McCall Hispanic Ministry Write up #4
Changing Race: Pgs 64-86.
Decennial censuses often only reflect a country’s historical needs (not future needs); however, the information collected is often deemed necessary for the needs of small geographic areas, as well as the greater nation at large. Furthermore, categories of classification within the Census generally reflect the dominant party’s (code word of white race) consideration of who should be counted, how often they should be counted, and how they will be counted. Over the years of Decennial Censuses, our author posits (65) that there have been two basic socially constructed polarities that contain “whites” on one end of the spectrum, and all “other colors” on the other end of the spectrum. However, I disagree with this conception, and posit instead that there are four general classifications: 1) Yellow (Asians), 2) White (Caucasions), 3) Black (Negroes), 4) Brown (Indians).
This chapter (4) traces the changes that have occurred in the Decennial Censuses’ classification of race and color throughout the years of its existence. In an interesting note, the US Constitution did not point out color or race when it set forth criteria with which the censuses were to be taken, but only “free status” instead. However, with only few exceptions, the end result was still largely determined on the modern conception of racial lines (as most “blacks” at the time were not free, etc). The necessity of a Census is a result of our desired form of Democratic government, which is necessarily representatitive by default.
In the original Census, Blacks were only counted as 3/5 of a person, whereas indentured sevrants (I am a 4th generation child of an indentured Irishman) were counted as “free people”, and hence were represented in the government census.Not being counted meant that the person did not had no official place in society, and by being counted as only 3/5 of a person, slaves were actually viewed as subhuman. These are some of the things that make me scratch my head in wonder when I realize that the ones who perpetrated such dehumanization considered themselves “Christians”. Between the first drafting of the Constitution in 1787 and the first census of 1790, the term “white” became an explicit part of the first category used, and thereby was made central in the census.
In 1830, uniform censuses across the states of the Union first appeared, and the “color line” became all the more evident. The Hypodescent rule became more explicit in 1830, and “other races” were subsequently put into the not-white or colored column of classification. In an attempt to not lose their numerical predominance in America, whites recruited anglos from Germany and Great Britian in the mid 19th century. Free white males above 20 at that time were only ~21% of the populations, whereas blacks were ~18% respectively. It is funny to me how anal people were in the late 1800’s (1890), as they partitioned mixtures of races into 4 different distinct classes: quadroons, octroons, mulattoes, and blacks. Whites were, by the 20th century, the class by which others were defined. 1910 recognized the “other” status of some people, and gave them an option to mark accordingly. By 1920, anyone with even a little black ancestory was now deemed “black”. Hispanics, due their multiplicity of phenotypes, are seemingly left out of these stereotypical classifications. For the first 200 years of the Census, “color”, not race, ahas been the term of reference. However, things have gotten better since 1950, for at that time the Census admitted that “race” is not scientific, but only culturally constructed instead.