What is your race? : the census and our flawed efforts to classify Americans / Kenneth Prewitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Prewitt, Kenneth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnicity--United States--Statistics.

Ethnicity.

Demography--United States.

Demography.

United States--Census--History.

United States.

United States--Population--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Preface

Part I. What Are Statistical Races?

Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

Chapter 2. Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races

Part II. Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces

Chapter 3. The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation's First Statistical Race

Chapter 4. Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census

Chapter 5. How Many White Races Are There?

Part III. When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

Chapter 6. Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool

Chapter 7. When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused

Part IV. The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale

Chapter 8. Pressures Mount

Chapter 9. The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line

Part V. What We Have Is Not What We Need

Chapter 10. Where Are We Exactly?

Chapter 11. Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be

Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad-Brazil, France, Israel

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781400846795

140084679X

OCLC:

847527175