Eldridge & Co. - Kenneth prewitt on the census

♪ [Theme Music] ♪ RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Hello. I'm Ronnie Eldridge. Welcome to Eldridge & Company. Our country couldn't survive without the United States Census Bureau. It's an amazing compilation of data that determines who runs our governments and how the federal government distributes more than $400 billion across the country. It's also full of information about who lives in the United States, things like our ages, marital status, where we live, what language we speak. It also asks what race we are. My guest, Kenneth Prewitt, Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University and former Director of the Census Bureau, has some compelling recommendations about that question, and he's my guest today, and welcome. KENNETH PREWITT: Thank you very much, Ronnie. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Let's just talk about the census because I think to a lot of people, it's kind of a mystery. It's something that comes every 10 years, and some people get the short form and others get the long form, and that, but tell me about it. KENNETH PREWITT: Well in 1790, in fact in 1787, it's in the Constitution, "There shall be a census," and that had to do with allocating seats into the new 13 states. The principle, once it became that the seats in the House of Representatives would be proportionate to population size, you had to go out and count the population, so the very first census was a very elementary count of the people living in the 13 now states, ex-colonies, up and down the coast, so that was his motivation. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And other countries had censuses? KENNETH PREWITT: Not quite. Other countries, including the U.S. historically, before this, had colonial censuses and so forth, but this was actually the first what we call census in the sense that it was established as a regular process, an every 10-year process. Now, other countries added that within the next 10 to 20 years so it wasn't a pioneer; we just happened to be first. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I was fascinated that they were smart enough to put that in the Constitution and to figure it all out. I mean, can you imagine the Congress today doing something like that? -- Absolutely not. KENNETH PREWITT: No, this was an act of really clever political engineering. Now, it had a downside: the bargain that had to be struck with the South. The South would not have joined the Union unless slaves were counted in the census, even though they could not vote. The bargain that they struck with the North was the slaves would be counted but at 0.6, as three-fifths of a person. However, that number in the South, including the slaves at 0.6, the famous three-fifths clause, gave us a series of southern Presidents who otherwise would not have been elected. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That's so interesting. KENNETH PREWITT: Jefferson would not have been elected; Madison would not have been elected. The Supreme Court rulers, justices, were all from the South, party leaders. The number of extra seats they got in the House in the first census was 14, and that meant 14 extra electoral votes. That tipped the balance. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But if they had counted them as people, then they would have had an overwhelming -- KENNETH PREWITT: Oh even more, even more, and indeed, they then caught another lucky break because after the slaves were freed, they are counted as full people, but still, of course, weren't allowed to vote, so the South retained its control over American politics in some important respects through that process up until the Civil Rights Movement. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That's so interesting, so it's a study with statistics. It's asking people many questions, and it's statistical, but it's also the basis for politics, right? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, I would make the simple point that you cannot make public policy. Most public policy is made about groups -- the unemployed, the school children, the incarcerated, the foreign-born. We make public policy about groups in a society, and you need to know their size and their characteristics, and so without some sort of statistical map of the country, it is very difficult to do public policy. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: When we talk about public policy, I know some people don't really understand what we're talking about, and politicians, it always makes them sound more intelligent when they can say something about public policy, but what exactly is public policy? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, it is really just the laws and regulations. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: What goes into developing it, basically. KENNETH PREWITT: Yes, surely, but the actual policy itself is something that a legislative body passes and an executive signs, whether it's a governor, a state legislator, or so forth. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But it's an issue that they study. KENNETH PREWITT: Exactly, we hope. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That you know that it's a need and you study and you go along. KENNETH PREWITT: Yeah, ObamaCare is a particularly complex public policy. Regulations about nursing care are public policies, but everything from the fact that we drive on the right hand side of the street is a public policy, in effect. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is public policy, right, and what's the difference then with politics? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, I would suggest that politics is the process that gives it to us. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I see. Yeah, I think that's true. KENNETH PREWITT: And they're contested, as is understandable in a democracy, so in a democracy, you will not get public policy without a prior political process, and the question then is what does the political process use to make the decisions that they're making about the policy choices, and a lot of what they use are the statistical underpinnings of the country. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And a lot of the political process also includes what we also call grass roots from community organizing, when you see a problem and define it and you bring it to the public attention, right? KENNETH PREWITT: Right. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And then people respond to it. KENNETH PREWITT: But 99 times out 100, what you bring to attention is the number of people who are affected by some condition. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So we go back to the Census Bureau. KENNETH PREWITT: And we go back to the census or some other similar thing, but the number who are unemployed, the number of the drop-out rates, the number of elderly who are declining rapidly. If you don't have a large enough number to command public attention, it's very hard to do something about it. Now I'm sure you and I would agree; one *** is one *** too many, but one *** does not turn on the government's activities. At a certain point, *** on college campuses has now become a thing because this year the number of -- RONNIE ELDRIDGE: It's so high. KENNETH PREWITT: Or *** harassment in the military, it's the number that drives public attention and then public policy. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So in the Constitution and the first census, we already had race questions. KENNETH PREWITT: Well, the British governors had asked race questions. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I see. KENNETH PREWITT: They wanted to know how many slaves there were in order to kind of maintain a balance. They didn't want too many slaves in particular parts of the colonies. So it was like counting property. It was like doing a census of the cotton production or of mining or something, and slaves were really thought of as an economic commodity. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So when did we start with categories of race to separate people out? KENNETH PREWITT: The first census in 1790 did not ask a race question. It asked civil status which is to say you count all the white males, we were counting white males primarily, and then Indians who could be taxed which means the Indians living in the colonies who could be taxed, and then all other people and those were the slaves, and then they were multiplied by 0.6 to enter them in. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But they counted women too; didn't they? KENNETH PREWITT: Yes. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I mean, they had a classification. KENNETH PREWITT: Gender, yes, men and women. The initial censuses were, especially 1790, right after- the big question was what's the size of our effective military resource -- white men between the ages of 20 and 45 or something-- so to get that number really mattered. The rest of the numbers were not initially consequential, not for another 20 or 30 years. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So it was 30 years later that we started getting -- KENNETH PREWITT: Oh, many more questions, economic questions. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: The census is a work in progress. It's always going to change. KENNETH PREWITT: Oh yes, it's always going to change because the social conditions change. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Yeah, so when did we start getting the actual divisions of race? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, almost immediately, it never went away, but you started a question about race as early as 1800, 1810. It was still asked about slaves, whites, and Indians. Those were the three categories. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So now we have what? We have white, black African American, Asian, Native Americans or American Indians, Alaskan Natives. KENNETH PREWITT: That's in the Native American category. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Native Americans, and then do we have South East Asia as a separate category? KENNETH PREWITT: Pacific Islanders. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Pacific Islanders. How did that get into it? KENNETH PREWITT: In 1776, Johann Blumenbach, a doctor in Germany, said there were five races of mankind -- white, yellow, black, red, and brown -- and that became our framework, and there was a deep racist science all through the 19th century, but that became our framework. We started with three of them: white, black, and red. We added a yellow when the Chinese laborers came in the mid-19th century, especially to California. Then the Japanese came, and they were included in that Asian population, and Pacific Islanders, of whom they were very few, were also counted as Asian until 2000, and that's because we had a Hawaiian senator who wanted to make it a separate category, so we have a separate count of native Hawaiians, Samoans, and so forth and call it Pacific Islander. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is that an example of politics overtaking public policy? KENNETH PREWITT: Absolutely, it was an issue of politics. He just wanted it, and there were hearings and so forth, and it's not a large part of our population. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So race is color of skin. KENNETH PREWITT: Race is what you want to call it. There is no definition of race that works. The Nile River, at one end of the Nile River, people are very dark. At the other end of the Nile River, they're very light. At what point did they become black instead of white? In some particular village, somewhere halfway up the Nile, you couldn't tell the difference. No. Color is a gradation, and you slice it in complicated ways. Don't forget; in the late 19th century, Italians were a race. Irish were a race. Poles were a race, and they were alien, and they were threatening. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And was that in the census that way? KENNETH PREWITT: In the census because they were immigrants; they were alien, and they became whitened in the so-called melting pot in the 1920s. They became whitened, that is included as whites in the census and more generally, because the whites were losing their populations majority, the WASPs, the Anglo-Saxon whites, and by including the Italians and the Irish and the Poles and the Russians, then you maintained your majority. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That's so interesting. KENNETH PREWITT: Ah, yes, but that's the question. Will we go through that process again? Will the South Asians, the Indian software engineers, the light-skinned -- RONNIE ELDRIDGE: What about the Australians? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, we don't have very many Australians but, as a matter of fact, the census doesn't know where to put Australians. There's Pacific Islanders, right? But they're certainly white and European, and we dodge that question. We don't have a clear answer. We let people tell us what they want to tell us. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So the Census Bureau which collects all this information, did you say there were how many people that are there all the time? KENNETH PREWITT: About 4,000 people work at the Census Bureau. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: 4,000 people work at it, and then every 10 years you go out. KENNETH PREWITT: You staff way, way up. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So now what are the questions that we're going to try to change? And you have a question especially about race. KENNETH PREWITT: Right. I left the Census Bureau, concerned that the population was changing more rapidly than our measurement system of it, and then I went to work on a book that came out recently that says What Is Your Race? Just as what is your race? Which is what the Census Bureau asks us, and the current question, if you look at it, you can't tell, because they're nationality groups. It's all illustrative. The current question has these five races: white, black, yellow, brown. People think brown means Hispanic but in the old nomenclature, brown was Pacific Islanders. Those are the five what we call primary races, and the questionnaire wants every American to belong to one of those. Then, in 2000, we added the idea that you could also be more than one of those, so you have now combinations, so mixed race. Then there is a separate question on are you an Hispanic or not, and Hispanic is considered by the Census Bureau to be an ethnicity, so we have this odd situation where, according to the census, there are two ethnic groups in the United States, Hispanics and non-Hispanics, and no other ethnic groups, and then everybody else, including every Hispanic, is also supposed to be one of the five races. You can be a white Hispanic. You can be an Indian Hispanic. If you're Mayan, for example, you presumably become an indigenous American origin. It misses the incredible richness of our population. You know, there are 800 languages spoken in New York City alone, for heaven's sakes. It's incredibly rich, the diversity of this country, and we're forcing everyone into one of these five boxes. There are good reasons for it. They were put there to discriminate, to punish, to exclude, and then when the Civil Rights Movement came along, the same classification was used to undo all of the discriminatory legal structures and apparatuses, Jim Crow laws, and so forth, but so the Civil Rights Movement had a real deep need to use the same statistics that had put them in these boxes to get them out of those boxes. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And we needed them also when the Justice Department was overseeing the districts that were electing. KENNETH PREWITT: That is right, the Voting Rights Act. We knew that African Americans had been denied the right to vote for all kinds of reasons and ways, and so those were the numbers. They become the denominator to find out whether there's injustices. What the Civil Rights Movement did is, forgive this one technical word, it created statistical proportionality. If 12% of the population is African American but only 1% goes to elite colleges and only 1% gets law degrees and so forth, something's wrong, so the whole idea of people ought to be represented proportionate to the size they are in the population became the underpinning of Civil Rights legislation. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Affirmative Action. KENNETH PREWITT: Affirmative Action, completely, of course. But now you have, for example, very, very well-educated, successful Ethiopians, Kenyans, Nigerians coming to this country, and there are going to be many, many more because of population growth in the African continent. They disappear. They're not in our statistical system because they have to go in this category called African American black, so we don't find the Ethiopians. We don't find the Kenyans. They actually don't see themselves that way. All of the Caribbean Islanders are in that category. Everybody, the number of population groups that go into the white category, all of North Africa goes into the white category. The Middle East goes into the white category. So these are just -- they're not wrong so much as they're just too crude to capture the complexities of our society. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And now when we take the politics out of it, African Americans are happy that they get all these other blacks into their category, right? KENNETH PREWITT: Every group worries about its numbers, absolutely, and what I recommended, and I won't go through the details of that, but what I've recommended allows any piece of legislation or any advocacy group to create their own category. They can decide that, for our purposes, we want the count of this population group which includes recent immigrants from Africa, it includes slave descendants, it includes Caribbean Islanders. That's our definition. Somebody else can say, "That's not the definition I want," and you can write a different law that says, "We're going to treat the recently-arrived Africans in their own category to see how well they're doing, how well their kids are being educated, they're naturalizing and so forth." We can't do that with the current group. So you don't throw it away, you just aggregate up. For some purposes, it makes sense to call the Cubans Hispanics. For other purposes, it doesn't. These are not people in need of affirmative action. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But there are black Cubans. KENNETH PREWITT: Yes. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Now what happens to them? KENNETH PREWITT: They are Hispanic black. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And under a different system? KENNETH PREWITT: No. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: The same way. KENNETH PREWITT: No, the Hispanic is a separate question, and then everybody who says "yes" to that should also be a race. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: How did Hispanic become a separate question? KENNETH PREWITT: Well, in the 1960s, they were a growing population. They had been called, they had been whites up until 1960. Mexicans were whites, for example in the 1930 census, '40 census, but it became a large enough group, looking to be, that they just simply agitated to be their own category. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And the personnel at the Census Bureau is interested in the figures, not in the political ramifications, right? KENNETH PREWITT: Those decisions are in the Executive Branch. The census could not write its own question and just use it. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Right, I see. KENNETH PREWITT: No, we're "civil servants." RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So what's the difference between a Latino and a Hispanic? KENNETH PREWITT: Nothing. It's in the eye of what people like to call themselves. I was in a Wal-Mart not too long ago, and there's an aisle, and there's a section called Hispanic and a section called Latino. It's the same food, but some people want to think of themselves as Latino, and Wal-Mart's doing a piece of marketing work, and so forth. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But you also would like to see more questions on the origin of their family strain tree or whatever, KENNETH PREWITT: Exactly, yes. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: The whole cultural-- KENNETH PREWITT: A very famous black intellectual, De Bois, in the beginning of the 20th century said that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. I think the problem of the 21st century is the problem of the color line as it intersects the nativity line. Are you born here or not? Are you a foreigner or not? We have a huge population of immigrants, nearly 30% of the population and their kids. It's going to grow. Those families are having more children than the native-born population, so the big question -- there are two big questions for the 21st century. One is immigrant assimilation, integration, cohesion, and so forth. The other is the residue of racial discrimination, and if we treat recent immigrants the same way we treated race groups in the 19th and early part of the 20th century, we'd have a major, major problem, and I want to know that. I want the country to know that, and the current statistics hide that from us. So we want to study, we should want to study as a nation, what is happening to the second generation of the immigrants, and some are doing very well. We have the so-called "model minorities" by which we mean the Koreans and the Chinese who are doing extremely well in schools. They could fill up the University of California system just on the strength of their own scores. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Silence in high school. KENNETH PREWITT: Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, we have Vietnamese that are not doing well at all, and they ought to be. They have different health problems. We can't find them because they're all just in this thing called "Asian" so I want a statistical system that is simply more nimble and flexible for the 21st century, has much more space for mixed-race people. We call a mixed-race person somebody who has a black mother and a white father or an Indian and an Asian. We don't call mixed race a child of a Korean and a Chinese, but that's important, just as it was very important in the latter part of the 19th century to know if Italians were marrying Irish. They were totally separate population groups. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: It's so much more. KENNETH PREWITT: Now, it's all gone. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And it's more also on race. I mean, the Italians marrying Irish was one thing but we see more and more with young people that there's just no difference. KENNETH PREWITT: Yeah. If you take the under-30, try to imagine what is the right census for the under-30 population, which after all, in 30 years, is going to be just the under-60 and then the under-90, and they're going to be followed by people more like them than the people who have -- RONNIE ELDRIDGE: How do cultural backgrounds affect the census? I mean, how do we find out about cultural backgrounds? Would we do it by origin? KENNETH PREWITT: Sure. You would do a national origin but the good sociologists and anthropologists who study this, they do it in small-scale studies. It's very difficult. There's an extremely important study of New York City that was funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and run by academics, some of which are right in this building, John Mollenkopf, and they told us more about integration and immigration in this country in the one big New York study than we could ever learn from the census because they could ask much more detailed questions, and I would like to take the kind of questions they ask, which includes second-generation questions. We do not ask, in the census, where were your parents born, so we don't know what's happening to the second generation today. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But, if a private study is done, we don't really find the legislation following it; do we? KENNETH PREWITT: No, not necessarily. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That's too bad, but the Census Bureau also does censuses in between the 10 years? KENNETH PREWITT: It does a lot of other work other than just the big census. It collects the data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics that gives us the unemployment rate. It does education research. Often it does the field work of a study that's designed in the Department of Education or the Department of Health or the Department of Labor, Department of Transportation. It will execute, be the field staff for that. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Does religion come into the census at all? KENNETH PREWITT: No. No. If you write it in, some religious word, it won't be coded, and that's the separation of church and state issue. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I see. Oh, that's so interesting, and nobody gives their religious background as their ethnicity? KENNETH PREWITT: Ethnicity, no, no. there was a brief time when we asked a Jewish population, late 19th century, and the Jews argued against it, did not want to take the chance, for good reason. The Jewish intellectuals invented the idea of the hyphenated American, Jewish-American, in order to claim that they could retain their identities, their cultural identities, their religious identities, and still be an American. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: I see. KENNETH PREWITT: And so the whole idea of hyphenation, so now we have Korean-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: African- Americans. KENNETH PREWITT: African- Americans and so forth, which was a recognition that people do retain. They don't totally melt. What does it mean to be an American? It partly means that you're not just a single thing. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: You're part of so much. KENNETH PREWITT: You come from a stream of different kinds of backgrounds, and the best question to get to that is national origin. Everyone knows their national origin. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And what that means. KENNETH PREWITT: And what that means. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: The history of it and everything else. KENNETH PREWITT: What they're carrying, and so forth, and if it fades in importance, then it won't tell us anything. The German population, on a separate question on the census, is the largest ethnic population in the United States. They just do it because they like it, to call themselves German. If you sort them out, it's not that they're differently educated or they go to different churches or they maybe eat a little bit of different food sometimes and so forth, but they're as American as anybody who's American, which is already a mixture, which is to say the Germans gave us Christmas, of course. You know, Santa Claus, the Christmas carols and so forth, so America, if you think that America is WASP America from -- RONNIE ELDRIDGE: It's gone. KENNETH PREWITT: It's gone, yeah. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And you have a wonderful term for America -- hybrid America. KENNETH PREWITT: Hybrid, yeah. It's a hybrid place, and we have to have the statistics that capture that. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Well, we've come to the end of this program. KENNETH PREWITT: Oh, I'm sorry. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Thank you so much, Professor Prewitt, and your book is called What Is Your Race? KENNETH PREWITT: What Is Your Race? Right. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And people like me could read it. KENNETH PREWITT: Yes, it's not technical. It's not statistical at all. It's narrative. It's history. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Right. Thank you very much. KENNETH PREWITT: Okay, thank you. RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Thanks. ♪ [Theme Music] ♪ RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is there any people you'd like to hear, and topics you'd like us to explore? -- Please let me know. You can write to me at CUNY TV, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016, or you can go to the website at cuny.tv and click on "contact us." I look forward to hearing from you.