JC
Thanks to Megan for the heads-up on this article! A CBS News Opinion piece reports on the briefing that the US Commission on Civil Rights had regarding the 2010 census. This article talks about the efforts being made by the US Census Bureau to improve the ways in which it asks about race and ethnicity.

“Improvement” in this regard means more precise and accurate racial/ethnic data that may better inform the governmental programs and policies that rely on such data.

The problem with any such data collection is that classifications based on race and/or ethnicity are inherently arbitrary, unscientific, and inaccurate. Consequently, their utility in informing government programs and policies is, if not marginal, then at least suspect.

The problem isn’t the Census Bureau. The agency does a remarkable job collecting and disaggregating mountains of information (at a cost of over $10 billion) pursuant to directives received from Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The problem is that race and ethnicity are extraordinarily malleable concepts that evade precise biological, anthropological, or sociological definitions.  

There are definitely many problematic things about the ways in which we categorize…and it’s clear that this country has struggled with this — the race/ethnicity questions changes with every census! This article gives a brief history of what that metamorphosis has looked like. Wow. It already takes $10 billion in order to sort through all of this collected information?! …and anthropologists and sociologists are arguing that the accurate count of possible ethnicities is actually closer to 2,000 categories instead of just 126 (what we saw in the 2000 census).

Finally, the author questions the usefulness of racial classifications in general…

The utility of census racial/ethnic classifications in providing data for the government programs and policies that the classifications purport to inform is selective. Outside of antidiscrimination statutes, few governmental programs make specific reference to race. Rather, the types of programs that employ racial and ethnic data are generally those designed to address disparities — in, for example, education, income, housing, health care, etc.— disparities that are a function of factors for which race/ethnicity are imperfect proxies. Even the collection and application of racial and ethnic data for civil rights and antidiscrimination enforcement are inconsistent. Consider: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion, and national origin. Yet the census seeks no data on color or religion.

Still, the idea that this information helps us to address disparities is important, and I definitely wouldn’t discount the usefulness of that.