What Is "Your" Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

America is preoccupied with race statistics--perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different "race" line--the nativity line--separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's "statistical races." Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed. Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America--Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better? What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task--particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census--but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Part I What Are Statistical Races? Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview 3 Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races 14 Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation's First Statistical Race 31 Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census 45 Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There? 61 Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool 83 Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused 105 Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale Chapter 8 Pressures Mount 129 Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line 151 Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly? 171 Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be 183 Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad--Brazil, France, Israel 209 Notes 221 Bibliography 251 Index 263

About the Author :
Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. His books include The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization. He served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001.

Review :
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2014 "In one of the best discussions of the social construction of race and the U.S. Census Bureau's role in that social construction that this reviewer has seen, Prewitt goes way beyond the typical discussion by demonstrating the policy implications of the social construction and shifting definitions of race... This detailed history and policy analysis is an absolute requirement for race scholars and policy analysts alike."--J. Hattery, Choice "This book will inform historians on important aspects of what census measurement says about the past, but it also may provide a bridge to what students will write about American society decades from now."--Stephen E. Fienberg, Journal of American History "What Is Your Race? is a fascinating and thorough account of an American institution that has had a powerful influence on policy and society."--Ryan Allen, New Books in Education