What's Your Street Race-Gender? The Fetish of Good Intentions, Colorblindness and Federal Data Collection

• In Event: 347 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Racial and Ethnic Minorities as the New Majority

Abstract

How can we understand the politics of federal racial and ethnic data collection guidelines and questionnaire formats for the U.S. 2020 Census? Drawing on Omi & Winant (2015), Bonilla-Silva (2003), Fine (1991) and Harris (1993), I depart from the premise that federal agencies are contested sites of macro-level racial formations. I argue that current proposals to combine two analytically distinct concepts, namely Hispanic origin (e.g., nationality, ancestry, ethnicity, language background, etc.) with race (e.g., master social status that is ascribed based on meanings assigned to a conglomeration of corporeal characteristics, including skin color, facial feature, hair texture, etc.), contribute to hegemonic neoliberal and colorblind racial projects. Accordingly, data collection should be guided by the need for “streamlined questionnaire real estate” that collects “reliable and accurate self report” of “identities.” According to the fetish of “good intentions,” federal agencies (e.g., Census, OMB) focus their energies on “helping people see themselves in the Census not interrogating inequality in Civil Rights outcomes, such as housing segregation, law enforcement, school segregation, voting rights, employment, etc.. This racial trajectory follows several recent Supreme Court Rulings (e.g., voting rights act, desegregation/busing, race-sensitive affirmative action higher education) that have coopted the discourse of the Civil Rights Movement. I propose the concept of "street race-gender" as a practical and innovative use-inspired measure that can be used to monitor and enforce Civil Rights legislation and advance equity-based policy research and practice that has to potential to capture the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. and beyond.

Author

• Nancy Lopez, University of New Mexico