Afro Latino organizations and scholars are raising the alarm about a new directive from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
In a decision announced on March 28, the OMB, which officially determines the nation’s criteria on race and ethnicity and sets the guidelines on how the U.S. Census is conducted, announced it will combine the race and ethnicity question for those who mark themselves as having a Hispanic or Latino identity.
The OMB says it’s come up with a new, combined race and ethnicity question that will ease confusion on the census. The agency said it discovered that most Latino respondents found the race and ethnicity question unclear and wound up marking themselves as a person of “Some Other Race (SOR).”
But Afro Latino groups say the OMB’s new question will have a detrimental effect on how statistics are gathered on their growing population.
“This latest effort ensures that Latinos are effectively deracinated and may cause Afro Latinos to be erased,” the non-profit organization afrolatin@ forum said in a statement. “By listing Latino ethnicity as co-equal with racial categories, Latinos are inaccurately portrayed as a population without racial differences despite all the research showing how Black Latinos are treated differently from other Latinos.”
The new decision is disappointing, declared Dr. Nancy López, a University of New Mexico professor of sociology and the director and co-founder of the Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice. “You can’t cover the sun with a finger––No se puede tapar el sol con un dedo. Race and ethnicity are different: they require different questions,” López asserted. “And it is appalling that all of the social scientific research that shows the importance of maintaining separate questions on race and ethnicity for understanding things like housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and even health inequities was discounted, not considered.”
Racial distinctions on the census
There had been decades of discussions about the importance of noting racial distinctions on the census.
Ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act legislatively ended discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, there have been National Advisory Committees (NAC) set up to help the Census Bureau outline racial parameters.
“[T]he value I assign to the existence of racial and ethnic advisory committees to the Census is based on the knowledge that these groups are difficult to count,” said Harry P. Puente-Duany, a member of a NAC called the Spanish Origin Advisory Committee, in a testimony about the 1980 Census. “I have not yet identified a way of saying this without offending the Bureau of Census, but there were Hispanics and Blacks in 1980 [who] did not complete a Census questionnaire, nor did anyone complete it for them. These Hispanics and Blacks were not counted in the 1980 Census and probably were not included in any earlier Census.”
Voluntary Black migration to the U.S. has been taking place for decades and needs to be recognized, Robert B. Hill testified back in 1987: “[A]s the noted Black sociologist, Dr. Ira De A. Reid revealed in his classic 1939 work, ‘The Negro Immigrant,’ immigration by Blacks to America is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, between 1900-1930, the number of foreign-born Blacks increased ten times faster than the number of native-born Blacks. Thus, by 1930, foreign-born Blacks reached 100,000 (or 1%) of the Black population. And, by 1980, the number of foreign-born Blacks soared to 816,000 or (3%) of the Black population. About three-fourths of foreign-born Blacks are from the West Indies. Yet, these figures markedly understate the actual number of Black immigrants…”
Most recently, several organizations and scholars spoke out about the importance of noting the racial distinctions among groups with foreign origins. “There’s been a group of over 200 scholars, academics, and Afro Latino organizations that have been concerned about this particular issue,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat explained to the AmNews. “And myself, Yvette Clark, Richie Torres, and others have expressed a concern that race is not ethnicity and that to lump the question together could contribute to an undercount of Afro Latinos because it places the applicant, the respondent of the census form, in a position where they may think ‘Well, I have to choose one or the other: If I choose Latino, then I should not choose Black––or vice versa.’”
The three congressional representatives plan to look at possible legislative routes for dealing with this new OMB ruling, Rep. Espaillat said.
“I’m hopeful that the greater community, particularly the greater Harlem community––being that Harlem is the home of the African diaspora internationally––that we can get the support from that community.”
Latino is not a race
The afrolatin@ forum began organizing to confront the possibility of a change in the census’ race and ethnicity question more than a year ago. Guesnerth Perea, the forum’s executive director, said his group began working with other Afro Latino organizations to form the Latino Is Not A Race coalition and shed more light on the issue.
Latino Is Not A Race conducted a public information campaign by holding a series of events and webinars. “The goal for that at that point was to get as many comments in as possible to the OMB to support the fact that Latino should not be co-equal to a racial category,” Perea said.
Now that the OMB decision is official, the coalition is planning on conducting another campaign. “The majority of our activity at the beginning of the campaign was to get comments. What we are now trying to figure out is what is our next thing to do? Like, how do we respond now? Because it seems like the only way that this can be changed is through Congress.”
Until it’s changed, Dr. López points out that the new OMB guidelines do allow for the collecting of additional data points.
“They do include a sentence that says that you can add additional questions if relevant. And I would say that if you’re interested in understanding the color line in housing and employment and school discipline, you should consider adding a perceived race, a street race question. And also consider clarifying that this is about not your self-identity per se, but understanding how others see you so that we can determine whether two siblings who are related and maybe even have the same parent, but actually one does not look Black and the other one does: Are they going to be treated the same way when they go vote or when they show up to look for an apartment?
“We’re going to ask people, if you were out in public, what race do you think others who do not know you would assume you are based on what you look like and by that I mean, skin color, facial features, hair, and whether or not we see inequities that would not be visible if we’re simply asking, how do you identify?”
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA), chairperson of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said in a statement, “It’s imperative that OMB, which is in the process of establishing an Interagency Committee on Race and Ethnicity Statical Standards, conduct more in-depth research and work with the Afro Latino community to ensure our nation collects the most complete and accurate data possible.
“The Congressional Hispanic Caucus will continue to stand as a partner with the Administration, the Census Bureau, and our diverse Latino community leaders and advocates to ensure the best possible data collection processes are used for the upcoming census.”
Ironically, as countries in the Caribbean and Latin America have begun including census counts of their Afro Latino populations, the U.S. appears to be turning the other way. Since the 1990s, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, and Venezuela have been among the most prominent nations to include Afrodescendants in their census count.
“I think that in certain sectors of Latin America, Afro Latinos are finally being recognized,” said retired educator Hector Bonilla, who is based in New Jersey. “The irony is that in some of these places, your criollo populations are beginning to look at Afro Latinos for their own cultural validation. Like, in Nicaragua they’re now celebrating the [Afro Nicaraguan] Bluefields culture. I had dance groups where when I was young as a teacher to mention [Afro Puerto Rican] bomba to some of those Puerto Ricans, it was like you were telling them, ‘Kiss me, I have AIDS.’ Now, you know, even the brown Puerto Ricans are dancing bomba––I’ve seen that development, I find that rather interesting.
“But Afro Latino culture has always been present in Latin America from the beginning. There’s not one national liberation movement in Latin America that wasn’t either started or led by Afro Latinos, and that includes Argentina. That culture has just been marginalized for the last three, four hundred years… I see now that folks are beginning to adapt to it and accept it.”