In the United States, the social and political order was largely defined by race. A census both creates the image and provides the mirror of that image for a nation’s self-reflection. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole. Briefly put, we focus on the census because a nation’s census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. For reasons that we explain below, this article focuses on the crucial role of the Census Office (after 1902, the Census Bureau). government groped its way through extensive experimentation-reorganizing and reimagining the racial order, with corresponding impact on individuals’ and groups’ life chances.Īll branches of government and all levels of governance were involved to a greater or lesser degree in this process of racial reorganization. Most broadly, over the course of almost a century, the U.S. Simultaneously, whether American Indians were deemed assimilable, whether Mexican Americans should be subject to Jim Crow laws, and whether South Asians would be excluded along with Pacific-rim Asians all depended in part on whether they were classified in terms that allowed them to be potential insiders or that defined them as perennially outside the status of American. Blacks and Chinese were placed into an ugly contest for the bottom of the status hierarchy, with the “victory” depending a great deal on how public officials defined and bounded the group. Whether or not a given group or individual was included in the category of "white" profoundly affected that group’s or person’s social standing. While whites never lost their position at the top of the status hierarchy, who belonged in this privileged group was hotly contested. Basic components of the racial order were revised, revisited, and fundamentally altered. Officially recognized group categories expanded and contracted socially recognized boundaries between groups blurred and shifted citizens and public actors passionately debated who belonged in which group. Census Population volume on number of quadroons, octoroons,īetween the Civil War and World War II, the United States underwent a profound process of racial reorganization. the greatest statistical laboratory of the United States government, worthy to rank with the best statistical offices maintained by European governments. The classification by race or color of individuals, or even entire populations, is not only very difficult, but is a very delicate matter to the United States Government. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation's self-reflection. Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation's census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. All recognized racial groups-blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others-were affected. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. In Studies in American Political DevelopmentĪBSTRACT: Between 18, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race
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