The Races Used in the
Measurement of Residential Segregation
The United States began gathering racial data in the Census of 1790. Until 2000, every census assumed that
all persons had one and only one racial identity. An effective lobbying effort in the
1990s challenged that idea. The
government’s Office of Management and the Budget, in 1997, decreed that all
Americans should be able to identify with more than one race if they wished to
do so.
Persons enumerated in 2000 could identify with any or all of the
following major races:
White
Black, African-American, or Negro
American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
Some Other Race
As a result of this new approach, Census 2000 provides information for 6
single races and for 57 combinations of 2 to 6 races. Overall, 97.6 percent of Americans
identified with just one of the 6 major races, but 2.3 percent identified with
two. Only 1 in 1,000 identified
with three or more races. Just
before answering the race questions, all respondents in the Census of 2000
answered a question about whether their origin was
Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.
For each state, metropolitan area and city, it would be possible to
measure the residential segregation of 6 single races and 57 multiple
races. If persons were classified
by Hispanic origin, there would be 126 groups to consider. Doing so would provide hundreds or
thousands of segregation indexes – too many for anyone to interpret. The Census Bureau’s major document about
the reporting of race is available at
www.census.gov/prod/01pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf
To keep the measurement of segregation clear and understandable, we
considered the Hispanic population, then non-Hispanics in the four largest
single race groups and the three largest combinations of two races. That is, we distinguished Hispanics
first and then classified non-Hispanics by their race. We describe the residential segregation
in 2000 of the following groups:
|
Races Considered in
this Project |
|
Population in
2000 |
|
Percent of
Total |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hispanics |
|
35,308,818 |
|
12.5% |
|
Single-Race
Individuals |
|
Non-Hispanic
Whites |
|
194,552,274 |
|
69.1% |
|
Non Hispanic
Blacks |
|
33,947,837 |
|
12.1 |
|
Non-Hispanic American
Indians or Alaska Natives |
|
2,068,883 |
|
0.7 |
|
Non-Hispanic
Asians |
|
10,123,169 |
|
3.6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Persons Identifying
with Two Races |
|
Non-Hispanic Whites
and Blacks |
|
697,077 |
|
0.2% |
|
Non-Hispanic Whites
and Asians |
|
969,230 |
|
0.3 |
|
Non-Hispanic Whites
and American Indians |
|
811,240 |
|
0.3 |
The eight groups whose segregation is measured account for 98.9 percent
of the total population in 2000.
This analysis does not measure the segregation of the small Pacific
Islander race or the segregation of combinations other then the three listed
above.
If a person identified with one race and then wrote a Spanish or Hispanic
term for their second race, the Census Bureau counted them as identifying with
two races. Approximately one-third
of the 2.4 percent of the population identifying with two races were multiple in
race because they wrote a Spanish term for their “Other Race.” In this analysis, these people are
included with the Hispanic population.
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