Guesnerth Josué Perea perfectly remembers the answers he gave on the form for the last census carried out in the United States in 2020. Are you of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin? He checked “yes” and specified in the corresponding box that he is Colombian. What is your race? He selected “black.” He identified himself “clearly as an Afro-Latino of Colombian origin,” in his own words. But he is convinced that the federal government did not classify him as such, but rather counted him as a person of multiple races. “I know this because I indicated that I was born in Colombia, which they took as a race in itself, and then they saw that I also listed black, so they counted me as multiracial. That is, in the census data I do not appear as an Afro-Latino man,” he explains.
Perea, executive director of the Afro-Latino Forum, a research center focused on blackness within Latinidad, points out that the Census Bureau has been miscalculating the number of Afro-Latinos residing in the United States for at least two decades. According to the latest census data, there are only 1.2 million. However, the Pew study center puts them at 6 million people. This discrepancy is due to how the Government collects data on the community. Until a few months ago, Latinos had to answer two questions about their identity every time they filled out a federal questionnaire, as Perea did in 2020. They were first asked if they were Hispanic or Latino and then asked to choose a race: white , black, indigenous to the Americas, Asian or “some other.”
However, last March the Census Bureau announced that from now on Hispanic or Latino will be considered a race and ethnicity category, both in the upcoming 2030 census and in other questionnaires of this type. With the change, the two questions are consolidated into one: what is your race and/or ethnicity? Respondents will be able to choose from seven options: including Hispanic or Latino, black or white. The question adds that more than one box can be checked, although if only one is checked—for example, Hispanic or Latino—it will be considered a complete answer.
In announcing the new method, the Census Bureau explained that the change reflects the results of the 2020 census, in which the majority of Latinos did not identify their race as white, black or Asian and instead tended to choose the option of “some other race” or not answering the second question. Specifically, 42% of the 62 million Latinos surveyed in 2020 chose the “some other race” category. “Over the past several decades, the ‘some other race’ population has increased, largely driven by the increase in the Hispanic population who could not easily declare their Hispanic identity on the separate race question,” the federal agency said. Furthermore, the office justified itself by pointing out that several studies show that Latinos prefer to identify themselves simply by their ethnicity, not by their race.
The new standard was applauded by organizations that for years have advocated for a single category for Latinos, considering the two-part question an erroneous and confusing approach for Latinos. However, entities focused on Afro-Latinidad see it as a big failure. To begin with, they emphasize that race and ethnicity are two different concepts. They are not categories that can be used interchangeably in the same list, as the Census Bureau suggests. Nancy López, a sociologist and professor at the University of New Mexico and collaborator with the Afro-Latino Forum and the Afro Latino Coalition, explains the difference: “Race has to do with a person’s appearance, with physical traits such as skin color and age. hair texture. It is a social status. “Ethnicity has to do with the cultural heritage of our countries.”
The main problem, López points out, is that the Census Bureau, in its questionnaires, has never stopped to “clarify the difference” between both concepts. Therefore, the Latinos surveyed, whether Afro or not, have answered the question as best they could with the little information at hand. But that does not mean that Latinos are not aware of their racial identity, the expert emphasizes. “It’s not true that people don’t know their race,” she says. What is true, she adds, is that the Census Bureau has systematically attempted to manipulate Latino respondents by asking them questions without any explanation. López calls it “statistical gaslighting”.
A single question
Instead of keeping ethnicity and race separate and explaining the difference between the two questions, as many experts have been recommending for years, the Census Bureau chose to combine both concepts into a single question. Afro-Latina researchers like Tanya Katerí Hernández explain that the change will end up confusing people more. “When you put the option of Latino or Hispanic in the same list with racial categories, the Latino will think, ‘oh, those other categories are for English-speaking Americans. They don’t apply to me because my box is the Latino one and it’s separate,’” says Hernández, a professor at Fordham University Law School and author of the book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.
That is, many Latinos will check their box and no other, regardless of their race. They will do so because they will believe that the other racial categories do not include them. According to Hernández, when a Latino sees the white category on the census or another questionnaire of this type, he thinks it refers to “North American whites, the descendants of the first English-speaking settlers who arrived in America. Similarly, when they see black, they think it only refers to African Americans.” Therefore, this change will lead to the erasure of Afro-Latinos in statistics and an undervaluing of racial diversity within the Latino community.
“With this change, the Government seeks to discourage people from checking several boxes, even though the new question says that they can check all that apply. The framing of the question itself does not encourage it, so we are going to have less data on how race affects Latinos,” argues Hernández. “The previous census method, which kept Hispanic ethnicity separate from race, at least allowed us to get at the ways in which racism makes a difference within Latinidad. Because although we can all be exposed to ethnic discrimination, we are not all exposed to the same type of racial, skin color discrimination,” he adds.
Whether there is a question or two and how they are asked matters because census data, in addition to being a count of the country’s population, also reflects the discrimination faced by different groups and whether or not rights are protected. civilians. “These data help us understand if there is inequality when it comes to voting, if there is inequality in access to fair housing, whether or not there is discrimination in employment, if there is equal opportunity in education,” explains López. Furthermore, although the change in the categorization of ethnicity and race was made at the federal level, the effect goes further. Many researchers, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations use census numbers for various projects and campaigns.
For López, the ideal solution would be to have three different questions: Are you Latino or Hispanic? What country are you from? What is your race? “And specify that by race we refer to their social status, which has to do with their physical features, mainly their skin color, not with their cultural heritage,” adds the sociologist.
The problem with “some other race”
Between the 2010 and 2020 census, a total of 45 million Latinos checked the “some other race” box, or wrote a response that the Census Bureau classified in that category. Between both surveys, the number of Latinos counted as “some other race” increased by 41.7%. That increase worried many researchers, who believed that the data was failing to reflect the racial identity of the Latino community. Therefore, the Government agreed to review the way in which until now Latinos were being asked about their race and ethnicity.
The new question approved in March is supposed to remedy this problem and the percentage of Latinos identifying with “some other race” is supposed to decrease. However, experts like Hernández believe that the Government “took a shortcut.” The change in the question, Hernandez adds, does nothing to address why 42% of Latinos chose that option to begin with. “Now that 42% of respondents can check the Hispanic box and move on with their lives. “They wanted to get rid of the problem of ‘some other race’ and they did it, but they did it by sacrificing the purpose of the census racial data, which is to guarantee civil rights for all,” explains the lawyer.
At the same time, Hernández highlights the other side of that statistic: if 42% of Latinos surveyed indicated “some other race,” that means that the rest did choose at least one of the races included in the list. “This data means that there are almost 60% of Latinos who did answer the race question. That is, they had no problem saying that they are white, that they are black, that they are Asian, in addition to being Latino,” he points out.
“We have to continue insisting”
Even though the change has already been approved, federal agencies have 18 months to develop compliance plans and up to five years to implement them. Therefore, from the Afro-Latino Forum they insist that they will continue fighting. “Given the terrible way in which the question is phrased, the burden of educating the population about the need to check several boxes falls on us, Latinos,” says Hernández. One of the ways in which they will raise awareness in the Latino community will be through the Latino/Hispano is not a race campaign, which has the participation of more than 45 organizations from across the country.
“At the same time, we will continue to pressure the Census Bureau to properly classify Latino responses. It is one thing to encourage Afro-Latinos to check several boxes, the one for Latino and the one for black, but that does not guarantee that the Census Bureau will count them as it should,” says Hernández. He is referring to what happened to Guesnerth Josué Perea when he filled out the last 2020 census. Like him, thousands of Afro-Latinos were wrongly classified as multiracial people.
Perea recommends evaluating how the Pew think tank collects its data on Afro-Latinos. In their latest 2022 report, Pew researchers concluded that, instead of using a two-part question like the one the Census Bureau used until recently, “if you ask directly about Afro-Latino identity, you get a higher proportion of respondents who identify themselves as such. That is, get to the point: are you Afro-Latino or Afro-Latina? According to Pew, six million people would say yes, 12% of the entire Latino population in the country.
