The White House put out a statement from Dr. Karin Orvis, Chief Statistician of the United States, titled “OMB Publishes Revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.”
Earlier today, OMB published a set of revisions to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (Directive No. 15): Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, the first since 1997. This process started in June 2022, with the first convening of the Interagency Technical Working Group of Federal Government career staff who represent programs that collect or use race and ethnicity data. Since that first convening, we’ve reviewed 20,000 comments and held almost 100 listening sessions to finalize the important standards we are announcing today.
Thanks to the hard work of staff across dozens of federal agencies and input from thousands of members of the public, these updated standards will help create more useful, accurate, and up to date federal data on race and ethnicity. These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America.
You can read the updated Directive No. 15 on the Federal Register as well as at www.spd15revision.gov.
[…]
The Working Group’s final recommendations included several critical revisions that have been thoroughly researched and tested over the last decade. The updated standards released by OMB today closely follow the Working Group’s evidence-based recommendations and make key revisions to questions used to collect information on race and ethnicity, including:
- Using one combined question for race and ethnicity, and encouraging respondents to select as many options as apply to how they identify.
- Adding Middle Eastern or North African as a new minimum category. The new set of minimum race and/or ethnicity categories are:
- American Indian or Alaska Native
- Asian
- Black or African American
- Hispanic or Latino
- Middle Eastern or North African
- Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
- White
- Requiring the collection of additional detail beyond the minimum required race and ethnicity categories for most situations, to ensure further disaggregation in the collection, tabulation, and presentation of data when useful and appropriate.
The updated standards also include several additional updates to definitions, terminology, and guidance to agencies on the collection and presentation of data.
That’s a long way of saying the Federal Government is making three changes to how it collects data on race and national origin. First, it’s adding a MENA category, recognizing that Arabs, Persians, and others from the region don’t think of themselves as “White.” Second, it’s combining race and ethnicity questions, mostly a function of Hispanic/Latino being considered a racial category by most. Third, it encourages people to check all that apply, recognizing that many folks are of mixed race.
Why?
One of the primary goals of Directive No. 15 is to ensure consistent and comparable race and ethnicity data across the federal government. To help meet that goal, the standards instruct federal agencies to begin updating their surveys and administrative forms as quickly as possible, submit an Agency Action Plan for complete compliance within 18 months – which will be publicly available, and finish bringing all data collections and programs into compliance with the updated standards within five years of today’s date. However, many programs will be able to adopt the updated standards much sooner than that. Starting today, the Office of the U.S. Chief Statistician will direct its efforts to help agencies collect and release data under these updated standards as quickly as possible.
In addition, this review process showed that racial and ethnic identities, concepts, and data needs continue to evolve. To improve the ability of Directive No. 15 to adapt and better meet those needs, OMB is establishing an Interagency Committee on Race and Ethnicity Statistical Standards, convened by the Office of the U.S. Chief Statistician, that will maintain and carry out a government-wide research agenda and undertake regular reviews of Directive No. 15. Some areas of interest identified in the technical expert research, as well as by stakeholders and engaged members of the public, lacked sufficient data to determine the effects of potential changes. Those areas of interest have now been identified as a top priority for additional research and data development in advance of future reviews. The updated standards identify several key research topics for the Interagency Committee to focus on initially. For more information on these research topics and the planned schedule for future reviews, see the updated Directive No. 15.
WaPo (“U.S. updates how it classifies people by race, ethnicity for first time in decades“) leads with
The federal government updated how it classifies people by race and ethnicity for the first time in over a quarter-century, aiming to better capture an increasingly diverse country and give policymakers a fuller view of the Americans their work impacts.
and adds:
The changes mark the first time since 1997 that the OMB has revised a policy on the federal collection of such data.
“This is truly a momentous day,” said Meeta Anand, senior director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of over 200 civil rights groups. The combined question, she added, is “one of the biggest changes we’ve ever seen.”
[…]
The changes are expected to show up on a range of federal data collection forms, including the census surveys that the government sends out every 10 years. They will also be reflected in the American Community Survey, which is conducted more regularly and includes more questions.
Such data guides how federal officials analyze everything from health-care outcomes to the redrawing of congressional districts.
[…]
“As a society, we cannot properly ensure equal rights and protections for all if we are not able to properly identify those impacted by overt and covert discrimination through systemic biases in the first place,” read one comment from an Egyptian American attorney who agreed with the new MENA category.
Momentum toward the changes has long been building, though it slowed during Donald Trump’s presidency. His administration sought to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, a move the Supreme Court blocked.
Advocates have especially pushed for a combined question on race and ethnicity, with research showing that the separate questions have hindered data collection among Latino respondents.
“Since many Latinos do not see themselves in any of the race categories under the current standards, a large proportion (nearly 44 percent) select ‘Some Other Race’ or skip the race question entirely,” Anand’s group said last year in a document outlining its case for a combined question.
The 2020 Census marked the first time that “Some Other Race” rose to the second-largest racial group in the United States.
“That means we had a lot of people who were not seeing themselves in the forms,” Anand said.
The Arab American Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Arab Americans, called the revised standards a “major accomplishment.”
“The new Standards will have a lasting impact on communities for generations to come, particularly Arab Americans, whose erasure in federal data collection will finally cease,” the institute’s executive director, Maya Berry, said in a statement.
At the same time, Berry said the institute has “deep concerns” that Arab Americans will continue to be undercounted because the new “Middle Eastern or North African” category does not fully capture the diversity of those groups.
NYT (“U.S. Officials Order Better Tracking of a Political Flashpoint: America’s Diversity“) leads with
The Biden administration ordered changes to a range of federal surveys on Thursday to gather more detailed information about the nation’s ethnic and racial makeup.
The changes — the first in decades to standard questions that the government asks about race and ethnicity — would produce by far the most detailed portrait of the nation’s ancestral palette ever compiled. And a new option will be available for the first time allowing respondents to identify as part of a new category, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.
But the changes also have the potential to rankle conservatives who believe that the nation’s focus on diversity has already gone too far.
and adds
American censuses have gathered personal information since the 1790s, but since 1977, surveys have specifically tracked basic race and ethnicity characteristics, originally to help enforce 1960s-era civil- and voting-rights laws. Save for one modification in 1997, the questions have remained largely unchanged until now.
Officials of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversaw the review of the current survey questions, said the changes were needed in part to make surveys more accurate. For example, respondents who separately identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in the current surveys frequently overlooked choosing a racial identification in the questions that followed, something that may happen less often when all questions are consolidated in a single section.
The changes also are also expected to allow experts to better measure how various populations benefit from federal programs and services in areas like employment, health and education, they said.
The social scientist in me is always happy to see more robust data collection. And, as American society becomes more diverse, it simply makes sense to ensure that people have categories that represent how they see themselves.
Indeed, Election Law Blog’s Justin Levitt provides this form, showing that the detail is considerably more than the above descriptions would indicate:
I’m more leery about the possible policy impacts, however. While I support the broad goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs there’s a natural bureaucratic tendency toward box-checking. While the Supreme Court has ruled racial quotas violate the Equal Protection Clause, it’s not hard to imagine more robust efforts to make federal hiring, higher education, and other high-focus sectors “look more like America.”
The more categories we create to that end, the more groups are pitted against one another. Historically, it’s mostly been a Black-White struggle, with Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity efforts seeking to redress racial imbalances in education and hiring. There, at least, there was the centuries-long legacy of slavery and Jim Crow to rectify. Are we going to start trying to ensure that there is “enough” Middle Eastern representation?
