The race and ethnicity statistics from the 2020 Census were released on Thursday. It’s hard to know what make of the data. The number of multi-racial people is skyrocketing, though if you: 1) Go outside, ever; and 2) Have functioning eyeballs, you already knew that. Tucker Carlson must have a mole in the AP, because they went with a “White Population Shrinking” headline that will be to the far right what killing a mastodon was to cave people: They’ll feed off of that for at least a month, probably more.
I checked “white” on my Census form, because I’m a white guy. I have peach-ish skin, a Spotify playlist called “Arcade Fire (early)”, and a closet full of Gap clothes, so: Yep, that’s a white guy. Though it’s not actually quite that simple: A few years ago, I did 23&Me and learned that I’m a bit more than two percent Sub-Saharan African. I’ve never checked “African American” on anything, because that would seem like some Rachel Dolezal bullshit. Though it does make me wonder: What’s the “cutoff” for any of this? And why?
The last people to be very into the “how much counts?” question were Jim Crow-era segregationists. They settled on the “one drop” rule, meaning that if you have any African ancestry, you’re Black. So, by that standard, I’m Black. It makes me laugh to think of how the world would react if I started presenting as Black; how long would it take Twitter to cancel me if I were to, say, start holding workshops for BIPOC writers dressed in a dashiki? Would it take minutes? Seconds? They might need to consult a special clock at MIT to measure the infinitesimal length of time it would take to cancel me.
We can forget the “one drop” rule; my hot take is that Jim Crow-era segregationists got things wrong. Still: What amount of some ancestry “counts”? 1/8? 1/16? Draw the line wherever you want: It’s arbitrary. And the Census Bureau just takes your word for it. There aren’t any rules about which box you should check, so measurement is inconsistent. For example: 58 percent of African Americans are at least 1/8 European, though a person who’s 80 percent African and 20 percent European will probably just check “Black” on their Census form. There are also surely a few Rachel Dolezal/Elizabeth Warren-types out there stretching conceptions of race in exciting new ways. The truth is, virtually none of us know our full ancestry unless we’ve been on the popular PBS show: Finding Your Roots and Discovering That Your Grandma Was a Liar and a Bit of a Hussy with Henry Louis Gates.
At any rate: I’m counted as white. But what will my kids (who do not yet exist) be? This is a bit complicated. The first issue is: My wife’s mother is half Portuguese. Do Portuguese people count as Hispanic?
That question doesn’t have a clear answer. In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget said that the term “Hispanic” did not include “those of Portuguese origin, specifically people from Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, Belize and Portugal”. So: Tough break, anyone who escaped the favelas of Rio and came to America -- turns out you’re privileged! But the question wasn’t settled, and in 1980, the Department of Transportation created a definition of “Hispanic” that did include Brazil but didn’t include Spain and Portugal. But when people asked “why?”, the DOT added Spanish people. And when people asked “why?” again, they added Portuguese. The official government answer to “are Portuguese people Hispanic?” is basically “Well…do you feel Hispanic?”1
Language-based definitions of Hispanic don’t work because of Brazil, not to mention Central Americans who speak indigenous languages. So, definitions based on geography probably make more sense. Which brings me to my wife’s dad: He grew up partly in Central America. So: That’s a Hispanic guy, right? Well…he’s an Ashkenazi Jew. We know this for sure, because he’s done 23&Me. And for what it’s worth: Being Ashkenazi often yields quite-definitive and not-very-fun 23&Me results. Most people get an “ancestry map”, and it’s usually a bit surprising and more diverse than expected. Many Ashkenazi people get a 23&Me result that basically just says: “Yup: Jewish.”
By the way: Will my kids be Jewish? According to halacha -- which my wife tells me is the Jewish legal tradition but she might be making up words just to fuck with me -- Jewishness is passed matrilineally. So, yes, they’d be Jewish. But, my mother-in-law converted…does that matter? And my wife doesn’t practice…does that matter? I guess my kids will have a claim to Judaism even though they’ll grow up in a house where Passover Seder includes a honey-baked ham, and our only Hanukkah tradition is googling “when does Hanukkah start?” three days after it started.
But let’s go back to the Hispanic question. My wife has never checked the “Hispanic” box, because she’d “feel like she was being misleading.” Which she probably would be; she also has an Arcade Fire playlist, plus an Arctic Monkeys one, which should be enough for any jury to return a verdict of “white”. But it’s striking how ill-defined the term is. What’s the common link between a wealthy Cuban from Miami, a subsistence farmer from Honduras, an advertising executive form Sao Paolo, and a teacher from the Dominican Republic? Humanity, certainly, and probably a feeling that Mike Richards is the wrong choice to host Jeopardy! (that’s pretty universal). But for the most part, the “Hispanic or Latino” category is impossible to pin down.
And yet, it’s not the weirdest category on the Census form: That honor surely has to go to “Asian”. Is your family from Japan? Siberia? Kyrgyzstan? Indonesia? Congratulations: You’re Asian! If you were tempted to craft a definition of “Hispanic” based on shared culture and values, please tell me what culture and values link a Pakistani college professor with a K-pop star. 58 percent of the world lives in Asia, so we basically have five categories for the first 42 percent of the world and one category for the rest. Though that’s not quite true, because if your ancestors are of “…the original2 peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” you’re supposed to check “white”. So: Saddam Hussein, Mo Salah, Nefertiti…in a hypothetical world in which these people emigrated to the US, they’d all count as white (though good luck getting that visa for Saddam Hussein).
Actually, all of the categories have massive problems. “Black” and “white” encompass numerous haplogroups, and the lines between them are blurry and somewhat arbitrary (look at this map: why is “H” the same as “X” but different from “L”?). Also, if you had asked an American in the year 1400 “who lives here?”, they would not have said “well, you got your Cherokee, your Inuit, your Navajo…I’d say we’re all ‘Native Americans’.” The least-dumb category is probably “Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander”, because it doesn’t get more geographically and culturally distinct on this planet than an island in the Pacific. But even then, we’re collapsing people who are separated by thousands of miles into one group.
What I’m saying is: When I look at this data, I’m struck by a strong sense of “what the hell is the point of any of this?” I feel like a robot just dropped a thousand-page computer printout on my coffee table and said: “I have indexed the American population according to toenail length!” To which my response is: Thank you, I guess? Very interesting -- lots of long toenails in Tampa. Hey, robot, mind if I ask: What the hell am I supposed to do with this? You’ve created these categories -- toenail length, toenail-length-relative-to-toe, buoyancy, which I’m not even sure how you measured -- but you can’t explain what they mean or why they’re meaningful. So I don’t know how to respond to this except to say: ‘‘Huh. Okay.”
Our ancestors created racial categories because they didn’t know any better. We do know better; we know that human development has been complex and messy. We use these categories because we inherited them, and -- especially when you mix in culture -- they sorta, kinda represent something. But they’re only as meaningful as we make them. To be clear: I’m not arguing that the Census Bureau did a bad job, and that we need more precise ways of sorting people into groups. I’m arguing that sorting people into meaningful groups is impossible, and I’m starting to wonder what we gain from these measurements.3
This argument might be unpopular in some quarters. There’s a movement against “colorblindness”, which is seen by some as a way to deny racism. And -- though I think this should be obvious -- I’m not denying the existence of racism; just because I question the meaningfulness of these categories doesn’t mean that everyone does. Racists certainly think they’re meaningful. A weird, recent twist is that some people on the left -- many of whom proudly brand themselves “antiracist” -- commonly speak about these categories in ways that increase their salience. I think that’s a huge mistake. I’m all for letting people have their identity, but whenever we treat race or ethnicity as something more than an aspect of a person’s character -- when we imply that it might represent some immutable reality -- we’re getting into a weird, pseudo-scientific area that makes me uncomfortable. I know we’re not a colorblind society, but I think we should aspire to be one, because that’s the only model that correctly recognizes the artificiality of racial categories.
Whatever relevance these categories have today, they’re only going to get less relevant in the future. The “two or more races” category -- which almost tripled in the last decade -- will continue to grow rapidly. I predict several decades of the Census Bureau creating increasingly fine-grained but ultimately unsatisfactory racial categories before a profound sense of “what are we even doing here?” takes over. I don’t think that’s imminent, but I think it’s inevitable. Which means that one possible answer to the “Which Census box will my kids check?” question is: “They won’t check any box at all.”
***Hi! It’s Jeff, the guy who writes this thing. I’m going to start attaching a poll to each column, because I want to know what people want to read about. The Substack editor isn’t compatible with Google forms (or similar things), so I have to use these “vote for this” buttons. I hope you’ll consider this format to have some early-days-of-the-internet retro charm.
I'd like the next column to be about...
1. Afghanistan [VOTE FOR THIS]
2. The "borders are racist" argument [VOTE FOR THIS]
3. The pressures one feels when they're building a news media thing (e.g. this newsletter) [VOTE FOR THIS]
The Census form makes the fact that you get to decide whether or not you count as Hispanic explicit. Under the question that asks “is (person X) of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?”, they write: “Your answer to this question should be based on how you identify. Each person can decide how to answer. You are free to choose where to report your identity and which boxes to mark, or not to mark.”
I will give you one billion dollars if you can provide a logical, workable definition of the word “original” in that sentence.
To be clear: I’m not yet prepared to say “let’s abolish racial categories in the Census.” But I’m starting to question the value of this data.
I remember being so taken aback the first time I encountered the "trying to be colorblind is a horrible goal, and if you don't get that you're a racist" argument. That was the first first real trickle of unease I felt from the social justice mania.
Sure, the weird 90s thing where it was vaguely frowned upon in certain circles to "notice" that someone was from another racial or ethnic group (to the extent that people would go out of their way to deliberately leave out that characteristic when describing someone else, leading to socially awkward comic silliness when that person eventually materialized and everyone tried to pretend they also didn't notice) was dumb. But this new thing where we're supposed to act like it's the *most important* characteristic of every human being is just a horrifying swing in the other direction, which, I mean, is where we started and didn't we establish that was bad already?
I'm hoping that these swings get slightly less extreme with each wave until we reach some relatively sane equilibrium, but it's hard to tell at this point if that's a thing human brains are fundamentally equipped to do. Although, given my IRL experiences, maybe it's more a question of what actual brains vs online-hot-take brains are equipped to do. It would be nice if we could inject more nuance into these conversations. And maybe even into the census eventually? More options? Less rigidity? Mix & match categories?
I agree that we should strive to de-emphasize race as an important category, and that unfortunately there is a movement in the opposite direction – led, in my view, by privileged people who have a short-term interest in promoting themselves as either a representative of their group or the very best “ally” (e.g. Robin Diangelo).
As a consequence, I suspect we will see an increasing number of white people claiming their 2% sub-Saharan African heritage and mythical Native ancestry. Upper-class white liberals aren’t taking those DNA tests to confirm that they’re white – they’re hoping to find something that allows them to escape an identity that requires them to engage in a bunch of performative deference to people with more oppression points. This, combined with an increase of people with genuine mixed heritage, will increase the number of people who don’t check one neat category on the census, making the data less meaningful over time.
But as long as we have racial differences on important outcomes, it’s going to be necessary to collect this information as best as we can – otherwise we’d lose a lot of information used in research. Self-ID messes you up on some indicators more than others. For example, how someone identifies is relevant for political participation and voting even if their identity otherwise doesn’t really make sense considering their DNA / background.