Throughline - A Race To Know

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

For nearly as long as there has been a United States there has been a census, it is in some ways how we know ourselves. And in every single census there has been at least one question about race. The evolution of these questions and the fight over asking them is at the heart of the American story. This week, how race has played a central role in who is counted-in America.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Miranda Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, the census and race. Sorry, go again.

Okay, sorry. All right, so we're opening the census. Did you start opening it already? I thought we were going to do a 3-2-1 situation. This year, most of us will receive an envelope in the mail addressed from the U.S. Census Bureau. I'm opening mine. Slowly but surely. I think I might have gotten a paper cut.

Yeah, I got paper cut. On the cover of the envelope, there's a message in all caps, bold, in English and Spanish. It reads, your response is required by law. So we're looking at the form here. Inside, there are a few pages containing a handful of questions asking about the number of people living in our homes, their ages and sex, whether the home is rented or not, and... What is this person's race?

What is our race? Well, I always choose other. And I write in Middle Eastern What is our race? Well, I always choose other. And I write in Middle Eastern. Because something doesn't sit well when I have to choose white. Since 1790, a few years after the country was established, the United States has taken a census of its population. It's continued to be taken every 10 years since.

And a variation of that question about race has been on every single one. Now in 2020, race on the census, like almost every census before, is a hotly debated topic. And this is because the census is not just a set of questions aimed to collect data. It's a statement. It gives us a snapshot of the cultural moment. And according to some historians, can actually help form notions of racial hierarchy. So on this episode, we're going to go back to the beginning and work our way to the modern era to understand how race has played a role in the U.S. Census and the incredible ways the question itself has evolved.

Hello, my name is Fernando. I am from El Salvador, and I'm listening to ThruLine from NPR News. Thank you for your work. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. The first recorded census that we know of took place in Babylonia around 3800 BCE, nearly 6,000 years ago. All livestock, butter, honey, milk, wool, and vegetables were to be counted and kept in an official record. The oldest surviving census of people comes from China's Han Dynasty in 2 CE, almost 4,000 years later. The records show 57 million people lived in 12.4 million households. Over time, the census became a more complex undertaking. Empires and countries had to account for vast and diverse populations living across thousands of miles. But one thing remained the same from the time of Babylon. The census was a way for the state to assess its own material value. It allowed rulers to understand how many men it

had to raise an army, how many people it could tax, and as a result, how much currency it could raise. In other words, the information gathered from a census was vital for the functioning of a state. So it's no surprise that in the summer of 1787, Section 2, Paragraph 3, which created the census and said representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the states according to their respective numbers. And that required a count of the population. This is Margo Anderson. I'm a distinguished professor emerita

and in history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Representatives and direct taxes. According to Margot, it's that first part of the phrase from the Constitution that's had a real lasting impact. The United States was created as a representative democracy. Citizens would be represented by members of the House and Senate from their state. The number of members each state would get in the House of Representatives would be determined by the population numbers from the census. Seems straightforward, right?

Well, not really. This was 1787, and there was a big problem. Women, children, indentured servants, and most importantly, slaves, had no political rights. So the question was, who do we count? Everybody? Some people? The answer to that question would have serious impacts on the power balance in United States politics. The northern states were well into the process of abolishing slavery and industrializing their economy. The south was still agrarian and had an economy that made wide use of slave labor.

But what that also meant was that in many of those southern states, enslaved people accounted for a high percentage of the population. So the question of whether slaves should count in the census or not would actually impact the balance of power between slave states and non-slave states. The North thought, well, they shouldn't count at all because they are property. They are not free people, so they should not be counted as such. The South took the opposite view and said they should be counted in the census. And the North obviously objected to that because they thought that would lead to way over-representation of Southerners. The South would have too much power in the natural legislature if you have slaves counting as persons. This is Melissa Nobles.

I'm a professor of political science at MIT, and I'm the author of Shades of Citizenship, Race in the Census, and Modern Politics. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention argued fiercely over this question. But this was a volatile time. The country was young, and there was pressure to establish the Constitution. Many northern delegates who opposed slavery, including, yes, Alexander Hamilton, chose to agree to a compromise with the South. So the compromise, which is known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is that for the purposes of apportionment, slaves were counted as three-fifths persons. This stuck in the craw of a lot of the northern states, but they sort of swallowed it, if you will, in order for the better functioning of the entire government.

James Madison, the author of much of the Constitution, offered this justification for the compromise. The federal constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves when it views them in the mixed character of persons and property. This is, in fact, their true character. So by that, he's saying the compromise reflects their twin character. They should not count as full persons, but we have to acknowledge them in some kind of way. So they decided that for the purposes of apportionment and in direct taxation, slaves would count as three-fifths persons. And it is that provision that leads to the need to make racial distinctions in the census ever since.

In 1790, under President George Washington, the State Department conducted the first American census. And to do it, they decide to use the United States Marshals. And the federal government sent out a letter, actually Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State, with very few instructions beyond, please go around to your area and count everybody. And then when you're finished, add them up and send the results from the assistant marshals to the marshals. The marshals then collated them and sent them to Jefferson. Jefferson collated them and sent them to the president. Long before there was GPS, census takers had to travel through cities, forests, and mountains to reach small towns and villages. The census itself was basic.

Six questions. It asked the number of free white males, 16 and over, because they wanted to know about militia capacity. Free white females. And then the number of free white males under 16. All other free persons. Other free persons were people of color who were not enslaved. And most importantly for our story, slaves. The census took 650 people nearly 18 months to complete.

The results showed that 3.9 million people lived in the U.S., excluding some Native Americans who, understandably, refused to renounce their tribal affiliations and pay taxes. This included 807,000 white males over the age of 16 and 694,000 enslaved people who made up nearly 18% of the population. George Washington was disappointed with the results. He even cast doubts about its accuracy. But what would last well beyond the life of Washington and haunt the U.S. for nearly 200 years is the fact that race in the census exposed America's conflicted soul. The U.S. was unsettled

at the time about how to reasonably kind of reconcile a country based on liberty, right, with slavery. So how do you do that? Well, oh, they're racially inferior. What is race? We'll figure that out. And much of the 19th century is dedicated to that. And the census is a part of it. When we come back, how the census plays a time and goofed. So here we go. My name is Carol Babbitt, and I'm from Chicago, Illinois, and you are listening to ThruLine on NPR. I love it. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day,

attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically but morally and intellectually. It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions. John C. Calhoun, 1839 By the late 1830s, the tension between the North and South over the question of slavery had intensified. The American abolitionist movement in northern states grew stronger in the 1840s, pushing for the federal government to outlaw

slavery in newly gained territories. The southern states, for their part, made economic, philosophical, and even religious arguments for slavery. Slavery was established by decree of Almighty God. It is sanctioned in the Bible, in both testaments, from Genesis to Revelation. It has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts. Jefferson Davis. At the core of most of these arguments was a simple idea, that white people were inherently superior to black people. For many, this was the fundamental justification for slavery. And as 1850 approached, the census became a battleground for the future of slavery.

Certain of the tension begins to emerge around categories on the census with the 1850 census. Both Northerners and Southerners are using their understandings of the science of statistics to justify their positions on slavery. Many abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were interested in what the census said about the growth of enslaved and free Black populations. On the other side, Southerners trying to justify slavery used census statistics about race and newly added categories about mental illness and mortality to argue that Black people were incapable of handling freedom. So there are some fearsome debates, mostly in the Senate, over what questions to ask. And that's when there was a move to add the mulatto category to the census.

Mulatto, a term that's long been considered derogatory, referred to people who were visibly part black and part white. We should note that the 1840 census did ask how many people were colored or white in a household. But why would anyone want to add the mulatto category? Well, according to some historians, they wanted to add it in order to to understand interracial relationships. You know, it's because there was children of white owners and black women, and so they wanted to know the number, and that's why it had to do with slavery. But actually, the reasons are much more pernicious than that. So by the 1850s, there was a notion that there are blacks and whites constitute separate races.

But there were some who thought more than that, that blacks and whites constituted arguably different species. The people who believed this were called polygynists. They thought that Africans and other non-white people had not evolved as much as Europeans. This thinking allowed space to create a pseudoscientific justification for European economic and military dominance. But by 1850... That view had long been abandoned in Europe, but not so here in the States. Multiple human origins people essentially argued that the African-American population would die out and, in the rather ugly term, follow the fate of the Indians. In other words, genocide. And it was brooded about, both in Congress and in academic circles,

all through the mid to late 19th century, you know, known as scientific racism. When two proximate species of mankind, two races bearing general resemblance to each other in type, are bred together, Teuton, Celts, Pelastians, Iberians, or Jews. They produce offspring perfectly prolific. Although even here their peculiarities cannot become so entirely fused into a homogeneous mass as to obliterate the original types of either. One or the other of these types will crop out from time to time,

more or less apparently in their progeny. These are the words of Josiah Knott. He was a slave-owning doctor from Alabama who fancied himself a scientist. He definitely believed in the race pseudoscience of that time. Their mulatto offspring, if still prolific, are but partially so, and acquire an inherent tendency to run out and become eventually extinct when kept apart from their parents' stocks. This opinion is now becoming general among observers in our slave states. Josiah Knott was also interested in the census. And he had pressed upon a particular senator from Kentucky,

Joseph Underwood, to press to get the mulatta category put on the 1850 census. And despite the fact that many Southern politicians feared that adding questions related to slavery or race might inflame already existing tensions, Senator Underwood pushed ahead with his goal of getting the mulatto category added. All of this is in what was then known as the Congressional Globe. And so my researcher and I went through and just read through the testimony,

you know, the actual floor debate, trying to figure out why is this category added. So basically his thinking through the senator was this, that if we can get a mulatto category put on the census in 1850, and if we keep it there, and if we see if persons who are so categorized, if we juxtapose those data with the data for mortality, and if they die sooner, then that proves that blacks and whites are different species. Now, I should say that there was a big back and forth in the Senate, in part because they thought, why in the world do we want that kind of data? One guy says, look, you're asking our census takers to become great scientific investigators.

That they are not. Others thought, why do we want any attention paid to slavery, given it was such a factional topic? But another group, a very unlikely one, also wanted more detailed questions about slaves and free black people on the census. Abolitionists. They wanted the data to support their arguments against the institution of slavery and against racial science. So after much debate, the Senate added the mulatto question to the 1850 census. It was a controversial move that, according to Melissa Nobles, did more than just change the way the government counted people. The census at that point isn't merely counting by race,

quote-unquote, it's making race. So it's not merely that you can read the 1850 census, as historians have done, and have said, oh, that melodica, it makes perfect sense. It makes no sense, right? It only makes sense in the thinking of race in the mid-1800s in the U.S. on the cusp of the Civil War. In other words, the addition of the mulatto category didn't just reflect racial attitudes of the time, but helped shape them.

It imbued racial hierarchy into the official count of the U.S. population. And most importantly, it greatly encouraged the notion that data and science could prove the inferiority of Black people. You have to call them something and attach a narrative to it in order to justify their condition. It was labor. We want you to work. We don't want to pay you. We want you to be in this condition in perpetuity, right? But we also may have some views of human equality, right? There was the Enlightenment. We also had some views about Christianity, right?

So there has to be something, right, that will explain why we're treating you the way that we are. As the 1850s went on and the country inched closer towards civil war, arguments about the census and population data continued, mostly because many in the South feared what the data would say about the future of slavery. abolitionists. What he meant by that was that the free population was growing so much more rapidly in the free states than in the slave states that eventually the free states would have enough control in the House and the Electoral College to pass a national abolition of slavery. The Southerners recognized that. That's why they seceded. 1860 census results were coming out the month that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. They knew that the gig was up.

The war comes and goes, and it's over. But the mulatta category stays, in part because these larger questions about race remained unanswered. Now that millions of Black people were no longer enslaved on plantations, questions about how they would or wouldn't be enfranchised emerged. Concerns that Josiah Nott had raised prior to the war continue on after the war, and the census is one of the main sources of his data. So let me give you an example. I'll just read you the instructions from the 1870 census.

The color instructions read, It must be assumed that where nothing is written in this column, white is to be understood. The column is always to be filled. Be particularly careful in reporting the class mulatto. The word is here generic and includes all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood. Important scientific results depend upon the correct determination of this class in Schedules 1 and 2. Schedule 1 was population, 2 was mortality.

But what this also is inscribing is the continuation of a racial order where whites are on top. And everybody else who's not white gets another kind of treatment. They're counted on the census, and they also have a different lived experience out in the United States. And it's one which is largely based upon profound inequality and subordination prior to the formal implementation of Jim Crow in the South. For the rest of the 19th century, data gathered from the census would play a role in the United States' policy. And in the early 20th century, it would continue to be used as a tool for the formalization of white supremacy

in politics and science. Thank you. Hi, this is Janet from Heidelberg, Germany. I just finished listening to the episode about the puff, and I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed it. And I, you, he, she, they, and we are listening to ThruLine from NPR. The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the zoological gardens. In 1883, a British polymath named Sir Francis Galton published a book called Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. However,

in every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value or are positively harmful. In his book, Galton, who happened to be a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, took Darwin's theory of natural selection to the extreme. I shall endeavor to define the place and duty of man in the furtherance of the great scheme of evolution, and I shall show that he has already not only adapted circumstance to race, but also, in some degree, and often unconsciously, race to circumstance. He argued that certain races were superior and should be encouraged to procreate, and he introduced a new term that would redefine the world.

Eugenics as the study of reproduction to improve the human race. And before long, Galton's ideas crossed the Atlantic and crept into American life. In 1890, 100 years after the first U.S. Census, a new question appeared, asking about race instead of color. And there were some new categories added, including quadroon and octoroon, quadroon meaning a person with a quarter Black ancestry, and octoroon, an eighth, people who might otherwise pass as white. In a way, this was just a natural extension of Josiah Knott's worldview. It was no longer enough to look black or white. It was a question of how white you were. How pure you were.

Some scientists took issue with this approach, arguing that there was no way to prove how white a person was. One statistician, Robert Mayo Smith, wrote, The extension of the color division to quadroon and octoroon seems to me entirely futile, because the persons interested, belonging to the old slave class or their descendants, will never be able to say how much white blood flows in their veins, and to determine the question by the shade of color of the individual would be contrary to our knowledge of physiological laws. The census was a marker for where the country was just a few decades after the Civil War. It was unclear how African Americans should fit into American society.

And sharp divisions remained and intensified as the Jim Crow era got underway. The crucial point in the development of Jim Crow is Plessy v. Ferguson. The case centered on an incident in which a passenger named Homer Plessy refused to sit in the train car reserved for Black people. He argued that his constitutional rights were violated. Now, Plessy is an octoroon. That was a test case to prove the absurdity of race-based classifications. The infant civil rights movement at the time was trying to say to the Supreme Court, see how silly this is, we can't do this.

Of course, the court went in the opposite direction. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which says equal but separate, segregation by race is deemed constitutional. And with that, southern states began the wholesale segregation of everything. Schools, swimming pools, neighborhoods, Bibles in courts when you go to put your hand on a Bible, social, economic, political, everything was segregated.

And the census data was weaponized against Black communities, particularly in the South, where white politicians controlled the allocation of government resources, even in majority black areas. If you go to a black schoolhouse, it'd be a one room, you know, completely dilapidated. Although those black citizens were paying taxes and you go down the road and you go to a wonderful white school, well apportioned and such, right? They knew the population, they knew the racial composition of the county and they knew all of that. The distribution of funds was not based upon any notion of equality. It was based upon segregation and Jim Crow, and a notion that Black citizens were unworthy. Some white Americans latched onto ideas of genetic superiority as a way to justify this mistreatment.

Because you're committed to a country that's organized around a racial hierarchy, right, in a racial order. It was a vicious cycle. The census data was used to reinforce the status quo. The status quo shaped the census, and the census produced more of the same data about where African Americans stood in society. 1890 was the first and last time Quadroon and Octoroon appeared on the census But the question of race remained front and center And was becoming more complicated From the late 1800s on

Huge numbers of immigrants were coming to the U.S. and radically transforming the landscapes of cities across the country. Americans have had a pretty, you know, fraught history of whether they love or hate immigrants as well. Started collecting, quote, race information about Asia, Chinese initially, and our first immigration restriction laws really were aimed at the Chinese. And it's that debate eventually leading to the questions of whether those immigrants or those people, whoever those people happen to be at the time, are really like, quote, the rest of us.

How do you distinguish between nationality and race in your classification? What do you mean by the word race? It is not the racial classification by color that is commonly known, but a race classification which was agreed upon. At least, I understand someone connected with the Smithsonian Institution worked out the classification of races. Leading up to the 1910 census, Senate hearings were held to try to make sense of these new groups and how to classify them. You refer to the Poles as a race. They are not a race at all. As I understand the word race, it is a nationality. Would you refer to the Irish as a race?

They're not a race. They are part of a race. Suppose they were Jews who came from Spain. Would they be classified as Jews or Spaniards? That would depend a good deal on what the man claimed to be. I do not think that has anything to do with it. The general gist of it all is that people were divided. You've got an anti-immigration movement that is basically arguing that a substantial proportion

of the immigrant population from Europe are racially defective. And that's when you start getting head measurements being done to show that the polls are not fit for democracy and so forth. People couldn't agree on how to define race, not to mention what those racial categories should be. And new immigrants didn't have a say in how the census was created. There's a lot going on here. One is what gets put on the census form. In other words, what the categories are, you know, white, black, American Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindu, you know, and so forth. How those are put on the census in a particular year.

Then there's this other question, which is once the data are collected, how they're published and interpreted. One of the most crucial things they interpreted was who among these immigrants was considered white. I mean, you wanted to be white, not because it was, you know, so great to be white necessarily, but that meant you got the best, right? You got the best schools. You were given jobs. Your, you know, your person was acknowledged. You were able to live as a full human being. If you were considered a Black or non-white person, this isn't only Blacks, everybody else who's non-white, you get the passport to hell. Meanwhile, the question of what qualified as Black remained open-ended.

During the early 20th century, African American leaders began to look at the census a little differently. They thought that we need these data because it will help us advocate for Black rights. So it wasn't entirely that the NAACP and other black organizations, black statisticians, were against the categories. I mean, they wanted these kind of data, right, in a certain way, because it allowed them to advocate more effectively for black people. At the same time, understanding, right, at least the more sophisticated of them and those who were thinking about it, the absurdity of race in the U.S. in general, right? I mean, that has to be said. This is a discussion that only makes sense once you kind of admit its absurdity. And if we had a different kind of society, we would be having a different kind of conversation.

By 1930, white statisticians decided to get rid of previous terms they'd used to classify African Americans on the census. Black, colored, mulatto, etc. And settled on a new term. Negro. After that, the categories on the census are about basically the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule. The idea that anyone with even the smallest trace of African ancestry would be counted as Black. They were concerned about invisible Blackness.

To give you a sense of how, you know, deep that is in the sense that we can't see it, right? But if we think that you have African ancestry, we have to be vigilant against that, right? Because we wouldn't want you. So there's no white purity, right, which is what it's upholding. And it was white purity for privilege. By adopting the one-drop rule, the census was basically aligning with the social and legal realities of that time. It's not as if what I can tell the people in the census were looking at what the courts were doing or vice versa, but rather I think a more accurate reading would be simply that it had become settled upon kind of common sense in the United States, right?

Like we all kind of knew. So it makes a certain consistency, right? So you have the laws, at least in southern states, had kind of settled on the one-drop rule, and you have the census in turn also reflecting that. As for immigrants, the 1930 census made sure there was no ambiguity about which box people fell into. You could only choose one, therein reinforcing that it wasn't really about an identity

that had to do with your own sense, but rather your social identity. The history I've been telling up until the mid-20th century is one in which the census seems to be mostly for ill, right? It's about supporting exclusion. It's about, you know, kind of advancing these so-called scientific theories of race. By the civil rights movement, things get changed quite a bit. There's a movement to be identified. How are we going to undo this history of racial subordination? And data become immensely important from the Voting Rights Act to everything else. The census was transitioning from an instrument of oppression and racism to one of empowerment and opportunity.

Finally meeting people where they actually were and identifying them on their terms. By the end of the 20th century, we have groups advocating for the multiracial category and check more than one box, right? So the census becomes quite a different site of politics, quite different from most of its history. We do the census so rarely. Every 10 years, these kind of issues come up again. And because, you know, the society and the technology and everything changes every 10 years, we have to both relearn it and rejigger everything for the new environment. I call the census kind of Janus-faced.

In other words, we're always looking forward and backward, trying to figure out where the country's going, where it's been, and questions about how the race questions in particular have been framed come up every decade, and they're very important civics lessons for the country. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Lou Olkowski. Nigeri Eaton.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Special thanks to Alex Chong. Alex Gallifant, Adam Horn, Austin Horn, EJ Horn, Steve Tyson, and Chaz Tyson for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Anya Grumman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. If you have an idea or like something on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or find us on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.