What Is "Your" Race

The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

Bibliographic Data

ID19906540
AuthorsKenneth Prewitt (corresponding author)
Year2013
Pages288
Publication date2013-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueWhat Is Your Race? (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9781400846795
OpenAlexW4251559251
Open LibraryOL29167134M
ISBN9781400846795
LanguageEN
Citations received43

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

Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Census · Demography · Ethnicity · History · Population · Statistics · united states

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