About This Case Study

This exercise puts you in conversation with two centuries of U.S. Census racial classification. You will work with an interactive timeline produced by Pew Research Center to see how the federal government has named, renamed, added, removed, and re-sorted racial categories on the decennial census from 1790 to the present. The exercise asks you to do two things: first, to see the pattern Prewitt names — that the current system is an accumulation of partial decisions rather than a coherent design — and second, to test that argument against primary evidence rather than only against secondary sources.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? — at least the introduction (or your notes on it)
• G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics — at least the introduction
• The Pew Research Center timeline (link in the case study header)
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation (5 minutes)

Open the Pew timeline in a new tab. Scroll through it once without stopping to get a sense of its overall shape. Then go through it a second time and note three transitions — moments where a category is added, removed, renamed, or re-sorted — that surprise you, confuse you, or seem politically charged.

For groups: each member does this individually. Do not share yet.

Phase 2: Close Reading of One Transition (10–12 minutes)

Choose one transition to examine in detail. If you don't know which to choose, pick from this menu:

• 1790 — the original three categories: free white males, all other free persons, slaves
• 1850 — slaves first counted by name in separate slave schedules
• 1890 — addition of mulatto, quadroon, octoroon: fractional categories of Black ancestry
• 1930 — brief addition of Mexican as a racial category, removed by 1940
• 1980 — Hispanic origin first separated from race as a distinct question
• 2000 — first time respondents can check more than one race
• 2020 — continued use of Some Other Race; debate over a Middle Eastern / North African (MENA) category

For your chosen transition, write or discuss:

1. What changed. Be specific. What word or category was added, removed, or moved? What was its predecessor or successor?
2. What was happening at the time. What political, economic, demographic, or social pressures were in play in that decade? You don't need to be a specialist; one or two factors is enough.
3. Whose interests were served. Which actors — state agencies, advocacy groups, scientific authorities, immigrant communities, political parties — pushed for the change, and which were affected by it?

For groups: each member presents their transition in two minutes. Then choose one to develop further as a group.

Phase 3: Testing the Arguments (5–10 minutes)

Return to Prewitt and Mora. Each makes an argument about racial categories.

Prewitt argues that the Census's racial categories are the product of two centuries of incremental, politically conditioned additions rather than a coherent measurement system designed from first principles. The system, in his view, is now incapable of capturing the population it purports to describe.

Mora argues that ethnoracial categories are made by coalitions of state, advocacy, and market actors — and that the making has material consequences for the people sorted under the category.

Using the transition you chose, ask:

• Does the transition support Prewitt's account of incremental, politically conditioned change? Where do you see the politics of the moment shaping the technical decision?
• Does the transition support Mora's account of category-making as a coordinated process across institutions? Or does it look more like a single actor — Congress, the Census Bureau, OMB — deciding unilaterally?
• Where do the two arguments diverge in their fit with your transition? Which one captures more of what you see?

For groups: spend the first five minutes of this phase developing the chosen transition together. Spend the last five on the synthesis questions.

Closing Reflection

In one or two sentences, complete this thought:

The U.S. Census categorizes race in the way it does today because __________.

Write the most honest version of this sentence you can given what you've just seen. There is no single right answer; the value of the sentence is in what you choose to include and what you leave out.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the three phases in order, writing brief notes at each step. Allow yourself to dwell longer on a phase that interests you and move quickly through one that does not. The closing sentence is the deliverable for your own record.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Members work individually in Phase 1 and discuss collectively in Phases 2 and 3. The group's closing sentence can be a single shared sentence or a list of each member's variation — both are useful.

After the Case Study

• Return to Question 4 in the unit's Questions for Reflection, which asks you to analyze a specific census transition. You now have the material to answer it.
• To extend this exercise, the Library of Congress U.S. Census Connections research guide and the National Archives Census Records portal provide primary sources — enabling legislation, instructions to enumerators, original schedules — for any transition on the timeline.