According to the 2010 Census, “Asian Indian”.
Really? Are there other countries that get their own race categories in the US?
The 2010 US Census categories were:
There was also a separate question about “Hispanicity.”
What a weird combination of race and ethnicity! Must have been designed by a committee. 
Edited–RNAB beat me to sharing the census categories.
Remember the Census is constitutionally required to be able to draw House districts, but it’s evolved as a decision making tool for political leaders as well. Census racial categories don’t have any special quality, they’re just designed to capture the information in a way that the census bureau believes the political leadership will care about.
I left out “Some other race — Print race”, too.
I always meant to ask this in GQ: Does anybody check the veracity of the answers in the U. S. Census? For instance, if a read-headed individual named Olafsson with milky white skin and freckles claims to be “50 percent Samoan and 50 percent African American”, will a Census taker accept this answer without hesitation? Is there any obligation to be truthful?
Technically you are obligated by law to answer the questions and do so truthfully, but the Census Bureau hasn’t prosecuted anyone in like 40 years.
I’m not sure “truthfulness” is applicable to race in the US, since we tend to use self-identification as the determining factor. You might get into hot water claiming to be part of a recognized Indian Tribe if you are not on the official tribal list, but that’s a different matter.
Perhaps an overzealous census worker could do some research and show that you had NOT identified thusly in other places where you did identify race, but even then I’m wondering what court would ultimately take the case and how they would decide.
I worked for a tribal administration for more than a year. Claiming to be a tribal member isn’t going to get you in trouble; people make such claims routinely. You just won’t get the benefits if you’re not on the official rolls.
The BIA allows tribes leeway to decide who is and isn’t a member and it gets pretty political at times.
I was talking about getting “in trouble” with the IRS wrt the “truthfulness” clause that RNATB brought up. Tribal status is something that can be assigned a truth value to-- you’re either in or not, based on the tribal registry. For “race”, it’s unclear you can assign a truth value to in the US with the way we use self-identification.
I’m not suggesting that each individual Census form could or should be scrutinized for accuracy, but the information gained from the Census is used by, among others, historians and sociologists. There has to be a certain degree of reliability, otherwise the source becomes questionable.
Self-identification can be deceitful. I’ve been following the Finding Your Roots series by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In many African-American families, there are tales of Native American ancestors in the family tree. Turns out, this usually isn’t the case at all (as proven by genealogical DNA tests). I could imagine that the same is true for other “self-reported” ancestries, especially if there are no recent immigrants in the family and nobody has actually ever done any genealogical research.
Double mixed? Marbled…
Oregon Governor Kate Brown is the first openly bi-sexual statewide officeholder and first openly bisexual governor in the USA. She’s of the Castilian race.
What makes her racially “Castilian”, if that’s even a race? She was born in Spain, but were her parents Spanish?
Not a marriage, but Thomas Jefferson was widely rumored in his time to have a longstanding romantic relationship with Sally Hemmings, one of his slaves. Modern evidence has shown that the rumors were almost certainly true.
At the risk of being accused of pedantry… I think it would be best to describe their relationship simply as “sexual” rather than “romantic”. The latter has an air of consensuality that is difficult to determine in a master/slave relationship. But otherwise, yes, there is that.
Whether you are legally a member of X tribe at a particular point in time can be assigned a truth value, but whether you are genealogically part of that tribe or a member by self identification is not so easily determined, precisely because of the political issues Atamasama mentioned. See for example the ongoing court case over Cherokee freedmen: back in the early 1900s, the Dawes Commission enrolled members of the Five Civilized Tribes, but anyone who looked African-American was enrolled as a Freedman rather than as an Indian by blood, often without reference to any actual genealogy, or indeed anything other than what the Commission staff thought of their physical appearance. Fast forward a century: people who have documented Cherokee descent by blood from previous enrollments but whose ancestors were listed only as Freedmen in the Dawes Rolls have been kicked out of the tribe, reinstated as full members, kicked out again, reinstated again, and kicked out again. What is the truth value of their identification as Cherokee?
True, but not really relevant to the question we were discussing.
And as to how much that screws up our statistics, consider that your average American black person is 20% white, and every other “screw-up” pales in comparison (no pun intended). Well, every other “screw-up” except for the millions of Hispanics who have a considerable Native American admixture, but also don’t register as Native American.
So yeah, our Census data on race is not particularly well aligned with what we’d get if we did a DNA analysis on everyone and assigned them to an ethnicity by % of DNA markers. Or, if we did a DNA analysis and assigned everyone to one race based on the majority of their DNA markers, we’d have a lot fewer blacks and Hispanics and lot more whites. And we’d have a considerable number of “not one single majority marker”, in which case we’d have to create a whole bunch of new categories.
Race, being a social construct, is almost guaranteed to mis-align with any biological method of assigning ancestry to Americans. Unless you purposely skewed thing so as to make it better align by, for instance, assigning anyone with 20% or greater African ancestry to “black”.
They have at least a good faith argument that they are in fact Cherokee, as distinguished from (say) a white guy who claims to be African-American because “we’re all from Africa.”