The Trump administration wants to stop asking about race and ethnicity on the next U.S. census. Since 1790, the topic has been used to exclude people of color, and, more recently, for inclusion.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

The Trump administration is proposing some major changes for the next U.S. census. One of them is to stop using the national head count to produce statistics about people’s race and ethnicity. It would be an unprecedented move because race has been part of the U.S. census since the very first one in 1790. To talk about this complicated history, we’re joined by NPR’s census correspondent Hansi Lo Wang. Good morning, Hansi.

HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Morning, Ayesha.

RASCOE: So now, we’re talking about more than 200 years of history here. Why has the government been keeping track of race and ethnicity for so long?

WANG: Well, whenever we talk about this once-a-decade count, what we’re really talking about is power. And for almost two centuries, race was part of the U.S. census to make it a tool for excluding people of color and concentrating power among white people. And in more recent decades, there was a major shift that turned the census into more of a tool for inclusion and racial justice. And now with this new Trump administration proposal, we may be at another turning point.

RASCOE: So going back to the country’s first census in 1790, why was race included in the count then? Was this about slavery?

WANG: Yes. This goes back to what’s known as the Three-fifths Compromise among the original framers of the Constitution. They came up with a system for setting up Congress and the Electoral College according to what are known as the census apportionment counts, and free white framers from the North objected to including the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people of African descent – mainly in the South – because it would’ve given Southern states more political power. And in the end, the framers decided on a compromise. An enslaved person would be counted as three-fifths of a free or indentured person. And the framers also decide that, quote, “Indians not taxed should be excluded from those counts.”

RASCOE: So when did this change? – like, how the census counted enslaved people and Native Americans.

WANG: Well, 80 years after that first U.S. census, the government started counting the, quote, “whole number of persons in each state.” And that was because the 14th Amendment was enacted after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. But for many Native Americans, exclusion from the census apportionment counts – that continued for 150 years until the 1940 census.

RASCOE: So the census was used to exclude Native Americans and enslaved people. What about other people of color?

WANG: Well, one example is the U.S. census category called Chinese. It was added to the 1870 census, and the government at the time used it as a catch-all category for people of Asian descent. And this was just after thousands of workers came from China to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. And Congress later used population tallies for this and other categories when making laws to restrict immigration from China and other Asian countries.

And if you jump ahead to the 1940s, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, U.S. military leaders used census numbers to help determine where Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast so that they could be removed from their homes and wrongfully incarcerated.

RASCOE: So clearly, the census was used for exclusion for a long time. When was that turning point when it became a tool for inclusion?

WANG: It was the 1960s, when people were first allowed to self-report their race for the census. And this is also, of course, during the Civil Rights Movement, and it helped galvanize this idea of using statistics to combat racism and racial inequity through policymaking. We’re talking about, you know, affirmative-action policies.

You know, I should note, this census is not just about, you know, wonky policy. It also helps guide trillions in federal funding for public services. And people of color had been undercounted for decades. So there has been this ongoing push, particularly among civil rights groups, to get more accurate counts.

RASCOE: Well, let’s turn back to today. This Trump administration has a proposal to ban census questions about race and ethnicity. What is the administration’s argument for this change?

WANG: Well, again, this is a proposal, and if it becomes a finalized plan, I am expecting lawsuits. But the Trump administration is arguing there’s a, quote, “reduced need for information about people’s race and ethnicity.” And this is an administration that has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and pushed for dismantling civil rights laws.

And, you know, it’s worth pointing out this proposal is coming just as the Census Bureau has stalled plans for rolling out a new category for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent, many of whom who’ve objected for decades to the U.S. government’s policy of automatically categorizing them as white.

RASCOE: That’s NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang. Thank you so much for bringing us this story.

WANG: You’re welcome.

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