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LATINOS AND THE PRINCIPLES OF RACIAL DEMOGRAPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2019

Christopher Lewis
Christopher Lewis*
Affiliation:
Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University
*
*Corresponding author: Christopher Lewis, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 78 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge MA 02138. E-mail: Christopher_Lewis@fas.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

U.S. federal agencies should treat Latinos as a racial or quasi-racial group in demographic data collection, rather than an ethnic or pan-ethnic group, as they do currently. Survey data must rely on self-reported racial and ethnic identification. But people often identify their own race differently from how others perceive them. In order for self-reported survey data to be useful for the enforcement of antidiscrimination law, it is important that it tracks how others perceive the respondents’ race and ethnicity, not just how they see themselves. To capture racial perceptions of Latinos, government surveys need to balance three subsidiary criteria: the promotion of self-reported racial identifications that are useful as a proxy for the perceptions of others; the ability to measure intra-group differences in how Latinos are racially perceived; and the extent to which Latinos are collectively perceived as a race. A survey format that treated Latinos as a racial group would likely be more amenable to these goals than the current format, but there are some areas, which this paper identifies, where further empirical research is needed in order to be sure.

Keywords

RaceEthnicityDemographyLatinosLatinxCensus
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 63 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2019 

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