ABSTRACT
Demographic questions in the United States, whether on census forms or social science surveys, have long blended national origin, ethnicity, and “race”1 into a set of color-coded categories. In 1900, the U.S. census categories included White, Black, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese. The 1935 Handbook of Social Psychology offered chapters on the social histories of the “White Man,” the “Negro,” the “Red Man,” and the “Yellow Man” (Murphy, 1935/1967). However, recent demographic changes are pushing the limits of demographic categories for science, policy, and educational practice. By 2000, immigration to the United States rivaled the high levels of 1910, with
Catherine R. Cooper University of California, Santa Cruz
Barrie Thorne University of California, Berkeley
Marjorie Faulstich Orellana University of California, Los Angeles
present-day newcomers coming principally from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, rather than the Eastern and Southern European origins of a century ago. And by 2030, children classified as Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American are expected to constitute half of U.S. children under the age of 17 (Hernández, 1999). Demographers have responded to these changes by adding open-ended questions to the U.S. census to capture the increasingly complex configurations of immigration, ethnicity, and “race.” On the 2000 census, one question asked about “racial” categories of American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, and White; another question asked about ethnicity by differentiating Hispanic from non-Hispanic. In addition, adults responding for their families could also write in their own self-descriptions and check more than one category (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002).
