Confusion over census question is addressed

Wednesday, March 5, 2003 | 11:13 a.m.

Sitting in a Starbucks, Jose Bolanos stuck out his arm and pulled up his sleeve.

"Look at me," he said. "I'm as white as you. But people don't see me as white. They see me as Hispanic."

Bolanos, from Costa Rica, has watched hundreds of Hispanics grapple with the question of race when the census forms come around. In addition to identifying their ethnicity, they are asked to classify themselves as black, white, Asian or American Indian.

As Nevada's recruitment manager for the 2000 Census, he saw Mexicans identify themselves on the form as white because they thought it might help them avoid the attention of immigration officials. He saw dark-skinned Cubans identify themselves as "Some other race" because checking off "Black, African-American or Negro" sounded to them like saying they were "American."

The same sort of scenario played out nationwide, causing "concern about ... the quality of numbers ... among Hispanics," said Claudette Bennett, chief of racial statistics for the Census Bureau.

Almost 15 million Hispanics nationally felt that no racial category described them in the latest census, so they checked off, "Some other race." That was 42 percent of all Hispanics who answered the census. Another 2.2 million Hispanics checked off two or more races, or 6.3 percent of the total.

Still others answered the question on Hispanic origin, but left the question on race blank.

While it may seem a small matter of semantics, the shades of meaning have real consequences. Answers to the race question are used to direct billions of federal dollars to various groups, to determine the composition of voting districts and to measure compliance to federal civil rights laws, Bennett said.

So the Census Bureau is trying to do something about the confusion.

During the past several weeks, the federal agency has sent test questionnaires to 160,000 households across the nation -- including an unknown number in Nevada. The questionnaires tweak a question here and cut a slash there, all in the quest for more accurate information about the nation's fastest-growing minority, now estimated at more than 37 million.

The number of Hispanics in Nevada grew by 254 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to the Census, and officials estimated that Clark County had 329,446 Hispanic residents in 2001.

Bob Parker, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who teaches a course called "Race and Ethnic Relations in America," said the portions of the Census that apply specifically to Hispanics require attention, but he doesn't think Census officials "can solve this problem."

"The (Hispanic) population is too heterogenous to ever have a complete, accurate count," he said.

But Bennett and the agency see the need to try. In the 2000 Census, the 15 million who didn't identify themselves as belonging to any race were reassigned to other racial categories based on a formula that took into account the millions who did choose a race.

Since 1980, when the question about Hispanic ethnicity was asked of all households for the first time, the number of people checking "Some other race" has risen steadily, from 5 million that year to 10 million in 1990.

Classifying millions of people based on a formula is not the best of all possible worlds, Bennett said.

"We don't want to go through this whole thing of reassigning people anymore," she said.

So the changes on the test questionnaires include dropping the "some other race" category altogether and urging people to answer both the ethnicity and race questions, choosing more than one race if necessary.

Over at the Florida Cafe on the older part of the Strip, Sergio L. Perez Bosmenier, who opened the restaurant 5 1/2 years ago, said that questions about race have always confused him in the 12 years he has lived in the United States.

"To me, that question always seems out of place. I always come up short when I have to answer it. What should I say? Better to put down, 'None of the above."'

Perez Bosmenier said that in his homeland, "We are all a little black."

He rattled off about a dozen terms Cubans use to describe people's skin color, ranging from "light black" to "cinnamon colored" to "redhead."

"But we're all mixed, so we're all the same," he concluded.

In a quick tour through his restaurant's kitchen, Mexicans, Cubans and Colombians all laughed when asked what race they consider themselves to be.

"Criollos," blurted out Jose de Romero Rodriguez, from Veracruz, Mexico, as he flattened plantains for frying, a Caribbean treat.

"Criollo" is the Spanish word for "Creole," and it takes into account the entire history of Latin America, including the arrival of Spaniards, slavery and the conquest of natives. It really means "mixed."

The problem is the way the question of race is viewed by Hispanics, said Robert Goldenkoff, assistant director for strategic issues at the Government Accounting Office. The Office of Management and Budgets sets standards for all federal agencies that gather data on race and ethnicity.

"The Census Bureau has found that Hispanics will look at race and ethnicity as one and the same find it difficult to classify themselves by standard categories," he said.

Parker, the sociology professor, said that race is a social construct more than anything and is constantly in flux.

"What this all shows is that different people have different perspectives on who they are ... (and) we try to lump people together to our peril," he said.

Bennett said the census is trying to avoid that peril but needs to figure out what to ask.

"How do we come up with questions that people understand and can respond to that at the same time meet legislative and program needs?" she said.

"(These are) the difficulties we're facing with the nation's growing Hispanic population and the growing racial and ethnic diversity as a whole."