Where Did the Racial Boxes People Check on Forms Come From? – Part 2

The origins of America’s arbitrary racial classification systems.

David Bernstein, in his book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, describes the long, sordid history behind America’s current, arbitrary racial classification system.  He writes:

The story of the development of modern racial and ethnic classifications begins in 1946. That year, President Harry Truman appointed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Until then, combatting discrimination against Catholics and Jews had been a priority of pioneering state and local civil rights agencies, especially in New York. The President’s Committee, however, focused on racial discrimination. The committee explained that “[g]roups whose color makes them more easily identified are set apart from the ‘dominant majority’ much more than are the Caucasian minorities.”  This focus reflected an emerging consensus in civil rights circles that antidiscrimination efforts should focus primarily on combatting racial discrimination … [B]y the early 1960s contractors were required to report on how many “Negro,”“Oriental,”“Spanish-American,” and “American Indian” employees they had. We now generally call these groups Black or African American, Asian American, Hispanic or Latino, and Native American, respectively. Aside from the name changes, the Kennedy-era precedent established the United States’ official minority categories, minus the Hawaiian and Pacific Islander category that was established decades later. White ethnic and religious minorities were lumped into the general white, nonminority category. All this was decided with very little public debate about, or explicit justification for, which groups were included and excluded in minority classifications. Indeed, there was little public debate as to whether the government should be in the business of tracking race at all; in the wake of Nazi racist horrors, Canada stopped tabulating race in 1951. It had been widely expected that the United States would follow. The federal bureaucracy’s need for data for civil rights enforcement sent things in the opposite direction. As Hugh Davis Graham explains, the “EEO-1 form, by isolating for minority groups that corresponded to the racial color coding of American popular culture -- black, yellow, red, and brown -- reified a cluster of assumptions about American society that agency officials, shielded from public debate by their closed process, simply took for granted.” The EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] also grappled with the question of how employers required to report workforce statistics to the agency should determine their employees’ race. One possibility was to have employees self-identify. The NAACP and other civil rights groups vigorously and successfully opposed that option. The EEOC instead decided to rely on visual identification by the employer. Employer visual identification remained the preferred mechanism for employers to identify race until 2007, when the EEOC began encouraging employers to rely on employee self-identification. In practice, visual identification meant that if an employee “looked black” to any degree, the employer would report the employee as “Negro.” Apparently, the EEOC intended for employers to identify all minority employees this way. This was especially problematic for Hispanics and Native Americans, who are usually of mixed heritage and have a wide range of appearances. Anthony Frederick, Vice President of Universal Studios, complained to Congress, “I couldn’t tell you a Mexican American if I were to look at him. We are not permitted to ask a person his nationality, his national origin, in [California], and we don’t, and you cannot tell by surname.” … In 1971, President Nixon issued an executive order meant to assist minority-owned business enterprises. This was the first such order to define which groups counted as minorities; it applied to businesses owned by “Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Spanish-speaking Americans, American Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts.” Asian Americans, who had high rates of business ownership, were not included … In 1973, the US Commission on Civil Rights, a federal advisory agency, issued a report urging the federal government to create a racial and ethnic data collection system. Such a system, the report argued, was needed to facilitate enforcement of antidiscrimination rules. The report noted that in deference to that goal, groups like the NAACP and the ACLU no longer opposed the government asking individuals about their race and ethnicity. The report discussed the “major” ethnic and racial classifications: Asian American/Oriental, Native American/American Indian, Spanish Surnamed/Spanish Speaking/Spanish Origin/Spanish American, Negro/Black, All Other Minority Groups, and White. The authors identified several issues with these broad classifications. First, each Asian American nationality group had “unique” problems. For example, while Chinese and Japanese Americans had incomes above the American median, Filipino Americans had the lowest median income of all ethnicities in California.

Interestingly, Filipino’s today have the second-highest median household income by ethnic group:

Indeed, as Bernstein writes, “Asian American groups also have extremely varied levels of socioeconomic success in the United States—Indian Americans, for example, have the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States, while the average incomes of Burmese and Nepalese Americans are well below the American mean. Korean Americans have the highest rate of business formation of any ethnic group in the United States, while Laotians have the lowest.” That indicates that if income status is at all relevant to racial or ethnic categorization, then racial and ethnic categorizations have not kept up with the times.  And as Bernstein writes, “The SBA [Small Business Administration] now has formal regulations dictating how a group can become eligible for presumptive disadvantaged status. The rules do not provide a mechanism for decertifying a group whose members have already received presumptively disadvantaged status but whose socioeconomic status has improved.”

Back to Bernstein:

Second, the American Indian category was extremely internally diverse. American Indians are members of dozens of distinct tribes with different languages, cultures, problems, and opportunities. Classifying them the same way obscured these differences and inhibited efforts to address unique tribal issues. Third, the lack of separate statistics for various subgroups with Spanish heritage “presented problems for each of them.” Cubans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans, by far the three largest subgroups, had different cultures, different levels of socioeconomic success, and were concentrated in different parts of the country. As a result, federal officials working with different Hispanic groups consistently requested separate data for each group … Finally, the report [the 1973 US Commission on Civil Rights report] noted that there was no governmentwide guidance on which groups to include in the “All Other Minority Groups” category. Most federal agencies included Polynesians, Aleuts, Eskimos, and Creoles. There was confusion about whether the category also included European national origin groups -- such as Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Portuguese -- that had lower-than-average socioeconomic status. When the federal government created uniform racial and ethnic classifications a few years later, it ignored almost all the commission’s concerns. A 1973 report from the Subcommittee on Minority Education, a division of the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE) identified a lack of useful data about Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians. When a group of educators from those groups was gathered to discuss the draft report, they wound up storming out due to what they saw as ethnic misidentification in the report. The report remained unpublished, but it was forwarded to Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger asked FICE to “coordinate development of common definitions for racial and ethnic groups.” FICE responded by creating an Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions. The committee decided to make recommendations for uniform federal racial and ethnic classifications of all Americans. And it did, recommending the following categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black/Negro, Caucasian/White, and Hispanic. How FICE decided to adopt these classifications and not others, such as All Other Minorities, has been lost to history. The federal Office of Management and Budget, the General Accounting Office, HEW’s Office for Civil Rights, and the EEOC adopted these categories for a one-year trial period. FICE then made minor revisions to its definitions based on feedback and circulated a final draft. The relevant categories became effective for all racial and ethnic reporting required by the federal agencies represented on the Ad Hoc Committee. In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget issued “Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting,” known as Statistical Policy Directive No. 15. The Directive 15 categories, with minor modifications, continue to guide government and government-mandated data collection today. The categories also became “the de facto standard for state and local agencies, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the research community.” The categories were defined as follows: American Indian or Alaskan Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition. Asian or Pacific Islander. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands. This area includes, for example, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine Islands, and Samoa. Black. A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. Hispanic. A person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.

Bernstein also describes how the racial classification system in America was first adopted by Congress and became embedded in the federal bureaucracy.  He writes:

The Public Works Employment Act of 1977 marked the first time Congress, rather than bureaucrats from the executive branch, specified which minority groups were eligible for affirmative action programs. The act set aside 10 percent of certain government contracts for minority-owned businesses, defined as business owned by “citizens of the United States who are Negroes, Spanish-speaking, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts.” As Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out [in a dissenting opinion in the 1980 case of Fullilove v. Klutznick], Congress did not explain why it chose these minority categories. “No economic, social, geographical, or historical criteria are relevant for exclusion or inclusion. There is not one word in the remainder of the Act or in the legislative history that explains why any Congressman or Senator favored this particular definition over any other or that identifies the common characteristics that every member of the preferred class was believed to share.” … In the 1990s, plaintiffs challenging SBA [Small Business Administration] minority preferences deposed a former associate director for the SBA’s Minority Enterprise Program and a former associate administrator of the SBA’s Office of Minority Enterprise Development. Neither could explain why certain ethnic groups were included or excluded in the Section 8(a) program. They also could not explain how membership in the groups was defined, nor why descendants of Spanish immigrants were included in the Hispanic category. Documents that surfaced during the lawsuit also showed that the SBA had no guidelines for reviewing whether a group should retain socially disadvantaged status. The SBA also had no procedures for determining how a multiracial person should be classified. Despite these issues, the SBA classifications became the template for a host of other preferences and set-asides ordered by Congress for businesses in everything from agriculture to space exploration … In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget, still in charge of federal data collection policies, separated “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” from the “Asian” category. Native Hawaiians had found that when applying to colleges on the mainland, being placed in the same category as Asians sometimes resulted in discrimination for being part of an “overrepresented” group. Being put in the Native American category, by contrast, would make them eligible for affirmative action preferences. The government, however, did not want to classify Native Hawaiians with Native Americans for fear of stirring sovereignty claims from Hawaiians akin to those from Native American tribes. Native American groups, meanwhile, did not want Hawaiians to be eligible for federal programs designated for American Indians. In the end, a new compromise category for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders was created. OMB [the Office of Management and the Budget] also decreed that it was not just preferable for race and Hispanic ethnicity to be asked separately, but that individuals should first be asked whether they are of Hispanic origin and then asked for their race. Meanwhile, the name of the Hispanic category was changed to “Hispanic or Latino.” … [U]nder pressure from multiracial activists OMB announced that individuals may now check more than one racial category on demographic forms. Americans were still not, however, allowed to define themselves as multiracial. Meanwhile, the most far-reaching federal status-based contracting program is the US Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. Congress established the federal DBE program in the early 1980s. It set a goal that at least 10 percent of transportation funds be allocated to “small business concerns [that are] owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” Congress reiterated this goal in 2012 and 2015. Under DOT regulations, individuals are presumed to be socially and economically disadvantaged if they belong to one of the nonwhite Directive 15 groups. The main difference between the DOT rules and OMB’s Directive 15 guidelines is that DOT’s Hispanic category includes Brazilian and Portuguese-descended Americans. To prove minority status for federal affirmative action programs, a petitioner need only check the appropriate box and present a signed affidavit attesting that they have been subjected to discrimination based on their identity. The SBA has also required applicants to demonstrate if requested that “he or she has held himself or herself out, and is currently identified by other, as a member of a designated group.” … The NMSDC [National Minority Supplier Development Council] considers minority group members to be individuals with at least one-quarter Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Native American ancestry. How this works in practice is unclear. For example, if an applicant has a grandfather who was half-Mexican and half-Irish but was known as Mexican American in his community, does this make the applicant one-quarter Hispanic or one-eighth Hispanic? … The NMSDC also limits its definition of Hispanic to those of “true-born Hispanic heritage” without further explanation or elaboration.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine the very, very strange case of the “Hispanics” category.