CENSUS CHIEF PRIORITIZES BETTER COUNT
Accurately reflecting non-White people is a top concern
For the past four decades, U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos has checked “Some Other Race” on his census form. Underneath it, he would write “mestizo” to describe his Mexican American heritage.
“That was the best way for me to be able to tell my own story of who I believe I am, as a Tejano and a Chicano,” Santos said in an interview.
Santos was not alone: In 2020, about 50 million people marked “Some other race” on their census form, and 90 percent of them were Latinos — a sign, Census Bureau officials have said, that the form is incompatible with how many people, particularly Latinos, identify.
A proposal by the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget could change that, potentially providing clarity for millions of Latinos filling out
the form — including the Census director himself.
The efforts are a revival of Obama-era reviews of the once-in-a-decade survey that were put on hold under former President Donald Trump. President Joe Biden has made them a “top priority,” according to the country’s chief statistician, Karin Orvis. It’s swiftly moving through the process with the goal of completing the revisions before the 2024 presidential election, Census officials
said.
The proposed changes would diminish the White population count, while presenting a country in 2030 that is more multicultural than previously thought.
Santos said one of his priorities as bureau director is improving the count of nonWhite populations. He is the first Latino to lead the bureau and its first Senateconfirmed person of color. (James Holmes led the Bureau as acting director in
1998, the first person of color to do so.)
When he was confirmed to lead the agency, Santos said he did some soulsearching.
“I had to make a decision of whether to just look like the usual Washington suspects or be myself. And as you can see, I decided to just be myself,” he said, gesturing to his low ponytail of long dark hair. “Yes, I’m Latino to the core. But I’m also a statistician to the core.”
His identity as a person of color informs and influences his work as a statistician and bureau director, Santos says. He was born and raised in the “barrio” of San Antonio and went on to become the vice president and chief methodologist at the nonpartisan Urban Institute and was executive vice president and partner of the Austin-based NuStats, a social science research firm.
In 2021, as presidentelect of the American Statistical Association, Santos expressed “grave concerns” over the hiring of several political appointees to the Census Bureau under the
Trump administration. He urged the bureau’s then-director, Steven Dillingham, to “explain the rationale for creating this senior position and assure the public that the appointees will not disrupt in any way the objective, scientific work of the bureau’s career employees.”
Since being sworn in last year, Santos said he has been working to create stronger ties between the bureau and local communities, to help them make use of the bureau’s data and to encourage them to fill out the once-in-adecade survey.
“The census is part of the American political system so you should never be surprised that different administrations deploy the enterprise differently,” said Margo Anderson, distinguished professor emerita at University of WisconsinMilwaukee.
On the current Census form, one question asks for the respondent’s ethnicity — whether they are Hispanic or not — and a following question asks for the respondent’s race, which includes White and Black but does not include Hispanic or Latino.
The proposal would combine these questions into one, with Latino listed alongside Black, White and other racial categories. It would also add Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) as an ethnic category alongside the others, instead of including MENA people under the White racial category.
The current census’ approach to recording race and ethnicity “is not optimal, is not the best approach,” Santos said. “The general public does not separate race and ethnicity. They think of it as one thing. And so when you ask one [question] and then ask another, they say, ‘Well, I already told you.’ ”
The OMB’s proposal also recommends removing outdated racial language from the census’s race and ethnicity policy standards, which were crafted in 1977 and include words such as “negro” to describe African Americans and “far east” for Asian Americans.