As the U.S. Census Bureau gets public feedback about how it should tally people into new race and ethnicity groups, the agency has released new research reflecting how U.S. residents from different backgrounds regard their racial and ethnic identities.
Earlier this year, the U.S. government changed how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity to more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage. Before this year, the categories hadn’t been changed in 27 years.
Under the revisions, questions about race and ethnicity that previously were asked separately on forms will be combined into a single question. That will give respondents the option to pick multiple categories at the same time, such as ”Black,” ”American Indian” and ”Hispanic.” Research has shown that large numbers of Hispanic people aren’t sure how to answer the race question when that question is asked separately because they understand race and ethnicity to be similar and they often pick ”some other race” or do not answer the question.
A Middle Eastern and North African category also was added to the choices available for questions about race and ethnicity. People descended from places such as Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and Syria had been encouraged to identify as white, but now will have the option of identifying themselves in the new group.
Results from the 2020 census, which asked respondents to write in their backgrounds on the form, suggest that more than 3.1 million U.S. residents identify as Middle Eastern and North African, otherwise known as MENA.
New research released this month by the Census Bureau showed that more than 2.4 million people, or around 80%, who wrote that their background was MENA did so under the white category in the question about their race on the 2020 census questionnaire.
Almost 500,000 people, or more than 16%, who wrote that they were MENA identified themselves as ”some other race,” and almost 139,000 MENA people, or 4.5%, identified as Asian. Almost 50,000 MENA write-ins, or 1.6%, did so under the Black race category.
Among MENA subgroups, people of Lebanese and Syrian backgrounds had the highest percentages of people identifying their race as white, and people who identified as North African, Berber and Moroccan had the highest rates of marking their race as Black. People with Omani, Emirati and Saudi backgrounds identified at the highest rates as Asian, the report said.
