Kenneth Prewitt

Prewitt is Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. His lecture, "Racial-Ethnic Classifications in Population Statistics: Politics or Science," drew a large audience.

The first census, conducted in 1790, was designed to help the government "divine the common good," Prewitt explained. The survey not only indicated where people lived, but also classified the population–men and women, children and adults, slave and free individual. Most of all, the census told the government the size of the group considered to be the most important citizens at the time–white, free men.

Over time, the country’s head count took on a secondary purpose–to give the citizenry a tool to track the performance of its fledgling government. With numbers, people could track the implementation of policy and law from decade to decade, said Prewitt. Gradually, the census expanded to include more detailed demographic information–such as place of birth, race, ethnicity, and occupation –based on a limited number of categories into which demographers once assumed everyone would fit, he explained. In the last half of the 20th century, the race and ethnic classifications were applied in the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and were used to calculate patterns of under-representation in education, health care, voting rights, political office-holding, home ownership, employment opportunities and other dimensions of economic and political life.

By 2000, when Prewitt led the Bureau, the U.S. had become perhaps the most diverse country in history, he said, made up of cultural groups from every part of the world. Census 2000 gave respondents the chance to identify with five primary racial groups or mark a box called "other." More significantly, people had the option for the first time to check more than one category, recognizing that people could blend and mix different racial heritages.

"The five primary categories, plus the ‘other’ category, generates 63 permutations and combinations," Prewitt said. Additional complexity is introduced by the numerous sub-categories listed on the short version of the census form, and by the ancestry and language possibilities on the long form.

"How do we know if a society is just?" he asked. "By seeing which groups are not represented in colleges, the best jobs, the highest levels of society. Statistical proportionality needs a denominator, and the census provides that."

The multiple permutations eliminated how arbitrary a limited number of discrete choices could be but added a challenge to researchers who use census data. Definitions of variables changed and needed to be reconciled with previous population and health data used by scientists. The implications of changing census denominators and possibly incompatible numerators from vital statistics and other health data sources was of enough concern that Nancy Krieger, associate professor of society, human development, and health at HSPH, helped organize a forum in 2000 to address these issues, including the changes’ possible impact on monitoring and analyzing racial/ethnic disparities in health. For more information, read an archived HPH NOW article available online at www.hsph.harvard.edu/ats/Mar31/ and the November 2000 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, which includes articles from the symposium.

Prewitt predicts several forces will converge on the Census Bureau as it prepares for the 2010 census. Classifications have taken on social value, he said, because they help people express their identity, which "they have a right to do in a multicultural world."

The influx of immigrants in the last four decades will put pressure on the Bureau to add new classifications, he said, and cited as an example the burgeoning strength of the Arab-American community. The community had sought to be counted as a unique group rather than being included under the "white" category, though that demand has been muted since 9/11.

"There will be confusion in how to classify people," Prewitt predicted for the next census. Americans caught a glimpse of that confusion, he said, in the debate surrounding the referendum on California’s Proposition 54, which attempted to abolish racial classification related to state business. The proposition failed.

After a lively question-and-answer period, Prewitt concluded that he remains conflicted over the classification issue. "We all want to get to a color-blind society," he said, "but the question is whether we can get there by blindfolding ourselves to racial injustices–past and present."

--PHC