By Suzanne Gamboa -
NBC News
The Government chaired by Joe Biden presented a proposal this Thursday so that people in the United States can mark Hispanic or Latino as their race in the Census and official forms.
The Administration has been revising its definitions of race and ethnicity, which were established more than a quarter century ago, and has finally proposed combining two questions on race and ethnicity, one in the census and another in official data collection.
He has also proposed a category for the Middle East or North Africa, abbreviated as MENA.
Currently, those people are included in the category of white race, something that this community has advocated to change for three decades, the proposal says.
The proposals are expected to be published Friday in the Federal Register.
The public will have the opportunity to comment
and this will be used to write the final proposals.
The next US census will take place in 2030.
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The Census Bureau found that 4 in 10 Hispanics, or 42%, checked "some other race" on the 2020 census. Jim R. Bounds / ASSOCIATED PRESS
“The nation regularly examines how it asks about race and ethnicity and the ways in which we report those findings can matter,” Mark Hugo Lopez, director of research on race and ethnicity at the Pew Research Center, said Thursday.
Evidence suggests that the current two-part question confuses many people who see race and ethnicity as similar, according to the group of experts studying the government's current race and ethnicity standards, which date back to 1997.
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The Census Bureau defines Hispanic or Latino as an ethnicity, not a race.
An increasing number of Latinos do not mark a race or choose “another race” in the Census (every ten years) and the Household Survey (which is done periodically).
Research has shown that combining the question reduces confusion and decreases the number of people who will answer "other race," the proposal says.
The Census Bureau found that four in 10 Hispanics,
42%, checked "other race" on the 2020 census.
One-third selected two or more racial groups and 20% chose White as their race, the Pew reported. Research Institute in 2021.
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Latino adults are more likely than white or black adults to say that the two-part questions on race and ethnicity in the 2020 decennial census did not reflect their identity well, according to a 2020 Pew survey.
To avoid an undercount
There has long been a debate about how the census and other government data represent Hispanics or Latinos and whether the two-part question of race and ethnicity contributes to undercounting certain groups in the population count.
Before the 2020 census, the federal government had proposed to reshape the question on Hispanics and add a box with the category MENA (of Middle Eastern or North African origin).
But those proposals were shelved during the Trump Administration.
The proposed changes would affect the way the federal government captures information on race and ethnicity in the decennial census and also in surveys such as those conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics or the Department of Education, said Pew's Lopez.
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He added that it has implications for research organizations like Pew Research, which uses the Census Bureau's data collection as a standard for weighting public opinion polls.
Other proposals include removing Black and Far Eastern
as racial identities and revising the description of the American Indian or Alaska Native category to read as: “The category 'American Indian or Alaska Native' includes all persons who identify with any of the original peoples of North, Central, and South America.”
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It also proposes that the use of the words majority and minority be suspended.
He is also considering allowing
people to check more boxes about their racial or ethnic identity
and then provide more details in each category.
For example, people could check white and then check the boxes for Italian, German or other countries of origin and also check American Indian or Hispanic or Latino and then check Mexican or Mexican-American or Puerto Rican and other.
The public
will have 75 days
from the publication of the proposal on Friday, labeled OMB-2023-0001, to submit their comments to a federal website.
