PAM 2030 Lecture 6: Reasons for Measuring Ethnicity

• School: Cornell University
• Department: Policy, Analysis and Management
• Course: PAM 2030
• Professor: Lichter

Document Summary

The passage of ciil rights laws in the 1960s provided a new imperative for measuring race. The voting rights acts (1965) required electoral boundaries to reflect the presence of racial groups/ language minorities. Various federal programs require data on the racial/ ethnic make-up of the community federal affirmative action plans home mortgage community reinvestment act veterans benefit public health service act needs. What were the 5 categories specified? american indians and alaska natives asian and pacific islanders non-hispanic blacks non-hispanic white hispanic (not a race group, ethnicity) People don"t like to check off boxes describing their race. Persons from brazil are not classified was latino because they do not speck spanish, they speak portuguese. Issues relating to data collection on these categories? from 1980 to 2020. Undercount: racial minorities more likely to be uncounted. Item non-response: in 200 census, 3% of the population did not fill out the race question. Census is a de facto, not de jure count.