Armenians, Hmong and other groups feel US race and ethnicity categories don’t represent them
The federal government recently reclassified race and ethnicity groups in an effort to better reflect the diversity of the United States, but some groups believe the changes are missing the point.
Hmong, Armenian, black Arab and Brazilian communities in the US say they are not accurately represented in the official figures. While the revisions were widely welcomed, these communities say the changes have created a tension between how the federal government classifies them and how they identify themselves.
The groups say money, political power and even health could be at stake. Being placed in the wrong column could mean a gain or loss of government funds distributed based on data. For some it is about their identity and the feeling of being seen by their own country.
The Office of Management and Budget said the working group overseeing the revisions held 94 “listening sessions” with many advocacy groups, academics and the general public, and will continue to reach out to communities.
During the Vietnam War, unbeknownst to the American public, the CIA recruited Laotian and Hmong people to fight the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands of Hmong soldiers died while others fled to the US as a result of what became known as the “Secret War.”
By the 1970s, many Hmong had resettled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and central California. Today, Hmong in the U.S. number more than 300,000. Some states recognize Hmong and Laotian veterans with annual ceremonies, and in April the governor of Wisconsin signed a law requiring Hmong American history to be taught in schools.
Given their history of fighting in that region for the US, many Hmong feel strongly that they should be classified as Southeast Asian. But because China is considered the ancestral homeland of the Hmong, the US Census Bureau categorized them as East Asian after the 2020 census.
“That has been very painful for our elders and for our veterans who sacrificed so much to get us here to this country, after all they did to help the United States during the Vietnam War,” said May yer Thao, President and CEO of the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Hmong American Partnership.
The East Asian label also hurts them because the Hmong were oppressed as an ethnic minority in China and sought refuge in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, said Quyên Dinh, executive director of the Washington DC-based Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
Those who object to the classification also have a practical concern: The East Asian grouping could hide socioeconomic differences between Hmong and other Asian households that need to be addressed. According to the 2022 American Community Survey, Hmong per capita income was nearly $26,000, while for Asians it totaled more than $53,000.
“We are still one of the most impoverished communities in this country,” Thao said.
The Census Bureau says it is working with the Hmong community to improve their classification.
When the government revised its race and ethnicity standards in March — the first major change since 1997 — its seven categories included a new one: Middle Eastern or North African, or MENA. The revisions also encouraged detailed data collection on respondents’ backgrounds, such as African Americans, Jamaicans and Haitians under the Black category.
Missing from the list of backgrounds under the new MENA category: black Arabs from countries such as Somalia and Sudan, and Armenians. The groups were left out after a 2015 Census Bureau field test found that most Armenians still identified as white and most Somali and Sudanese respondents identified as black, even when MENA was an option.
Some advocates said the decision to exclude black Arabs from inclusion in the MENA category was based on outdated research.
For many Armenian Americans, the lack of a category of their own poses an existential threat, as much of their diaspora’s culture is now concentrated in the United States. Ethnic Armenians also have communities in Europe and the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon.
Many are descendants of those who fled the Ottoman Turks’ 1915 campaign, which killed some 1.5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic areas in eastern Turkey, are widely seen by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and the dead were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.
Without Armenian inclusion in the MENA subcategories, many will likely categorize themselves as being from another country. That could shrink their official numbers and reduce their power when it comes to redrawing political districts in places with large Armenian communities, said Sophia Armen, chair of the Armenian National Committee of the Americas-Western Region’s Census Taskforce.
“We will now be undervalued by possibly hundreds of thousands of people,” Armen said. “It points to a very real destruction of Armenian identity over the next two generations.”
During the latest round of redistricting after the 2020 census, Armenians in greater Los Angeles — which has the largest concentration of Armenians outside of Armenia — were nearly split into different parts of the city, but the redistricting plan was changed after they raised the alarm. According to the 2022 American Community Survey, there are an estimated 460,000 Armenian Americans in the U.S., half of whom live in California.
Being correctly identified in the data is also important for local health departments. It can influence everything from vaccination campaigns in the right language to tailoring health campaigns to specific communities.
For example, Armenian Americans are more likely to have high blood pressure than the general population, but there isn’t much data.
A coding error last year in an annual Census Bureau survey provided unprecedented insight into how large numbers of Brazilians in the U.S. identify as Hispanic or Latino.
A Pew Research Center analysis found that the coding error exposed at least 416,000 Brazilians, or more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S., who were also identified as Latin American in the 2020 American Community Survey.
Typically, if someone marks Latin American and Brazilian on the survey, they are recoded as “not Hispanic” when the numbers are analyzed.
Not including Brazilians, or Haitians for that matter, in the definition of Hispanic or Latino means that large numbers of Afro-Latinos are not counted, says Michelle Bueno Vásquez, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Northwestern University, the Office of Management and Budget wrote.
“The OMB in its current form is failing Latinos, especially Afro-Latinos who continue to suffer double discrimination and marginalization in the United States on top of statistical invisibility,” she said.
Research into the consequences of categorizing Brazilians as Latin American was among the recommendations made by a Census Bureau advisory committee last month.
“Policy is primarily driven by data,” Armen said of people who feel missed in the classifications. “It seems like we are being deliberately ignored.”
___
Follow Mike Schneider on X, formerly known as Twitter: @MikeSchneiderAP. Tang is a Phoenix-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on X at @ttangAP.