[IMC-Editorial] New From CJR: Who's a minority now? Why the NY Times and USA Today disagree.

[michael scherer]

Columbia Journalism Review: Who's a minority now?
Why the NY Times and USA Today disagree.

All these headlines ran this week in major papers:
Hispanics Now Outnumber Blacks As Largest U.S. Minority Group, AP
Hispanics Inch Towards Outnumbering Blacks, USA Today
Hispanics Have Edged Past Blacks As The Nation's Largest Minority Group, 
NY Times
Latinos Pass Blacks Unless You Count Black Latinos, SF Chronicle

So what's going on? The answer lies in the confusion spawned by the 
recent Census, according to a new web-only feature from the Columbia 
Journalism Review.

The link is: www.cjr.org/year/03/1/webspecial.asp

Please link at will,
The Editors
Columbia Journalism Review
(212) 854-7511

WEB SPECIAL
Census Confusion

Have Hispanics Surpassed Blacks
as the Largest Minority in America?
It Depends On Who Reports The Story


BY MICHAEL SCHERER

I magine this headline: Baptists Now Outnumber Blacks in Louisiana, Says 
New Study.


Doesn't work right? The reason: Any such study would have to count black 
Baptists against themselves to compare overlapping categories of race 
and religious belief. It's like comparing organic apples with red apples.


Now consider this headline, which The Associated Press ran Tuesday: 
Hispanics Now Outnumber Blacks As Largest U.S. Minority Group. Similar 
versions ran in papers and on web sites all over the country. Hispanics 
Have Edged Past Blacks As The Nation's Largest Minority Group , said The 
New York Times.


Can that be true? Unlike blacks, Hispanics do not make up a racial 
group. They are a self-identified ethnicity, a group of people who 
generally trace their roots back to Latin America, Portugal, or Spain. 
Hispanics can be white, black, Native American, Asian, or a blend of all 
these racial categories. So when does an ethnicity really outnumber a 
racial group, particularly if both categories share some of the same 
members? The answer is not so clear.


While the importance of race and ethnicity remains a topic of vigorous 
debate, journalists too often overlook the nuanced differences between 
them and the boundaries that define them. Newspapers and local 
television stations still run stories that describe police suspects as 
"Hispanic males," a description not much more telling than "Anglican 
males" or "Atheist males." On Wednesday, the Chicago Tribune described a 
jury of twelve as "six blacks, four whites and two Hispanics." One can 
only guess at the skin color of the latter two, or the ethnicity of the 
first ten.


"The rules that people are making to stabilize these categories are 
coming unglued," explains Margo Anderson, who studies the Census at the 
University of Wisconsin. In fact, government approved racial and ethnic 
categories have never been much more than gross generalizations. Over 
the last two centuries, racial categories like "Mulatto," "Hindu," and 
"Octoroon," meaning one-eighth black, appeared on Census forms. The 
current categories are still just rough approximations, especially when 
it comes to the self-defined category of Hispanic. "It has now become so 
commonplace to think of Hispanic as a race," explains William H. Frey, a 
demographer at the University of Michigan, pointing to a common fallacy.


Such distinctions become crucial when it comes to reporting statistics 
like Census data, especially since the government began allowing people 
to describe themselves by marking multiple races. On Tuesday, the Census 
Bureau released voluminous new information on the racial and ethnic 
makeup of the U.S. The data came without any comment, leaving reporters 
with the task of interpretation.


At the AP, policy prescribed the coverage. Since April 2001, the AP has 
used "black" to mean non-Hispanic blacks as well as non-Hispanic blacks 
who also describe themselves as belonging to a second or third racial 
group, like Asian, white, or Native American. The AP uses "Hispanic" or 
"Latino" to mean Hispanics of all races. "The decision was made to 
ensure that our reporting minimized confusion," explains Jack Stokes, a 
spokesman for the AP. As a result, the AP read the new Census data in a 
very specific way: It counted 36.1 million blacks and 37 million 
Hispanics, and thus concluded that Hispanics had outnumbered blacks.


The problem is that this formulation counts black Hispanics as Hispanic, 
but does not count black Hispanics as black, effectively erasing 1.7 
million people from the total black population. Considering that 1.7 
million uncounted blacks are more than the 900,000 difference the AP 
describes, the story's headline comes into question.


Other reporters, who did not share the AP's view of the data, found 
themselves in a bind when the story moved across the wires. Paul 
Overberg, Census reporter for USA Today, had to explain to his editors 
why he could not follow the lead of the AP. "Who wanted to believe me 
when I said, 'No, that's not the way we count these things'?" says 
Overberg.


He chose to compare two other numbers, the total Hispanic population (37 
million) and the total population of blacks, including those who also 
claimed another racial identity, regardless of Hispanic ethnicity (37.7 
million). This effectively double counts the 1.7 million Hispanics who 
consider themselves at least partly black. In this interpretation, which 
assumes that race and ethnicity are comparable minority categories, 
blacks are still the larger minority group. In the end, Overberg's story 
carried a markedly different headline: Hispanics Inch Towards 
Outnumbering Blacks. The Miami Herald and The Washington Post were also 
cautious, emphasizing the rate of increase for Hispanics. Hispanics 
Close to Becoming Largest Minority, read the Herald's banner. Hispanic 
Population Booming In U.S.; Census Finds Growth Outpacing Blacks , said 
the Post. The San Francisco Chronicle chose to be explicit: America's 
Ethnic Shift; Latinos Pass Blacks Unless You Count Black Latinos.


But several other papers opted for a third interpretation that supported 
the most news-making interpretation of the data. Both The New York Times 
and the Atlanta Journal Constitution decided to double count black 
Hispanics, but unlike Overberg, they did not count those who considered 
themselves black in combination with some other race. Consequently, they 
found that the total number of Hispanics (37 million) surpassed the 
total number of people whose only racial identity is black (36.2 
million) by roughly 800,000. Both the Times and the Journal-Constitution 
mentioned multiracial blacks later in their stories. Like the AP, these 
papers chose a more provocative path through the maze of numbers 
presented by the Census, leading assertively with a single 
interpretation. Without qualification, the Journal-Constitution's 
headline read, Latinos Surpass Blacks As Largest Minority.


News organizations that simply trumpeted this new milestone might have 
served their readers better with a more cautious approach. As one member 
of the journalism email listserve Census-L noted, "I'm worried that the 
AP is drawing black-and-white conclusions from gray data." If nothing 
else, these stories show that American demographics are no longer black 
or white. In truth, they are a blended, difficult-to-define shade of brown.


For the raw information from the Census Press Release click here: 
http://eire.census.gov/popest/data/national/tables/asro/US-EST2001-ASRO-02.php 



For more information on how the government decides on racial and ethnic 
classifications click here: 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/backgrd_docs2.html


Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription. <javascript:void(0)>






---
You are currently subscribed to cjr-press as: Imc-editorial at indymedia.org
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-cjr-press-19173K at lists.jrn.columbia.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-editorial/attachments/20030124/2f695f3e/attachment.htm