Census Forms Are Changing Again -- Because We Are

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Apr 1, 2024

It’s important to note here that the census forms change with every census because Americans change a lot, including in the ways we categorize ourselves.

In 1790, our nation’s first national census, the choices were understandably few: male, female, free and slaves.

In my lifetime, I have seem my racial self-descriptor change in common usage from “Negro” and “colored” to African American and, most recently, back to “people of color.”

Going from “colored people” to “people of color,” as I have noted over the years, doesn’t sound like as much progress as I have seen Black Americans actually make.

Still, even as we have progressed enough to witness the election of this nation’s first Black president, race continues to be a social and political tinderbox, the number of Americans who identify as multiple races has risen dramatically, as Maher mentioned. As a result, identity politics have changed, but they haven’t gone away.

In fact, let’s face it: In a dynamic society as diverse as ours, all politics — at one time or another — are identity politics.

In the era of former — and possibly future — President Donald Trump, I increasingly seem to hear comparisons of Trump’s MAGA politics and rally speeches to the old-school populists, union movements and civil rights protests of America’s past, except expressed this time by working-class and middle-class whites who feel they don’t get a fair shake.

I sympathize with their sense of being passed by or even exploited by elites. But I also think Trump’s leadership of many of them into paranoid resentment politics is about as promising as the self-defeating Black nationalism of the 1960s. Yes, African Americans scored advances. But we made more advances marching alongside allies of other races than we did fighting against them for the real progress we were trying to make.

As the Census Bureau tries to keep up with the ways we Americans see ourselves, the boxes they offer us to check can seem silly, cumbersome and even out of touch. But we all need to look in a mirror sometimes, even if only to find out who we are — and how much we have changed.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)