A large share of the U.S. Latino population doesn’t identify with any of the current racial categories in the census, according to new 2020 Census Bureau data that shows “major shifts” in how Americans who identify as Hispanic report their race.
While almost 60% of the 54.6 million Americans who identified as Hispanic reported belonging to one racial group, such as white or Black, over a third (35.5%) of Latinos chose “Some Other Race” alone. This category is currently not recognized as a race by the federal government.
The Census Bureau said a combined 43.6% of Americans who self-identify as Hispanics either reported being of “Some Other Race” (35.5%) or did not respond to the race question in the 2020 count (8.1%).
The findings come as the Biden administration is considering allowing Americans to check off “Hispanic or Latino” as their race as well as their ethnicity as part of new proposed classifications for the next census.
Currently, the census considers race and ethnicity as two distinct categories, and Americans are asked about them in census forms in two different questions.
‘Average Hispanic doesn’t necessarily see the difference’
The proposal to include Latino/Hispanic as a “race” has been explored for more than a decade, because Latinos “have been telling the Census Bureau that the [current] question didn’t really work for a lot of people,” Jens Manuel Krogstad, a senior writer and editor at the Pew Research Center focused on Hispanic demographic trends, told NBC News.
“A central issue is that the average Hispanic doesn’t necessarily see the difference between race and ethnicity,” he said.
At the same time, a growing number of Latinos who are multiracial or have mixed backgrounds do “view their Hispanic identity as part of their racial identity,” Krogstad said.
In the 2020 census, 19.4 million Latinos identified as belonging to “Some Other Race” alone, followed by 9.6 million who identified as white alone, 1.4 million who identified…
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