re: #334 Obdicut

They normally even have sections for ‘white Hispanic’ and ‘non-white Hispanic’.

Do you think people from Argentina aren’t actually Hispanic or something?

For people’s general information, here’s how federal race/ethnicity questions are formulated (you have to follow this schema if you’re participating in federal programs such as the Pell Grant in higher ed):

Q1: Are you of Hispanic ethnicity? (Yes/No)

Q2: To which of the following racial groups do you belong (you can select more than one):
- Black/African-American
- Asian/Pacific Islander*
- White
- Native American/Alaskan Native
- Other**

From these questions, there are then rules to construct people’s race/ethnicity. Locally, you can report the combinations however you want, however the federal rules, to the best of my knowledge, are:

- If you responded “yes” to Q1, you are “Hispanic”
- If you responded “no” to Q1, then you are whatever you answered in Q2, followed by “non-Hispanic”, i.e., “White non-Hispanic”.
- If you responded to multiple answers in Q2, you are “two or more races”

Confusion arises because people typically abbreviate “White non-Hispanic” to “White” and so on.

Incidentally, the main reason why the questions are formulated this way (Hispanic split out from other categories) is because this has been found, via scientific research***, to be the best mapping on to the way respondents think of themselves. If Hispanic is left in with the other categories, many (Hispanic) respondents are confused as to whether they should select “White” or “Hispanic”.

Of course, there are problems and limitations with the current system. However, it yields a classification that is broadly useful across most of the US for tracking continuing disadvantage or privilege along racial/ethnic lines.

* Actually this is a bit out of date, now I think there is a separate category for Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, to distinguish these people from mainland Asian Americans who tend to be immigrants from East Asian countries.

** There are other possible categories such as “Resident Alien” but I’m not 100% sure what the federal rules are here. The categories above this one are the main ones and usually cover the large majority of respondents.

*** Science, Republicans. It works.