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677 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (2018)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0677 and id is 1 raw text is: The Census Race Classification: Is It Doing Its Job? By KENNETH PREWITT Aligning census ethnoracial categories with America's changing demography is a never-ending task and becomes more difficult when identity claims are ration- ales for altering categories. We examine four current problems: (1) the Census Bureau projects a population more nonwhite than white by midcentury-social demographers document trends pointing to a different racial future; (2) the census inadequately measures second- and third-generation Americans, limiting the nation's understanding of why some immigrant groups are racialized while others are whitened; (3) on health, education, and employment, there is more int- rarace than between-race variability, which is better measured for Asians and Hispanics than it is for whites and blacks; and (4) consistency in racial self-identifica- tion is stronger for whites, blacks, and Asians than for Hispanics, Native Americans, and biracial groups, low- ering the reliability of race data. These measurement problems weaken policy choices relevant to economic growth, social justice, immigrant assimilation, govern- ment reforms, and an enlightened public. Keywords: majority-minority; assimilation; intrarace variability; identity rationales; white nationalism; statistical races America's racial classification can be traced to 1735, when Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, briefly shifted his attention from flora and fauna-he was a botanist-and fear- lessly divided the human species into four sub- species: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, Europeaeus. A few decades later, the classifica- tion was slightly modified by a German doctor, Johan Blumenbach, in his influential On the Natural Varieties of Mankind. He divided the Asians into the Mongolian and Malaysian; he Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor at Columbia University, President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, past director of the Census Bureau, and author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Effort to Classify Americans (Princeton University Press 2013). Correspondence: kp2058@columbia.edu DOI: 10.1177/0002716218756629 ANNALS, AAPSS, 677, May 2018 8

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