrer's "other New York" campaign in the Democratic primary for the New York mayoral race in 2001.
48. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).