The following is from an article written by Ricardo Henrique Lowe, Jr and obviously lists some of his (biased) personal opinions and published in the news.utexas.edu web site:
Two months ago, I left my career as a statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau. I had become agitated with the agency’s proposed direction for race and ethnic measurement and felt my scholarly expertise on the matter was undervalued.
My beef with the bureau mainly involved its persistent promotion of a combined race and ethnicity question. The bureau believes that lumping all race and ethnicity categories into one question will improve data quality, particularly for Latinos and persons of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Both groups do not see themselves represented in the current separate question format.
As a demographer and former analyst with the bureau, I support the desire to achieve accurate data for these populations. But the combined question is riddled with too many ethical and methodological flaws to be considered a viable solution.
As it stands, the question conflates race and ethnicity by making both concepts co-equal and relies on a coding infrastructure that forcibly reassigns people to race groups they did not initially identify with.
A 2016 Westat study conducted for the agency found that Afro-Puerto Ricans were less likely to select the black category in a combined question. The study found that participants would have marked both Black and Latino if the question had not limited “Puerto Rico” to an example only for the Latino category.
This research confirms that some Latinos find it hard to distinguish whether the combined question is asking about race, ethnicity, nationality, or ancestry. The combined question treats these concepts as synonymous despite evidence that they are analytically distinct.
Census research also shows that the Middle Eastern and North African category reduces the number of people who identify as black or white in the combined question. But the bureau has yet to address feedback from the community that the category should be tested as an ethnicity as opposed to a race. The failure to do so ignores the fact that people of Middle Eastern and North African origin can be of any race — just like Latinos.
This is just scratching the surface.
You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/4w58sv2b.