3 ms·
I'm immediately curious about how bad the undercount[1] was in 1950. At the height of Jim Crow, how many people avoided self-identifying Black or African Americ
by cratermoon 3y ago
I'm immediately curious about how bad the undercount[1] was in 1950. At the height of Jim Crow, how many people avoided self-identifying Black or African American for obvious reasons?[2]
1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2023/10/understanding-undercounted-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2023/...
2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/jim-crow-era-discrimination-violence-black-men-passed-white https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/jim-crow-er...
- SenAnder 3y agoDismantling Jim Crow does not seem to have affected their numbers much - the census found Blacks to be 10% of all Americans in 1950, and 12.4% in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
- cratermoon 3y agoYou'd almost think that identifying as Black in the US still entails significant risks and disadvantages.
- SenAnder 3y agoSo it is your claim that Blacks still lie about their race on the census, in significant numbers, because they are afraid of... what, exactly? Except in rare cases, race is obvious on sight, so I don't see what they would gain by giving a different answer on the census. Of course you presumably have a good source backing up your claim that Blacks are afraid to identify their race on the census, and trustworthy alternate statistics counting the racial makeup of the US?