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Opinion

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count

Credit...Monica Ramos

Racially speaking, the United States is zero percent Hispanic. This is confusing — especially for America’s nearly 58 million Hispanics.

The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics.

Equally obscured are America’s estimated 3.7 million residents of Arab descent. With neither a racial nor an ethnic category to call their own, they most often opt for a racial designation of “White.” But to count Yemenis and Syrians as generically white is a complicated proposition these days, when whiteness confers power, and men and women from the Arab world are instead the subjects of travel bans and national security debates.

Nearly four years ago, the Census Bureau began researching how to more accurately represent these populations and decided to combine the race and ethnicity questions into one, and to add two new categories: one for residents of Middle Eastern/North African origin and one for those of Hispanic origin. Many advocates within those groups celebrated the reforms, and the broad expectation was that the next census, in 2020, would incorporate these changes. After all, the bureau itself concluded that they were necessary to “produce the highest quality statistics about our nation’s diverse population.”

But in January, the bureau abruptly announced it would not move forward with the reforms after all, saying only that “more research and testing” was needed on the addition of a Middle Eastern/North African category.

While the Census Bureau has shown strange reluctance to enact these vetted changes, it has been unusually aggressive in making others. On Monday, news broke that the 2020 census would include a question asking respondents whether they are United States citizens. The question, requested by the Department of Justice late last year, has not been included on the census since 1950. It has not been tested at all and was first proposed some nine months after the bureau was supposed to have submitted the 2020 questionnaire topics.

These changes matter. Census data is used to determine more than $675 billion in federal funding; it is a demographic Rosetta Stone that is referenced in the drawing of congressional districts, each state’s number of Electoral College votes and the application of civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. To be counted in the census is to be both seen and supported.

While the Trump administration contends the citizenship question will help the Justice Department more “effectively” enforce the Voting Rights Act, what it will actually do is drive millions of Americans, many of them Hispanic, into the shadows. Undocumented residents and even green-card holders may fear that filling out the census could put them at risk of deportation and decide it’s better not to be counted at all.

At least 12 states have announced they will sue the administration, and others are likely to follow.

“In the current environment, where there is overt hostility toward immigrants coming from the White House, this does not generate trust in the census,” said Arturo Vargas, the executive director of the Naleo Educational Fund. According to Tomás Jiménez, a sociologist at Stanford specializing in immigration and assimilation, “the intent is incredibly nefarious.”

How to conclude otherwise? Reforms to the census focused on millions of Hispanics and Middle Easterners, based on years of research, have been tossed aside. It is not a coincidence that these are two groups President Trump has targeted repeatedly. His administration’s decisions will cost those men and women, in both political and concrete ways.

It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency. To be white in President Trump’s America is to fundamentally belong. Unlike brownness, which remains at the margins, whiteness is at the center of the American origin story — a powerful narrative about how this country came to be and what made it great (and indeed what might make it great again).

Perhaps this is the reason the administration opted to ignore the advice of its own bureau, to keep America’s demographic destiny at bay and, in so doing, to silence the narrative about who we really are.

Or maybe it was this: In our present moment of marginalization and deportation, scorn and dismissal, to self-identify as Hispanic or Arab-American is a political act. To be counted is to secure a place in the story of this country. It is to will the American narrative to bend in the direction of change.

No wonder this government has taken the tool with which to do so off the table. There is strength in numbers, after all. What better way to undermine that strength than to refuse a count in the first place?

Alex Wagner is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a co-host of “The Circus” on Showtime and the author of the forthcoming book “Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest and the Secret to Belonging.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Americans Our Government Won’t Count. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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