The discussion, part of the center’s Over Tea series, focused on a National Public Radio article published earlier this year about changes in self-identification shown in the United States Census.
“Race and ethnicity are difficult categories that are mutually overlapping and in flux,” said Holly Schreiber, a graduate student from the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, who led the talk.
The census, as a quantitative survey, comes in constant conflict with the changing racial attitudes and politics of its time, she said.
The conversation focused on what NPR reporter Gene Demby called “racial churn” among Hispanics, or the shift in how people identify themselves on the census, often crossing lines and checking different boxes decade by decade.
The 2010 census in particular recorded a notable increase in Hispanics marking themselves racially “white.”
Schreiber noted the census’ macroscopic view often does not match individual perspective.
“The method used to gather the information affects the information,” Schreiber said. “This article may frame the census as a part of human experience, like you’re marking your identity when checking the boxes.”
Even whiteness is not so clear-cut in the American mind, Schreiber said.
“What does it mean to be white?” she said. “That’s such a historically fixed thing. What does whiteness mean? The Irish is a very famous example. That there was an assimilation process, that when they first came over they were not considered white. People didn’t always see race and ethnicity in the same way.”
Students questioned whether the gap between government and individual could be fixed by adding more racial categories to the census.
“I don’t know if it’s even doable,” student Janaki Patel said. “You’re trying to quantify something that’s qualitative. It’s never going to be perfect.”
The discussion comes in a time of high speculation about the country’s changing racial profile, as it makes changes in the coming decades in majority/minority diversity.
The students said they often hadn’t thought about the difference between ethnicity and race and how their place fit in national categories.
“I started to identify more with my racial identity after joining HoosierRaas at IU and developing interests in my culture,” IU student Kavita Dedania said. Dedania came to the event with other members of Gujarati dance group Raas Royalty.
After an hour of difficult definitions and discussion, one student offered a summary: “The census doesn’t work as well as I thought it did.”
