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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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I used the website below, which gets data from the census bureau, to see how much of California was white in 1975. 87.6%--because the 1975 data does not include Hispanic as a category.

https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/california/?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1975-01-01

One of the major problems of the whole categorization system (as documented by David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy) is that Hispanic is basically a non-category. Hispanic just means, "sort of associated with Spanish" in practice, and most "Hispanic" Californians and Texans were European genetically for the vast majority of US history.

Am I going mad? Because it looks like the 2021 data doesn't distinguish hispanic from white either, so in 2021 the state was 71.1% white.

That seems strange, I'd expect the census bureau to want more information than "black, white or other?" But on the other hand, if hispanics are white enough for the census bureau, why do they need to be distinguished?

Try narrowing the years to something like 2010—2023 and Hispanic will populate. I don't know what year the census bureau started asking people if they were Hispanic (I'm pretty sure the US Census is actually where the word "Hispanic" was invented) but the charts on that website will stop showing that data as soon as you include any years where the question wasn't asked.

I hope that makes you feel less crazy—although many people go mad for reasons that have nothing to do with the Census Bureau. I'm not qualified to rule those out for you.

The Census Bureau considered Hispanic to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, one can be white and Hispanic (Ted Cruz) as well as black and Hispanic (eg many Cuban-American baseball players).

Hence, the Census Bureau reports that California is currently almost 71% "white alone" but only 34% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."

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