Nate Cohn recently wrote in The New York Times that more and more Hispanics say they are white. The article, which has a cute picture of a man who looks like he’s Latino but is actually white after walking from one square to another, says that this may be “new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or the Irish.”
That is definitely interesting and colorful. But I tell my data staff that when they find something surprising, they might be on to something, but they might also be wrong.
In reality, Cohn’s analysis is a few steps back, which may help explain part of the problem. His discussion is based on a summary from the Pew Research Center, which was based on a presentation from the Population Association of America’s annual meetings.
The research behind it is new in a number of ways. One is that it connects the answers people gave on the Census in 2000 with the answers those same people gave on the Census in 2010.
It turns out that 2.5 million Americans who said they were Hispanic and “some other race” in 2000 said they were Hispanic and white a decade later. Another 1.3 million people switched the other way, but that’s still a big net gain — about 3.5 percent of the Latino population in 2000.
So, what went wrong? Maybe assimilation is still going strong. Maybe the anti-immigrant rhetoric made some Hispanics feel like they were being threatened because of their race. Maybe it’s young people who turned 18 during the decade and finally got to choose their own identities instead of having the head of their household decide for them?
Or the question might have changed.
That seems like the most likely person to blame. Demographers already knew that the number of Latinos who say they are white is on the rise: In the 2000 Census, 48 percent of Latinos said they were white. In the 2010 Census, 53 percent of Latinos said they were white. After ten years of moving, having babies, and dying, those people could be very different, which is why the linked record analysis is so interesting.
But you still need to ask the same things. In general, the Census asks two main questions: First of all, are you Latino? Second, what kind of people are you? There is also clear instruction for the respondent to answer both questions. And in 2010, a line in bold type said, “For this census, Hispanic origins are not races.” This was different from previous years.
By adding that phrase, Latinos might have been more likely to choose one of the other groups instead of “other.” It would have been like “whitening” by changing the data instead of the reality. In fact, that was one reason: the Census wanted what it thought would be a more accurate count of people’s races. But could a simple bolded statement, even if it was just a little bit different, have made such a big difference?
The American Community Survey (ACS), a sample taken every year by the Census, is one way to look into the problem. The long-form Census, which was done every ten years and collected detailed socioeconomic information, has been replaced by the ACS, which is done every year. There, the question was changed in 2008, when the message in bold about racial identification was added.
So, how did the answers to the ACS in 2008 compare to the answers in 2007? Even though this isn’t as good as individual records, it’s likely pretty close. Some Latinos died, some were born, and some moved away, but the populations in the two years were probably pretty similar.
As it turns out, the number of Latinos who said they were white in the ACS went up by more than eight percentage points in 2008. This is twice as much as the net change seen in the linked record analysis between 2000 and 2010. Except for the change in the question, it’s hard to think of anything that happened that year that would have caused whiteness to rise so quickly.
To be clear, the researchers who gave the original presentation made sure to say that they were just reporting the numbers and not trying to figure out what they meant. Pew also pointed out that it could have been a change in the question (something Pew also noted in past postings). Even so, reporters from places like MSNBC, Slate, and The New York Times talked about how the meaning of race is changing for Latinos in America.
I’ve actually thought a lot about this issue, most recently in a project with my colleague Laura Pulido. The article, which came out in American Quarterly, looked at how Latinos in Southern California answer the ACS questions about their race.
We are geographers, so it was important to us to know if living in a suburb had a “whitening” effect. (The title of the paper was “Where in the World is Juan and What Color is He?”) But because income and education are linked to where people live, we used a method called multivariate logistic regression to try to control for the effects of all the variables at once.
And before you ask, we only used data from 2008 to 2010—all years after the bolded directions made it into the question—partly because we saw a big jump in the underlying data.
Latinos who lived in the suburbs were more likely to say they were white, on top of other things that pushed them in that direction, like age, income, education, and English ability. But our most surprising result may have been about how recently people moved.
A lot of the previous research in this area has suggested that new immigrants might be confused by U.S. racial categories and marked “other.” As they stay in the country longer, they will settle into being white. But our regressions showed that, when other things are taken into account, the longer you live in America, the less likely you are to think you’re white.
We think that being “othered” by society may be one of the things that push Latinos away from whiteness rather than toward it. All of this seems important given the heated debates about immigration going on right now, especially in Arizona and Alabama (and even Congress).
In any case, people who follow the conversation about race, like the many coworkers who sent me an email about Cohn’s article, know that a more nuanced understanding of the data and the questions being asked would probably lead one away from a breathless conclusion that Latino assimilation is changing in a new and fundamental way.
And just so you know, in both years, I checked “Latino” and “other.” I like it when my questions and answers are the same.