It's Probably By Accident
By Bob Walsh
The feds are preparing to
possibly introduce a new racial-ethnic subcategory for federal forms and
surveys. This is the first update in this arena in 25 years.
The
new acronym will be MENA. Middle Eastern / North African. This idea
was floated during the Trump administration but it went nowhere. (I
confess I didn't know that.) There is also likely going to be a
combining of the various Hispanic sub-groups into one. The Census
people assert that the current multiple groupings is confusing to many
people
This is just a
proposal but the working group says they are getting much better
responses from test groups using these response possibilities rather
than the old ones.
In case you are keeping track, MENA would include Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Morocco and Israel.
The
working group is also recommending that the descriptions of "Negro" and
"Far East" be discontinued as they are considered pejorative by many
and would tend to get under-responses in those categories.
Assuming
you believe that keeping track of this sort of data is beneficial it is
probably a good thing if the data you collect is actually meaningful
and accurate.
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