Prometheus 6

Don't 'Brown' the Hispanics
By Amitai Etzioni

Consider the following headline: "Reading scores of blacks and Hispanics improve: Scores of whites show little change." Like many such news reports, this one is not only misleading, but also it's wrong because it does not account for the fact that roughly half of Hispanics in the United States are white.

In the minds of millions of Americans, this kind of all-too-common wording shrinks the proportion of Americans who are white and inflates the proportion of people who aren't. Yet there is not an easy way to avoid this error, because most information available about Hispanics does not allow reporters to distinguish white Hispanics from others. Worse, the information there often transforms Hispanics into members of a distinct race; they become "brown" Americans. Various news media have approached this challenge in different ways, but each strategy comes with some surprising sociological implications.

In typical government reports, as well as other data-driven publications, information about racial and ethnic differences is published in two basic forms. One uses merely racial categories (such as black, white, Asian and so on). This practice makes Hispanics vanish, as they are incorporated into various racial categories, including the particularly uninformative one of "some other race." Data are also released in ways that compare Hispanics to various racial groups, but this is like comparing apples, oranges, pears and--cars, since racial categories and ethic groups are very different sociological creatures. As one observer puts it, "From a social science viewpoint, this [kind of comparison] makes no sense at all; but this is the way it has been established, this is the way it is done." Most responsible data providers do add a footnote stating that "Persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race," but this is about as helpful as saying, "Note: We just made meaningful comparisons impossible."