The federal government recently reclassified racial and ethnic groups in an effort to better capture the diversity of the United States, but some groups feel the changes miss the mark.
The Hmong, Armenian, Black Arab and Brazilian communities in the US say they are not accurately represented in official numbers. While the revisions were widely applauded, these communities say the changes have created tension between how the federal government classifies them and how they identify themselves.
The groups say money, political power and even health could be at stake. Being placed in the wrong column could mean a gain or loss of government funds distributed based on data. For some, it is about their identity and feeling as seen by their own country.
The Office of Management and Budget said the working group that oversaw the reviews held 94 “listening sessions” with many advocacy groups, academics and the general public, and will continue to reach out to communities.
During the Vietnam War and unbeknownst to the American public, the CIA recruited Laotian and Hmong people to combat the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands of Hmong soldiers died while others fled to the US as a result of what became known as the “secret war.”
In the 1970s, many Hmong were resettled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and central California. Today, Hmong in the U.S. number more than 300,000. Some states recognize Hmong and Lao veterans with annual ceremonies, and in April, Wisconsin’s governor signed a law mandating that Hmong American history be taught in schools.
Given their history of fighting in that region for the US, many Hmong feel strongly that they should be classified as Southeast Asian. But because China is considered the ancestral homeland of the Hmong, the U.S. Census Bureau classified them as East Asian after the 2020 census.
“This has been very painful for our elders and for our veterans who sacrificed so much to bring us here to this country after everything they did to help the U.S. during the Vietnam War,” said Mayyer Thao, president and CEO of St. Hmong American Partnership based in Paul, Minnesota.
The East Asian label also hurts them because the Hmong were oppressed in China as an ethnic minority and sought refuge in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, according to Quyên Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, with headquartered in Washington, DC.
Those who oppose the classification also have a practical concern: The East Asian grouping could hide socioeconomic disparities between Hmong and other Asian families that need to be addressed. Hmong per capita income was nearly $26,000, while it was more than $53,000 for Asians overall, according to the 2022 American Community Survey.
“We are still one of the most impoverished communities in this nation,” Thao said.
The Census Bureau says it is working with the Hmong community to improve its classification.
When the government revised its racial and ethnic standards in March – the first major change since 1997 – its seven categories included a new one, Middle East or North Africa, or MENA. The reviews also encouraged detailed data collection on respondents’ origins, such as African Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians in the black category.
Absent from the list of origins in the new MENA category: Black Arabs from countries such as Somalia and Sudan, and Armenians. The groups were left out after a 2015 field test by the Census Bureau found that most Armenians still identified as white and most Somali and Sudanese respondents identified as black, even when MENA was an option.
Some advocates said the decision to omit black Arabs from inclusion in the MENA category was based on outdated research.
For many Armenian-Americans, not having their own category represents an existential threat, as much of their diaspora culture is now concentrated in the United States. Ethnic Armenians also have communities throughout Europe and the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon.
Many are descendants of those who fled the Ottoman Turks’ 1915 campaign, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic areas in eastern Turkey, are widely seen by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the death toll was inflated and that those killed were victims of the civil war and unrest during the First World War.
Without Armenia’s inclusion in the MENA subcategories, many will likely categorize themselves as being from a different country. That could shrink their official numbers and reduce their power when it comes to redrawing political districts in places with large Armenian communities, said Sophia Armen, chair of the Census Working Group of the Armenian National Committee of America-Western Region.
“Now we will be underestimated by potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” Armen said. “This represents a very real destruction of Armenian identity for the next two generations.”
During the last round of redistricting after the 2020 census, Armenians in greater Los Angeles – which has the largest concentration of Armenians outside of Armenia – were nearly divided into different city districts, but the redistricting plan was modified after they sounded the alarm. There are about 460,000 Armenian Americans in the U.S., half of them living in California, according to the 2022 American Community Survey.
Being correctly identified in data is also important for local health departments. It can influence everything from communicating vaccinations in the right language to tailoring health campaigns for specific communities.
Armenian-Americans, for example, are more likely to suffer from hypertension than the general population, but there isn’t much data.
A coding error last year in an annual Census Bureau survey offered unprecedented insight into how large numbers of Brazilians in the U.S. identify as Hispanic or Latino.
An analysis by the Pew Research Center showed that the coding error revealed at least 416,000 Brazilians, or more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S., also identified as Hispanic in the 2020 American Community Survey.
Typically, if someone checks Hispanic and Brazilian in the survey, they are recoded as “non-Hispanic” when the numbers are calculated.
Not including Brazilians, or Haitians, in the definition of Hispanic or Latino means that a large number of Afro-Latinos are not counted, said Michelle Bueno Vásquez, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Northwestern University, wrote the Office of Management and Budget.
“The OMB, as it stands, fails Latinos, especially Afro-Latinos, who continually suffer double discrimination and marginalization, in addition to statistical invisibility, in the United States,” she said.
Researching the impacts of categorizing Brazilians as Hispanic was among the recommendations a Census Bureau advisory committee made last month.
“Politics is mostly driven by data,” Armen said of people feeling lost in the rankings. “It feels like we are being purposely ignored.”
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Follow Mike Schneider on X, formerly known as Twitter: @MikeSchneiderAP. Tang is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team, based in Phoenix. Follow her on X at @ttangAP.
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