Constructing Race and Ethnicity in America

Category-making in Public Policy and Administration

Dvora Yanow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765608000
• eBook ISBN: 9781317473923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms "race" and "ethnicity"? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that "race" and "ethnicity" are socially constructed concepts, not objective, scientifically-grounded variables, and do not accurately represent the real world. She joins the growing critique of the unreflective use of "race" and "ethnicity" in American policymaking through an exploration of how these terms are used in everyday practices. Her book is filled with current examples and analyses from a wealth of social institutions: health care, education, criminal justice, and government at all levels. The questions she raises for society and public policy are endless. Yanow maintains that these issues must be addressed explicitly, publicly, and nationally if we are to make our policy and administrative institutions operate more effectively.

Part I

Laying the Groundwork: Giving a(n) (Ac)Count

What do the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, police departments, and schools have in common? Aside from being public agencies—and, as such, agents of the state—they all play a central role in counting the population of the United States, each for its own specific programmatic reasons. All of these agencies, along with others not listed here, use sets of categories for these counts; and in counting and reporting by these categories, they participate not only in classifying those they enumerate, but also in giving an account—that is, in telling a story about the people they categorize and count. Chapter 1 relates counting to naming in the process of making categories, and both to science and the establishment of identity.

U.S. federal policy has mandated, since the late 1970s, that race-ethnic data be counted. The Office of Management and Budget published Statistical Directive No. 15 in 1977, naming and defining the categories for tabulating these data. The directive was revised twenty years later, in time for Census 2000. Chapter 2 explores these names and definitions, as the ways in which the U.S. federal government “does” race-ethnicity in a “scientific” fashion.

1

Constructing Categories: Naming, Counting, Science, and Identity

It is an anachronism to believe that our world

is more securely founded in knowledge

than one that is driven by pangolin power.

—Mary Douglas (1975, p. xxi)

Indeed, the very desire for guarantees

that our values are eternal and secure

in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving

for the certainties of childhood

or the absolute values of our primitive past.

—Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty
(quoted in Gray 1996)

Let us begin with the first of two thought experiments. How many races are there in the United States? Name them.

If you answered five, you would be following common administrative practices between 1980 and 2000. The federal government, in the form of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, identified—named and defined—for data collection purposes, beginning in 1980, five American racial or ethnic groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. The 1990 U.S. Census, on its forms and in its data tabulations, made allowances for some additional variations on these five:

● An unspecified number of possibilities for American Indian, depending on the individual’s principal tribal affiliation as indicated by him or her, and Eskimo and Aleut as possibilities for Alaskan Native;

● Twenty-five specific possibilities for Asian or Pacific Islander (API), plus the option of identifying another group;

● Two names for Black, Negro being the other (although there is only one box to check);

● Eleven possibilities for Hispanic, plus the option of naming some other one.

Discounting all the possibilities for choosing “Other” (other tribe, other API, other Hispanic, other race), that means the 1990 census provided specific possibilities for 41 different American race-ethnic groups. This is without itemizing the 119 federally recognized Native American tribes, plus untold numbers of others not (yet) recognized. According to one researcher, one mountainous province in North Vietnam alone reported being populated by as many as 16 ethnic groups in 1958, with over 100 for the whole country (Dang, n.d.); and although the Han ethnic group is dominant in China (at 91 percent of the population), there are 55 minority nationalities, including Manchu and Mongolian (Singer 1997). Even if only some members of these Vietnamese and Chinese groups immigrated to the United States, the American race-ethnic picture gets even more muddied. Indeed, with the 1997 revisions to OMB No. 15 and changes to Census 2000, the Census Bureau will report out 63 race-ethnic possibilities (Fan 1999).

Academic research suggests other possible answers. Ethnic information sources of the United States (Wasserman and Morgan 1976) identified 112 “ethnic peoples.” This number does not include Blacks, American Indians, and Eskimos, for reasons the editors explain in their introduction.¹ The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Thernstrom, Orlov, and Handlin 1980) lists 106 ethnic groups. The 1992 edition of Ethnologue (Grimes 1992) identified 191 American language groups (including, e.g., those speaking American Sign Language): 164 living, 26 extinct, and 1 a second language without mother-tongue speakers. Accepting language as one of the elements that constitutes an ethnic group, these sources yield a much larger picture of U.S. race-ethnicity than defined by the federal government’s five 1980 categories.

The second thought experiment is this. Imagine an employment questionnaire that begins by asking: “What is your race?” or “What is your cultural heritage?” and that for answers provides the following possibilities:

	● Northeastern		● Southern
	● Midwestern		● West Coast

or, perhaps, these possibilities:

	● Downeasterner		● New Yorker
	● Hoosier		● Appalachian
	● Chicagoan		● Californian
	● Texan		● Okie/Arkie
	● Bostonian		● Southerner

These answers represent other possible category schemes for American race-ethnic identification, created and organized from a different vantage point from the one that has constructed the schema presently in use.

My intention with these two thought experiments is to suggest that there is nothing “natural” about how Americans think, talk, or practice the race-ethnic discourse most commonly in use in the United States today. We are making American race and ethnicity in everyday administrative practices and public policies, in acts and in the language used in carrying out those acts. This race-ethnic discourse—by which I mean both acts or practices and the language used in conducting them, in a mutually implicating fashion—constitutes the daily (re)creation of race-ethnic identities; in turn, this ethnogenesis sustains the specific race-ethnic categories created, invoked, and used.

Much of the collective, national knowledge about race and ethnicity is embedded in this category language and in the tacitly known rules for its use. The categories reflect a set of ideas about race-ethnicity, as do the various policy and administrative practices that create and use the concepts and categories. The concepts “race” and “ethnicity” as they are used in the United States, and the practices of naming and counting race-ethnic groups, reflect a set of ideas about identity. But although this knowledge is held conjointly in a society, much of it is known tacitly. As Polanyi (1966, p. 4) noted, “We can know more than we can tell.” It is possible to begin to make at least some of this tacit knowledge explicit, and thereby begin to examine beliefs about race-ethnicity, by examining the practices in which this knowledge is used. It is in its use—in its enactments, including speech and writing—that tacit knowledge comes closer to the surface of explicitness and can be more readily, though not always easily, seen.²

Much ink has been spilled in attempting to define a priori what “race” and “ethnicity” are and are not.³ As Goldberg (1992, p. 544) notes, most social science exploring the meaning of race has stipulated its definition in keeping with a sense of what the term should mean. What is of interest to me here, however, is how these concepts are used in actual practices, quite aside from normative usages or social scientists’ definitional debates. How are the concepts of race and ethnicity understood by contemporary Americans, not as conceptually abstracted from a context of practice and daily life, but in their actual use as reflected in policy and administrative enactments? Call it “common sense” (Geertz 1983a), call it “folk wisdom” (Lakoff 1987), the definitions-in-use in public policies and administrative practices both reflect and shape human understanding of the meanings of these concepts.

This analytic approach rests on the distinction captured in the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do”: thought and act are often discrepant. Asking people directly what they think about race-ethnicity is likely to elicit a set of espoused beliefs or values—whether because interview or survey participants often tell researchers what they think the latter wish to hear, or because they say what they think they ought and wish themselves to believe. By making a close “reading” of the categories constructed collectively, as a society, in and through public policy and administrative practices, I aim to make more explicit what those beliefs are, not as espoused, but as enacted.

It is the collective or social dimension of category and concept construction, learning, and knowing that I am after. Public policy and administrative practices reflect public knowledge at the same time that they shape it. Processes of category making in the public arena reflect and shape, maintain and change; both aspects are mutually interactive and inextricably intertwined. The OMB’s revisions of its list of categories and the Census Bureau’s revisions of its tabulation procedures are a product of numerous hearings, meetings, deliberations, testimonies, position papers, and so on. The new categories are, in short, constructed texts, not authored ones produced by some identifiable Ozian wizard behind a bureaucratic curtain.

Public Policy and Administrative Practices as Public Narratives

Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) maintained, in a view probably shared by many, that there is no point in legislating policies that cannot be implemented. This sentiment reflects an instrumental-rational approach to public policy (and perhaps a certain American pragmatism). And yet, many unimplementable pieces of legislation are, in fact, drafted and passed at all levels of government. One example of such seemingly unimplementable legislation may be found in several local governments in California’s San Francisco Bay area—Hay ward, Berkeley, Oakland, and Santa Cruz—as well as in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Each of these cities has declared itself a “nuclear free zone.” Signs posted on their streets proclaim this status. Yet, these cities’ governments are unable to stop the transshipment of nuclear materials across their borders: such shipping travels over federally funded highways, and federal law supersedes local law.

From an instrumental-rational point of view, such policy making is pointless, and any evaluation of it would only highlight that pointlessness. But sense does appear if we broaden our understanding of human action, including policy making, to include an expressive dimension. In this vein public policies can be seen as narratives or stories through which a polity’s members express, to themselves and to one another, as well as to more distant publics, their collective identity and values.⁴ Taylor (1988) defines expressive acts as those that have meaning for the people who engage in them. They are not only the instrumental, goal-oriented communication of information. Expressive behaviors, Taylor said, give voice to something within a repertoire of shared experience. Seen from an interpretive view, narrative is one such form of expressive act, created to give voice to human meaning.

Public policies are, in this sense, a collective narrative. They construct public, collective knowledge and identity as they link a memory of the past to the present, and possibly to some future as well. Through them, a polity, acting within a repertoire of shared experience, gives voice to its identity. Through public “policy-tales” (Schram and Neisser 1997; see also Buker 1987), members of the polity narrate publicly, to themselves and, at times, to others, who they are, as a polity, in terms of what they value (Yanow 1996, chap. 1). The nuclear-free cities case illustrates this. The policies were (and are) unimplementable, yet they were not exercises in futility (except from a perspective that sees public policies as solely instrumental endeavors); rather, they gave voice to each polity’s collective sense of values, beliefs, feelings— to members’ identity as a polity.

Identities are asserted by naming them. Each category scheme and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Laying the Groundwork: Giving a(n) (Ac)Count
• Part II. Making Race-Ethnicity Through Public Policies
• Part III. Making Race-Ethnicity Through Administrative Practices
• Part IV.Telling Identities:The Contemporary Legacy
• References
• Index
• About the Author