Thread by @charles_gaba

THREAD:
Good grief. I do not envy the @uscensusbureau their task when it comes to categorizing people into different racial demographics. 1/

On the surface, it seems simple enough: They have 6 different racial (not ethnic) categories:

--White
--Black/AA
--Am. Indian/AK Native
--Asian
--Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
--Other

However, then we get into "2 or more races" and things get...complicated. 2/

--White + Black/AA
--White + Am. Indian/AK Native
(etc)
--Black + Am. Indian/AK Native
--Black + Asian
(etc)

...and they even go into 3+, 4+, 5+ and finally have a column for someone claiming to be *all 6*. 3/

All told there's upwards of ~70 different racial categories.

I applaud them for trying, but at a certain point I'd imagine it gets futile especially since I assume this is all based purely on self-attestation.

For the record, in the 2020 Census, 2,539 people claim to be all 6.

120 of them live in Los Angeles, which makes sense seeing how it's the largest county in the country.

For what it's worth, according to the Census Bureau, as of April 2020:

--61.2% White alone
--12.3% Black alone
--1.1% Am Indian/Native Alaskan alone
--5.9% Asian alone
--0.2% Na Hawaiian/Pacific Isle alone
--8.6% "Other"
--10.6% 2 or more races

Of that 10.6% which identifies themselves as being 2 or more races, however, 86.1% are White + some other race.

As someone noted, "Asian" is awfully general, as I assume it includes both Chinese/Japanese as well as Indian, which doesn't make much sense.

If you're a U.S. citizen whose parents were Egyptian or Afrikaner, do you put yourself down as "African American"?

Reminded of the opening of Mean Girls...