ABSTRACT
In a 1970 sample survey of Hawaii's population conducted by the State Department of Health, each respondent was asked for the race of each of his parents. For more than a century after Europeans discovered the Islands, the Hawaiian royalty and chieftains retained effective control. The racial identifications of parents listed on the birth certificates of 179,327 babies born from 1948 to 1958 were found to be substantially reliable when checked against samples from the Hawaii Blood Clinic. The racial classification of Hawaii's heterogeneous population has been inconsistent, for the identification of subnations depends in part on such factors as their relative prestige, power, and size. Even though the definitions of races and ethnic groups typically imply that the classifica-tory system derives solely from their attributes, it requires no more than a cursory digging to show that statisticians play a crucial part in orchestrating their statistics.
