Race in The United States - Racial and Ethnic Categories

Racial and Ethnic Categories

In the 2000 Census and subsequent United States Census Bureau surveys, Americans self-described as belonging to these racial groups:

• White: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
• Black or African American: those having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.
• American Indian or Alaska Native, also called Native Americans: those having origins in any of the original peoples of North, Central and South America, and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.
• Asian, also called Asian American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent; frequently specified as Chinese American, Korean American, Indian American, Filipino American, Vietnamese American, Japanese American, etc.
• Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islander: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands; see also Pacific Islander American.
• Some other race: respondents write in the race they consider themselves to be, if different from the foregoing categories. This category captures responses such as Mestizo, Creole, and Mulatto, but among the write-in entries reported in the 2000 census were nationalities instead of races, such as South African, Moroccan, Belizean, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, as well as mixed-race terms like Wesort, mixed, interracial, and others. 95% of the people who report in this category are of Hispanic and Latino origin. This is not a standard OMB race category.
• Two or more races, widely known as Multiracial: those who check off and/or write in more than one race. There is no actual option labelled "Two or more races" or "Multiracial" on census and other forms; only the foregoing six races appear, and people who report more than one of them are categorized as people of "Two or more races" in subsequent processing. Any number, up to all six, of the racial categories can be reported by any respondent.

Each person has two attributes, their race (or races) and whether or not they are Hispanic. These categories are sociopolitical constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. They change from one census to another, and the racial categories include both racial and national-origin groups.

In 2007 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the US Department of Labor finalized its update of the EEO-1 report format and guidelines to come into an effect on September 30, 2007. In particular, this update concerns the definitions of racial/ethnic categories.