My thoughts on the changes, reminer thatthis data is used for many governmentand government-adjacent programs:
- Hispanic: mixed. Maybe even some would call it political. If there were problems with the previous ethnicity format then it is justified, but from a outsiders perspective Hispanic + African American or Hispanic + White seemed to reconcile the divisions between identities.
- MENA: Long time coming and needed for a community that lacked existing representation.
- Lack of splitting Asian into South and East: WTF, needed arguably even more that MENA.
I don't know if a race -> ethnicity is even that useful.
The census is mostly completed online at this point. I think it would just be easier to make a checklist with the top 50 ancestries shown, with a search bar, and then an other write-in section that has a search bar for the other less common ones.
After that the responses can be allocated to race given whatever ethnicity it is. One issue would be Black Latinos. Tons of Black Latinos identify as White, so the question is if the US government is more interested in their race from an American perspective or from a Latino perspective. The switch to new model on the census suggests that the Census Bureau believes that asking a Latino person if they are White, Black, or Other is not a successful strategy.
