William Petersen - Ethnicity Counts
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Official statistics about ethnicity in advanced societies are no better than those in less developed countries. An open industrial society is inherently fluid, and it is as hard to interpret social class and ethnic groups there as in a nearly static community. In consequence, the collection and interpretation of ethnic statistics is frequently a battleground where the groups being counted contest each element of every enumeration. William Petersen describes how ethnic identity is determined and how ethnic or racial units are counted by official statistical agencies in the United States and elsewhere. The chapters in this book cover such topics as: Identification of Americans of European Descent, Differentiation among Blacks, Ethnic Relations in the Netherlands, Two Case Studies: Japan and Switzerland, and Who is a Jew? Petersen argues that the general public is overly impressed by assertions about ethnicity, particularly if they are supported by numbers and graphs. The flood of American writings about race and ethnicity gives no sign of abatement. Ethnicity Counts offers an indispensible background to meaningful interpretation of statistics on ethnicity, and will be important to sociologists, historians, policymakers, and government officials.
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Ethnicity
Counts
Counts
First published 1997 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1997 by Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 96-37513
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petersen, William.
Ethnicity counts / William Petersen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-296-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Ethnicity. 2. EthnologyStatistical services. 3. EthnicityUnited States. 4. EthnologyUnited StatesStatistical services. I. Title.
GN495.6.P49 1997
305.8dc21
96-37513
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4957-9 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-296-3 (hbk)
For Renee,
as always
as always
Contents
The accuracy of ethnic data is the principal topic of this book. With details concerning counts in the United States and several other countries, it demonstrates that in a general enumeration a reasonably true classification and accurate count are impossible.
We expect the official statistics of less developed countries to be inadequate, but the quality of data is not generally better in advanced societies, in part because of the very fact that they are advanced. The era when censuses became a routine element of national administration was also when divisions in the population by occupation, education, religion, race, and nationality became more permeable. The son of a peasant was no longer necessarily a peasant, and in his urban setting he retained, often with some ambivalence, only some of his forebears traits. An open industrial society is inherently fluid, so that neither social class nor ethnic group can be interpreted as identical with the terms as applied in a more nearly static community.
Ethnic groups are real, and often they are of great significance. Their indefinite and variable boundaries, however, make it hard to classify persons into meaningful sectors of a population. And the difficulty is increased by the fact that the collection of ethnic statistics has frequently become a battleground where the professed leaders of the groups being counted contest each element of every enumeration.
There has been a flood of American writings about race and ethnicity in books, scholarly journals, and popular magazines, and it continues with no sign of abatement. Most of these works have pertained to the United States. The dominant theme remains victimology, for the casualties of real or alleged discrimination now include not only blacks and Jews but Hispanics, Indians, and others, as well as females, homosexuals, and the disabled as supposedly parallel cases. Whether excellent or poor by other criteria, most of these books and articles are parochial in the sense that no comparison is made or implied with any other real society. With a concentration on problem minorities and a standard set at utopian perfection, the American record seldom deserves, or gets, approbation. The conviction that the melting pot has utterly failed, which has become dogma in many of the works lacking a comparative framework, is not at all evident when the relative acculturation of newcomers to American society is contrasted with the process elsewhere. Over the past two centuries, democrats were right to believe in the promise of the New World.
Books that seek a broader understanding in a comparative perspective are much rarer. Two excellent works can be citedThomas Sowells Race and Culture and Donald Horowitzs Ethnic Groups in Conflict. My book also analyzes ethnicity in several societies, but it differs from both of these in a number of ways. Sowell is an economist, Horowitz a political scientist and lawyer. For these disciplines, demographic data are a given. The emphasis here, on the contrary, is on the procedures by which these source materials come into being.
Many of the general public, no more than semiliterate in matters mathematical, are impressed by any assertion made with numbers and graphs. Even analysts of ethnicity generally show little interest in how ethnic groups are defined and counted. I am going to write about a particular ethnic/racial group, an author says to himself, and everyone knows who is a member and who is not. When I want to get some figures to back up my findings, I need only use the census data, for the official statistics are surely a reliable source.
Neither half of this assumption is well based. Who is a black, a Hispanic, a Russian, has not been a firm datum, either in the United States or in other countries, either in the past or at the present time. The lack of consistency and dependability is characteristic of ethnic data per se, not restricted to this or that agency or national bureau. The statisticians and demographers who work in the U.S. Bureau of the Census and its counterparts in other countries are well aware that ethnic data are unreliable. The fundamental reasons are that a complex attribute cannot be accurately measured with a simple indicator, and a more appropriate measure cannot be fitted into a national enumeration. In Central and Eastern Europe, where the right of national self-determination was promulgated in polyglot populations, the art of cooking data was developed into an haute cuisine (see ). Frequently the state has found it expedient to slant the count one way or the other.
The principal demand of ethnic minorities has generally been for some degree of cultural autonomy, and from the dominant sectors point of view, the main dangers in granting them such rights have been that the nation would be substantially weakened not only culturally but also economically and militarily, and that the demand might escalate into an independence movement. The way to square the circle, it has seemed to many persons of good will, is through a federal structure. Among actual federations, however, secession was the proximate cause of disastrous civil wars in the United States and Nigeria (see ), and of a persistent constitutional quandary in Canada. The seemingly promising federation of the two Rhodesias or of the West Indies soon dissolved into their separate parts. A federal system is fragile almost by definition, and the greater prominence of ethnic ambitions the world over has made it more so.
Most figures on ethnic groups in the United States derive from the publications of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, reporting either on the decennial enumerations or on the various types of intercensal surveys (see ). To know what the counts by ethnicity signify, we must ask how the Bureau defines the groups it classifies and counts. Have these definitions remained fixed from past enumerations, so that the indicated trends have a firm base in reality? How are individuals assigned who have two or more ethnic lines among their forebears? What pressures by interest groups, Congress, and its own budget affect the Bureaus decisions?
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