Once a decade, every household in the United States is required by law to participate in the U.S. census. For many people, most of the questions on the census seem pretty straightforward: How many people live in a household? Is the household rented or owned? But things get a little trickier when people are asked to identify their race.
Throughout the month of April, Code Switch will be looking at some of the complicated questions that arise when we’re all, collectively, asked to think about our racial identity.
There are 15 boxes that people can choose from on the census form, and within some of those categories, respondents have the option to get more granular. They can specify that they’re Black Jamaican, for instance, or a white person of Serbian descent. People are also allowed to check as many boxes as they want, including “some other race.”
We’re also questioning the very nature of what it means to identify as part of a racial group. We look at an effort in Puerto Rico to persuade more of the island’s residents to self-identify as black, after a longstanding denial of African heritage. Then, we’ll grapple with the fraught question underlying a lot of debates about reparations: What does it mean to be black? Later, we’ll talk to a filmmaker who thinks a lot about his relationship to whiteness, and how other white people think about it, too.
Foundingfrog
Article URL : https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/03/31/823881121/who-are-we-were-finding-out-together