{"id":22147,"date":"2015-10-02T11:11:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T16:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=22147"},"modified":"2017-09-17T20:35:19","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T01:35:19","slug":"the-census-and-the-social-construction-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/10\/02\/the-census-and-the-social-construction-of-race\/","title":{"rendered":"The US Census and the social construction of race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethnicity are social constructions, not biological categories.\u00a0 The US government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”\u00a0 You can find them on the Census:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

These categories, however real they may seem, are actually the product of a long process. Over time, the official US racial categories have changed in response to politics, economics, conflict, and more. Here’s some highlights.<\/p>\n

In the year of the first Census, 1790,<\/strong> the race question looked very different than it does today:<\/p>\n

Free white males
\nFree white females
\nAll other free persons (included Native Americans who paid taxes and free blacks)
\nAnd slaves<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By 1870<\/strong> slavery is illegal and the government was newly concerned with keeping track of two new kinds of people: “mulattos” (or people with both black and white ancestors) and Indians:<\/p>\n

White
\nBlack
\nMulatto
\nIndian (Native Americans)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Between 1850 and 1870 6.5 million Europeans had immigrated and 60,000 Chinese.\u00a0 Chinese and Japanese were added for the 1880<\/strong> Census.<\/p>\n

By 1890,<\/strong> the U.S. government with obsessed with race-mixing.\u00a0 The race question looked like this:<\/p>\n

White
\nBlack (3\/4th<\/sup> or more \u201cblack blood\u201d)
\nMulatto (3\/8th<\/sup> to 5\/8th <\/sup>\u201cblack blood\u201d)
\nQuadroons (1\/4th<\/sup> \u201cblack blood\u201d)
\nOctoroons (1\/8th<\/sup> or any trace of \u201cblack blood\u201d)
\nIndian
\nChinese
\nJapanese<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This year was the only year to include such fine-tuned mixed-race categories, however, because it turned out it wasn’t easy to figure out how to categorize people.<\/p>\n

In the next 50 years, the government added and deleted racial categories. There were 10 in 1930<\/strong> (including “Mexican” and “Hindu”) and 11 in 1940<\/strong> (introducing “Hawaiian” and “Part Hawaiian”).\u00a0 In 1970,<\/strong> they added the “origin of descent” question that we still see today.\u00a0 So people are first asked whether they are “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” and then asked to choose a race.<\/p>\n

You might immediately think, “But what do these words even mean?”\u00a0 And you’d be right to ask.\u00a0 “Spanish” refers to Spain; “Latino” refers to Latin America; and “Hispanic” is a totally made up word that was originally designed to mean “people who speak Spanish.”<\/p>\n

Part of the reason we have the “Hispanic” ethnicity question is because Mexican Americans fought for it.\u00a0 They thought it would be advantageous to be categorized as “white” and, so, they fought for an ethnicity category instead of\u00a0a racial one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Funny story:<\/strong>\u00a0 The US once included “South American” as a category in the “origin of descent” question.\u00a0 That year, over a million residents southern U.S. states, like Alabama and Mississippi checked that box.<\/p>\n

2000<\/strong> was the first year that respondents were allowed to choose more than one race. They considered a couple other changes for that year, but decided against them. Native Hawaiians had been agitating to be considered Native Americans in order to get access to the rights and resources that the US government has promised Native Americans on the mainland. The government considered it for 2000, but decided\u00a0“no.” And whether or not Arab American should be considered a unique race or an ethnicity was\u00a0also discussed for that year. They decided to\u00a0continue to instruct such individuals to choose “white.”<\/p>\n

The changing categories in the Census show us that racial and ethnic categories are political <\/em>categories. They are chosen by government officials who are responding not to biological realities, but to immigration, war, prejudice, and social movements.<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared in 2010.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethnicity are social constructions, not biological categories.\u00a0 The US government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”\u00a0 You can find them on the Census: These categories, however real they may seem, are actually the product of a long process. Over time, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":68103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,253,2125,1824,3920,85,285,1758,1756,1759,1760,1754,1761,1757,293,309],"class_list":["post-22147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-immigrationcitizenship","tag-nation-mexico","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-american-indiansaboriginals","tag-raceethnicity-arabsmiddle-easterners","tag-raceethnicity-asianspacific-islanders","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-latinos","tag-raceethnicity-multiracial","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-construction","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2010\/03\/51.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22147"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22155,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22147\/revisions\/22155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}